When a Swedish voice came down the line informing him he had a “very important call” on Tuesday night, Australia’s newest Nobel laureate, Brian Schmidt, assumed it was an elaborate undergraduate joke.
“My first thought was was: ‘Geez, my students have done a pretty good job on this accent,’” the Australian-American astronomer said yesterday.
“She asked me to confirm that I was Brian Schmidt and told me I had a very important call, and then the members of the panel went out and read the citation to me and congratulated me,” he said.
“I feel like when my first child was born. I’m kind of weak in the knees and a little, you know, I guess a little — hard to describe — almost speechless at this point,” Schmidt said.
Schmidt, 44, was named joint winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in Stockholm on Tuesday for his work on the 1998 discovery that dark energy — gravity’s repulsive opposite — was driving an ever-increasing expansion of the universe.
Schmidt shared the prize with the US’ Adam Riess and Saul Perlmutter, who learned about his prize in an unusual fashion.
Perlmutter said the Nobel Prize Committee must have had the wrong telephone number because he did not hear the news from them on Tuesday that he was a winner.
Instead he learned it from a member of the Swedish media.
“It was a quarter to three in the morning our time in California. Actually, I got a call from a reporter first from Sweden. He said: ‘Congratulations,’ and I said: ‘Congratulations about what?’” Perlmutter said.
Perlmutter, a physics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said about 10 more calls from media followed in the first hour after the announcement was made in Stockholm.
Meanwhile, his wife dashed to the computer.
“My wife checked online ... to make sure it was not a hoax,” Perlmutter said.
He got a call about an hour later from the Nobel Foundation itself.
“The problem was that the Nobel committee had the wrong phone number,” he said.
Perlmutter, 52, said they had asked a Swedish collaborator on his project for his contact information and had received a mobile number he had not used in five years.
Meanwhile, Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard said the award was a testament to Schmidt’s “rigor and determination,” as she congratulated the three on the joint prize.
“This discovery turned some of our most stable notions of the universe on its head and challenges our understanding of its very composition,” Gillard said.
By his own admission Schmidt’s research is “bleak” stuff: Earth’s galactic neighbors hurtling away at unimaginable speeds to ultimately leave mankind’s home in a cold, deserted universe.
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