SWEDEN: Three American scientists won the 2004 Nobel physics prize yesterday for showing how tiny quark particles interact, helping to explain everything from how a coin spins to how the universe was built.
Mr David Gross, Mr David Politzer and Frank Mr Wilczek showed how the attraction between quarks - nature's basic building blocks - is strong when they are far apart and weak when they are close together, like the tension in an elastic band when it is pulled.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said their work helped give "a unified description of all the forces of nature ... from the tiniest distances within the atomic nucleus to the vast distances of the universe".
It explained how "an everyday phenomenon like a coin spinning on a table" is determined by fundamental forces. The three scientists showed how quarks, the building blocks of protons and neutrons, were held together by a so-called "strong force".
Without this force there would be nothing holding the tiny particles together, nor indeed any basic building blocks to assemble into an object like a coin. "They really helped us to understand how it is that quarks are bound together to make protons and neutrons," said Mr David Wark, a particle physicist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratories in Britain.
Their theory is known as quantum chromodynamics.
Mr Gross, from the University of California, Mr Politzer, from the California Institute of Technology, and Mr Wilczek, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will share the 10 million crown (€1.1 million) prize.