Welcome to the Nobel Prize’s official YouTube channel, which showcases videos about Nobel Prize-awarded achievements and Nobel Laureates.
Since 1901, the Nobel Prize has been awarded in the fields of physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace, while a memorial prize in economic sciences was added in 1968.
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Nobel Prize
"When I was at the university, I liked physics, but I liked the arts too. I was a good photographer, I liked cinema, I wrote and I shot a film. My main inspiration was Ingmar Bergman. My god was Bergman. I remember trying to express the feelings I wanted to express by black and white close-ups and slow panning shots, inspired by the first films of Bergman, Sommarlek, Sommaren med Monika, Smultronstället. But, when I saw my film, it was not at all expressing what I wanted to express, and I realized that, unfortunately, I was light years from what I had seen in Bergman’s films.
"But I could remember that I had some skills in physics. I began a PhD and I found that the research can be a very creative work too. The discovery of new and beautiful landscapes in the field of knowledge was also fascinating and this led me to be here today ... partly thanks to the inaccessibility of the genius of Ingmar Bergman."
During his banquet speech, 2007 physics laureate Albert Fert spoke about the creativity that is needed in science.
Read his banquet speech: www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2007/fert/speech…
13 hours ago | [YT] | 971
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Nobel Prize
Imagine you've been awarded a Nobel Prize. What item would you consider donating to our museum?
When Nobel Prize laureates visit Stockholm they're invited to contribute an item to our museum collection. Han Kang donated this tea cup, which she drank from each morning while writing the novel, 'I Do Not Bid Farewell.' On the sheet of paper, she describes her work routine in Korean. After getting up at 5:30 am and going for a walk, she would drink a cup of tea. When she stared at the vortex that formed in the cup, it became her universe.
1 day ago | [YT] | 1,061
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Nobel Prize
Which city do you call home?
"Here we come to the heart of the matter: I’ve never left Istanbul – never left the houses, streets and neighbourhoods of my childhood." Turkish author Orhan Pamuk describes his book 'Istanbul', that documents the first 22 years of his life, as half biographical, half essay. Born on 7 June 1952 in that same city, Pamuk was awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature with the motivation: "who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures."
Listen to Pamuk reading an excerpt from his book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iY8jW...
2 days ago | [YT] | 1,115
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Nobel Prize
When a massive star collapses under its own gravity, it forms a black hole that is so heavy that it captures everything that passes its event horizon. Not even light can escape. At the event horizon, time replaces space and points only forward. The flow of time carries everything towards a singularity furthest inside the black hole, where density is infinite and time ends (see figure).
Roger Penrose – awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics – invented ingenious mathematical methods to explore Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. He showed that the theory leads to the formation of black holes, those monsters in time and space that capture everything that enters them.
His paper 'Gravitational collapse and Space-time singularities' was published on 18 January in 1965.
Read his paper here: journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.…
3 days ago | [YT] | 1,673
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Nobel Prize
'The father of the Green Revolution' - Norman Borlaug - is credited with saving millions from mass starvation. The story of Norman Borlaug and the green revolution demonstrates how the combination of science, education and social entrepreneurship can transform the world - and save millions of lives. The cartoon shows Borlaug cradling a new hardy type of wheat, called dwarf wheat, which was highly disease-resistant and not easily affected by wind and rain. Borlaug worked with scientists and farmers in Mexico to introduce the new breed. Thanks to their collaboration the country became self-sufficient in wheat in about 11 years.
Borlaug believed in educating farmers on the ground, a practice that turned out to be very successful. The learnings from Mexico were later taken up by other countries including India and Pakistan.
Learn more about peace laureate Norman Borlaug: www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1970/borlaug/facts…
4 days ago | [YT] | 1,599
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Nobel Prize
"The power of a theory is exactly proportional to the diversity of situations it can explain." When Elinor Ostrom applied for a PhD in economics she was turned away - her subsequent doctorate is actually in political sciences.
Despite this, in 2009, Ostrom became the first woman to be awarded the prize in economic sciences in its forty-year history. She was awarded the prize for her work on human cooperation and shared resources. Ostrom showed how natural resources can be shared sustainably by a community without central authorities or privatisation.
Learn more: www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2009/o…
5 days ago | [YT] | 1,503
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Nobel Prize
“In a world of unbelievable affluence, millions flounder and struggle for survival, as they suffer indescribable need. The child, the most vulnerable of human beings and the least able to fend for itself, surely agitates the conscience of a world that acknowledges the right of every human being to equal consideration and prospects.” - Zena Harman who delivered the Nobel Prize lecture on behalf of UNICEF.
Founded in 1946 the international aid organisation established by the UN initially concentrated on supplying food, clothes and medicine to children and mothers in war-torn Europe, China and Palestine. But from the 1950s onwards it set itself longer-term objectives to improve conditions for women and their children in developing countries by fighting disease, distributing vitamin-rich food and building health stations.
UNICEF was awarded the 1965 Nobel Peace Prize for enhancing solidarity between nations and reducing the difference between rich and poor states. Here are two correspondences between UNICEF and the Nobel Committee.
At the time, Henry R. Labouisse, Executive Director of UNICEF, said: “The most important meaning of this Nobel award is the solemn recognition that the welfare of today’s children is inseparably linked with the peace of tomorrow’s world.”
Learn more about UNICEF: www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1965/unicef/facts/
Photos: The Norwegian Nobel Institute / Det Norske Nobelinstitutt.
6 days ago | [YT] | 829
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Nobel Prize
"I got 20 flashlight batteries and lots of wire and bulbs and some kind of doorbell mechanism, so that was fun. Then I found that if you didn’t use the light bulb in the circuit but only the wire, it becomes red hot. That was pretty nice, because the insulation was burned by that [...] that led me to research on other things, such as black powder, which my father helped to buy the components for. By the time I was in eighth grade I was a researcher for minor explosives, so I feel right at home in the Nobel company."
- John Hall on how his scientific career started at an early age.
Hall, together with his co-laureate Theodor Hänsch, developed the frequency comb technique, in which laser light with a series of equidistant frequencies is used to measure frequencies with great precision.
Watch the full interview with them here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bc6LY...
1 week ago | [YT] | 965
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Nobel Prize
On 15 January 1950, John Nash’s paper 'Equilibrium Points in n-Person Games' was published by the National Academy of Sciences. You can read the paper here: www.jstor.org/stable/88031
Nash (1928-2015) shared the 1994 prize in economic sciences for "pioneering analysis of equilibria in the theory of non-cooperative games."
1 week ago | [YT] | 1,306
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Nobel Prize
This was the moment when Indian poet and literature laureate Rabindranath Tagore met American author and educator Helen Keller, who was blind and deaf. They met during Tagore's 1930 trip to the US, when they were speaking at the same event. "Sitting beside Rabindranath Tagore and sharing his thoughts is like spending one's days beside the Sacred River, drinking deep of honeyed wisdom," said Keller.
1 week ago | [YT] | 2,582
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