Tower To Shine Orange As UT Physicist Wins Prestigious Medal

By alcalde in Blog on October 26, 2010 at 4:28 pm | No Comments

Your beloved UT Tower will glow burnt-orange tonight in honor of a UT physicist who has won a prestigious international prize.

George Sudarshan has been awarded the 2010 Dirac Medal and Prize for his original and weighty contributions to theoretical physics. He specializes in quantum mechanics and particle theory. Delicious.

In particular, Sudarshan is being recognized for his work on weak interactions, one of the four fundamental natural forces.

OK, science types. Here’s a fuller description, courtesy of Texas Science:

Sudarshan’s important contributions to theoretical physics include the discovery (with Robert Marshak) of the V-A theory of weak interactions, which opened the way to the full description of the unified electroweak theory. He has also made innovative discoveries in the field of Quantum Optics, including the Optical Equivalence Theorem, which provides the foundation upon which the investigations of the manifestly quantum or non-classical character of the electromagnetic field are based.

Sudarshan is known as a prolific scholar, the author of more than 400 papers, and he has been mentioned previously as a candidate for the Nobel Prize.

He will share this prize with Italian physicist Nicola Cabibbo, who came up with something called the Cabibbo angle. (It has something to do with mixing in weak reactions that creates new physical constants.)

The Dirac Medal, given by the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics, honors P.A.M. Dirac, one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century.

It is awarded annually on Dirac’s birthday, Aug. 8, to scientists who have made significant contributions to physics. The award includes a $5,000 prize.