Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to Serge Haroche and David J. Wineland | Hacker News Reader

Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to Serge Haroche and David J. Wineland

nobelprize.org

77 pointsgebe13 comments

Rabi, Ramsey and now Wineland. A three generation "academic family" where each has received the Nobel Prize. I'm not sure if that's happened before...

Serge Haroche's advisor was Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, also a Nobel Prize winner.

The Currie family has something similar I think with 5 different member receiving the honor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize#Family_laureates

In the parent case he's talking about 'academic' families, instead of biological families (academic meaning that the 'parent' is the academic advisor of the 'child'). Of course, having several members of the same family all receive Nobel prizes is quite exceptional (and I believe unique to the Curie family).

Sorry, didn't know about that. And yes, the Currie family is exceptional but according the the Wikipedia link there are several husband/wife or father/son combos that received the same prize.

Hate to be the spelling nazi here, but it's the second time you misspell Curie as Currie.

Wow sorry about that, thanks for the correction. I'm going to defend myself by saying I'm at work and I just reply quickly between two tickets.

My usual excuse is that English is my "first language".

I really like the German word for PhD advisor, Doktorvater (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doktorvater), which reflects this "family" aspect so well. I wonder if other languages have similar nice terms for this concept. BTW, Wikipedia says Doktormutter is also sometimes used.

Wow, that list was much larger than I expected, it seems that P(nobel | nobel in family) is orders of magnitude larger than P(nobel). It would be interesting to do a similar analysis for other prizes, e.g. Fields Medal, to see if a similar effect of motivation in the family exists in other domains.

Too late to edit, but did a bit more research.

Turns out there's a few other academic families (that's PhD advisor lineage, not genetic) that have received >2 Nobel Prizes.

Of note there are 2 other direct Nobel-to-Nobel lineages of 3 generations:

1) I. I. Rabi -> Julian Schwinger->{Ben R. Mottelson, Sheldon Lee Glashow, Roy Glauber, Walter Kohn, Samuel Chao Chung Ting}

2) Eugene Wigner->John Bardeen->J. Robert Schrieffer

Rabi seems to be a good academic grandfather.

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_genealogy_of_theoretic...

... which makes Rabi an astoundingly effective supervisor.

Agreed. I am surprised we don't see this more actually. A good PhD advisor can make a world of difference if s/he is working with a good student. Also, you maintain that connection throughout your career and tend to work together (even if informally). Seems like Rabi knew what he was doing.

Also Ramsey->Kleppner-> Wolfgang Ketterle and and William D. Phillips

This is the kind of technology that's hard to distinguish from magic, even after they explain how it works. For instance, many science museums have an apparatus with parallel mirrors, where you stand in the middle and see your reflections vanish into the distance. Haroche's group built something similar, but clear enough for you to see images of yourself on the far side of the Earth. That's a small detail, too minor to make the press release.

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