The Nobel Prize in Physics 2002

 

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2002
       
 

When you sunbathe, you also take a neutrino shower: 100,000 billion pass through your body every second. Statistically speaking, your body will stop only one of the many neutrinos which pass through it during a lifetime.

 

What makes the sun shine?
Light from the sun’s hot surface allows life to flourish on our planet. The heat is provided by fusion processes in its dense core. Atomic nuclei of hydrogen fuse together into helium nuclei. For each helium nucleus produced, energy is released together with two neutrinos.

“Through the vista-windows suns peer in at us,
looking calm of eye, although we know,
their thunderous roars amid the roentgens blasting,
their flailings in the gorge of everlasting.”

Harry Martinson, Nobel Prize Laureate in Literature 1974
– Poem 62 from ‘Aniara’, 1956
(translation by Stephen Klass and Leif Sjöberg, published by Story Line Press)

       

To cite this section
MLA style: The Nobel Prize in Physics 2002. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach AB 2024. Sun. 22 Dec 2024. <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2002/9622-the-nobel-prize-in-physics-2002-2002-2/>

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