The three American physicists, Nobel Laureates in Physics in 1990, 1979 and 2004 respectively, visited the Faculty of Physics of the University of Valencia on Monday, 6 June 2016 and participated in a meeting with a large group of professors and students at the Eduard Boscà Library's Auditorium at the Science Campus. The Nobel Laureates visited Valencia on behalf of the meeting of the board members for the Premios Rey Jaime I (King Jaime the First Awards).
The scientists arrived to the Faculty at 10:30 where they were received by the Faculty’s Dean, Soledad Gandia, who was accompanied by the rest of the management team of the Faculty. From 11:00 on, the meeting was held and chaired by José Adolfo Azcárraga, Emeritus Professor of the Faculty and President of the Spanish Royal Physics Society. The meeting included a 30-minutes lecture by each of the scientists and a subsequent colloquium. The event, organised by the Faculty of Physics and the Premios Rey Jaime I Foundation, started with the welcome words of the Faculty's Dean.
Thus, Jerome Isaac Friedman lectured about “Exploring Inner Space”; Sheldon Lee Glasgow spoke about “Basic Science: apparently useless, but essential”; and the title of Frank Wilczek’s talk was “Nature’s deep design”.
Jerome Isaac Friedman (1930) received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1990, together with Henry Kendall and Richard Taylor, for his studies on deep inelastic scattering of electrons on protons and neutrons, which have had a fundamental importance in the development of the quark model in Particle Physics. Professor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) since 1960, he was director of the laboratory of Nuclear Science between 1980 and 1983. Among other awards, it stands out the W.K.H. Panofsky Prize in 1989. He has been a member of the board of the Premios Rey Jaime I in different occasions, and he is a member of the Advisory Committee of the Príncipe Felipe Museum of Valencia.
Sheldon Lee Glashow (1932) was awarded with the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979, along with Steven Wienberg and Abdus Salam, for his contribution to the unification of the electromagnetic and weak interactions between elementary particles. Physics Professor at Harvard from 1967 to 1984, Higgings professor since 1979 and Mellon professor of Sciences since 1988, he has been a member of the American Advisory Committee of the Academy of Achievement since 1979. Among his awards it stands out his designation as honorary doctor by several universities, as well as the Commemorative Oppenheimer Medal (1977), and the George Ledlie Award.
Frank Wilczek (1951), along with David Gross and David Politzer, was awarded with the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004 for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of strong interaction, known as quantum chromodynamics (QCD). Proving that when quarks are closer they are freer among themselves, just like rubber bands that the more you stretch them, the greater is the force you need to apply, allows the study of phenomena within particle physics and cosmology, such as the attraction of black holes. He is a Physics professor at the MIT and he has worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and at the Kavli Institute in Santa Barbara.
