Word: prizes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Ramsey was awarded half of the $470,000 prize for his contributions in pioneering a method of measuring the minute movements that occur inside atoms. Ramsey's so-called separated oscillatory fields technique did not just become a valuable scientific tool; it also provided the basis for modern-day atomic clocks. Like the ticking of a pendulum in a grandfather clock, the rapid-fire (9,192,631.770 times a second) oscillations of cesium-atom nuclei, spinning like tops inside a magnetic field, can be used to pace off time...
...other physicists -- Hans Dehmelt of the University of Washington in Seattle and Wolfgang Paul of Bonn University in West Germany -- are to split the remainder of the prize. They were honored for devising ways of "trapping" single electrons and charged atoms known as ions. Paul, 76, won fame for fashioning a vastly improved ion trap. Dehmelt, 67, who studied with Paul as an undergraduate, used such a trap to observe a single ion. Illuminated by laser beams, the imprisoned ion glowed "like a little blue star," he recalled...
Most winners of the Nobel Prize respond with joy and gratitude to the singular, once-in-a-lifetime honor. But Norway's Trygve Haavelmo bluntly criticized the award last week after he was named the 1989 laureate in economics. Haavelmo, 77, a modest and shy University of Oslo professor emeritus, told a reporter, "I don't like the idea of such prizes...
...reluctant laureate was honored for pathbreaking work in the early 1940s that laid the foundation for econometrics, which uses mathematical models to study the behavior of an economy. "Every time you open a newspaper and see an analysis of economic trends," said Assar Lindbeck, chairman of the economics- prize committee, "it is based on Haavelmo's econometric theories." Haavelmo's key contribution was to show that the relationship between such factors as income and spending was far more complex than had been thought, since those factors affect one another and the rest of the economy. For example, he demonstrated that...
...University of Pennsylvania, who won the 1980 economics award for his work in econometrics: "Haavelmo had a tremendous influence on me and on many other young econometricians in the 1940s." Concurred Robert Solow of the Massachusetts $ Institute of Technology, the 1987 laureate: "It's like giving the Nobel Prize for Physics to Thomas Edison. You slap your forehead and wonder why they didn't do it sooner...