George Johnson | |
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| Born | January 20, 1952 Fayetteville, Arkansas, U.S. |
| Education | American University (MA) University of New Mexico (BA) |
| Occupation(s) | Science writer, journalist |
| Notable credit(s) | Writer for The New York Times; author of several books |
| Relatives | Dr. J. E. Johnson (father) & Dorris Matthews Johnson (mother) |
| Website | http://talaya.net |
George Johnson (born January 20, 1952) is an American journalist and science writer. [1]
Johnson is the author of nine books, including The Cancer Chronicles (2013), The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments (2008) and Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in 20th-Century Physics (1999), and writes for a number of publications, including The New York Times. He is a two-time winner of the science journalism award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His books have been short-listed three times for the Royal Society science book prize. His column, "Raw Data", appeared in The New York Times. [2]
Johnson is one of the co-hosts (with science writer John Horgan) of "Science Faction", a weekly discussion on the website Bloggingheads.tv, related to topics in science. Several prominent scientists, philosophers, and bloggers have been interviewed for the site.
His ninth book The Cancer Chronicles: Unlocking Medicine's Deepest Mystery was on the shortlist for the 2014 Royal Society Prize for Science Books. [3]
Previously shortlisted for the prize were Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in 20th-Century Physics (2001) [4] and Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith, and the Search for Order (1995). [5]
In 2014 three of his pieces for The New York Times about the science of cancer won the AAAS Science Journalism Award. [6] He won the award in 2000 for three articles about complexity and high-energy physics.
Murray Gell-Mann was an American physicist who played a preeminent role in the development of the theory of elementary particles. Gell-Mann introduced the concept of quarks as the fundamental building blocks of the strongly interacting particles, and the renormalization group as a foundational element of quantum field theory and statistical mechanics. He played key roles in developing the concept of chirality in the theory of the weak interactions and spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking in the strong interactions, which controls the physics of the light mesons. In the 1970s he was a co-inventor of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) which explains the confinement of quarks in mesons and baryons and forms a large part of the Standard Model of elementary particles and forces.
A quark is a type of elementary particle and a fundamental constituent of matter. Quarks combine to form composite particles called hadrons, the most stable of which are protons and neutrons, the components of atomic nuclei. All commonly observable matter is composed of up quarks, down quarks and electrons. Owing to a phenomenon known as color confinement, quarks are never found in isolation; they can be found only within hadrons, which include baryons and mesons, or in quark–gluon plasmas. For this reason, much of what is known about quarks has been drawn from observations of hadrons.
The strange quark or s quark is the third lightest of all quarks, a type of elementary particle. Strange quarks are found in subatomic particles called hadrons. Examples of hadrons containing strange quarks include kaons, strange D mesons, Sigma baryons, and other strange particles.
The up quark or u quark is the lightest of all quarks, a type of elementary particle, and a significant constituent of matter. It, along with the down quark, forms the neutrons and protons of atomic nuclei. It is part of the first generation of matter, has an electric charge of +2/3 e and a bare mass of 2.2+0.5
−0.4 MeV/c2. Like all quarks, the up quark is an elementary fermion with spin 1/2, and experiences all four fundamental interactions: gravitation, electromagnetism, weak interactions, and strong interactions. The antiparticle of the up quark is the up antiquark, which differs from it only in that some of its properties, such as charge have equal magnitude but opposite sign.
The down quark is a type of elementary particle, and a major constituent of matter. The down quark is the second-lightest of all quarks, and combines with other quarks to form composite particles called hadrons. Down quarks are most commonly found in atomic nuclei, where it combines with up quarks to form protons and neutrons. The proton is made of one down quark with two up quarks, and the neutron is made up of two down quarks with one up quark. Because they are found in every single known atom, down quarks are present in all everyday matter that we interact with.
Henrietta Swan Leavitt was an American astronomer. Her discovery of how to effectively measure vast distances to remote galaxies led to a shift in the scale and understanding of the scale and the nature of the universe. Nomination of Leavitt for the Nobel Prize had to be halted because of her death.
Ennackal Chandy George Sudarshan was an Indian American theoretical physicist and a professor at the University of Texas. Prof.Sudarshan has been credited with numerous contributions to the field of theoretical physics, including Glauber–Sudarshan P representation, V-A theory, tachyons, quantum Zeno effect, open quantum system and quantum master equations, spin–statistics theorem, non-invariance groups, positive maps of density matrices, and quantum computation.
George Zweig is an American physicist of Jewish origin. He was trained as a particle physicist under Richard Feynman. He introduced, independently of Murray Gell-Mann, the quark model. He later turned his attention to neurobiology. He has worked as a research scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and in the financial services industry.
In quantum mechanics, the totalitarian principle states: "Everything not forbidden is compulsory." Physicists including Murray Gell-Mann borrowed this expression, and its satirical reference to totalitarianism, from the popular culture of the early twentieth century.
Natalie Angier /ænˈdʒɪər/ is an American nonfiction writer and a science journalist for The New York Times. Her awards include the Pulitzer Prize for Beat Reporting in 1991 and the AAAS Westinghouse Science Journalism Award in 1992. She is also noted for her public identification as an atheist and received the Freedom from Religion Foundation's Emperor Has No Clothes Award in 2003.
Charles C. Mann is an American journalist and author, specializing in scientific topics. In 2006 his book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus won the National Academies Communication Award for best book of the year. He is the co-author of four books, and contributing editor for Science, The Atlantic Monthly, and Wired.
In particle physics, the term particle zoo is used colloquially to describe the relatively extensive list of known subatomic particles by comparison to the variety of species in a zoo.
Robert Eugene Marshak was an American physicist, educator, and eighth president of the City College of New York.
Rick Bragg is an American journalist and writer known for non-fiction books, especially those about his family in Alabama. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1996 recognizing his work at The New York Times.
Nicola Cabibbo was an Italian physicist, best known for his work on the weak interaction.
The timeline of particle physics lists the sequence of particle physics theories and discoveries in chronological order. The most modern developments follow the scientific development of the discipline of particle physics.
Shoichi Sakata was a Japanese physicist and Marxist who was internationally known for theoretical work on the subatomic particles. He proposed the two meson theory, the Sakata model, and the Pontecorvo–Maki–Nakagawa–Sakata neutrino mixing matrix.
Kazuhiko Nishijima was a Japanese physicist who made significant contributions to particle physics. He was professor emeritus at the University of Tokyo and Kyoto University until his death in 2009.
The World of Science was a youth-oriented science book first published in 1958 under the Golden Books imprint. The principal author was Jane Werner Watson, but the science material was contributed by contemporary scientists, many of whom worked at the California Institute of Technology, including the author's husband Earnest C. Watson (1892-1970), who was Dean of the Faculty from 1945 to 1959.
Jack Schwadron was an American businessman in retail. He started at Alexander's Department Store and went on to be president of E.J. Korvette, Klein Department Stores, and Best & Company. He worked closely with Arthur G. Cohen of Arlen Realty & Development Corporation in choosing locations for expansion of stores.
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