This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics goes to three men who have created and peered through new windows on the cosmos. Half the prize is awarded to Riccardo Giacconi, director of Associated Universities Inc, in Washington, DC, “for pioneering contributions to astrophysics, which have led to the discovery of cosmic x-ray sources.” The other half is shared between Raymond Davis Jr, retired from Brookhaven National Laboratory, and Masatoshi Koshiba, retired from the University of Tokyo. They are cited “for pioneering contributions to astrophysics, in particular for the detection of cosmic neutrinos.”
In 1962 Giacconi discovered the first x-ray sources beyond the Solar System, and he headed the effort that led, in 1978, to the launch of the Einstein Observatory, the first x-ray telescope capable of imaging distant sources. A few years later, in the bowels of a South Dakota gold mine, Davis and a handful of collaborators built the first...
