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Chris Jones
Social climber
Glen Ellen, CA
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Topic Author's Original Post - Oct 4, 2016 - 10:09am PT
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Nice to add Mike Kosterlitz to the list of Nobel Prize winning climbers! He and two colleagues were just awarded the Nobel in physics for their work on "exotic states of matter." At Cambridge in the mid 1960s he was a formidable rock climber and alpinist. Later while studying in Italy he pioneered routes in the Italian Alps. In 1966 he with Don Willans and one or two others made the first foray by top-rate UK climbers to Yosemite, climbing the Northwest Face of Half Dome and the West Face of Sentinel. Not bad for a short holiday trip.
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micronut
Trad climber
Fresno/Clovis, ca
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Very cool. Most of my climbing friends are idiots. This is great news. Thanks for the share.
Scott
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Tricouni
Mountain climber
Vancouver
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What other rock climbing or mountaineering Nobel laureates are there?
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survival
Big Wall climber
Terrapin Station
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Sweet!!
Congratulations!!
I love hearing the Yosemite history part!!
Pictures??
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Impaler
Social climber
Oakland
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That's cool! There's a crack with his name "Fessura Kosterlitz" in Orco valley in Italy. Really a highball 5.10 hand crack (or possibly easier if it was stateside). We thought we found it on our trip there, but didn't and ended up doing a harder crack FAed by Edlinger: "Fissure du Panetton", only finding out much later of our mistake...
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guido
Trad climber
Santa Cruz/New Zealand/South Pacific
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Super!
Chris, besides Henry Kendall who are the other Nobel prize winners?
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Curt
climber
Gold Canyon, AZ
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Bill Shockley, inventor of the transistor and FA-ist of "Shockley's Ceiling" in the Gunks, for sure.
Curt
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Alan Rubin
climber
Amherst,MA.
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Lester Germer a well-known Gunks habituee in the 50s and 60s, was a Bell Laboratory scientist who was a Nobel finalist during the same period as Shockley--so an 'almost'--and along with Kendell (who didn't win his prize until years afterwards)they were all contemporaries in the Northeast US climbing scene--quite a group!!! In addition to the Nobel Laureates, I believe that some climber-mathematicians have won the Fields Medal--the Nobel equivalent in that field of study. I'm sure that Rgold or Jogill can confirm.
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JEleazarian
Trad climber
Fresno CA
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In 1967, I read an article in Summit by D. Jock McPherson (if I remember rightly, which at my age becomes increasingly unlikely), a climber from Washington state, describing his ascent of the West Face of Sentinel Rock with Mike in 1966. Robbins had a footnote hinting at some of Mike's accomplishments in the Europe, including the Phillip/Flamm route on the Civetta -- a route that, at the time, I regarded as cutting edge.
I was wondering if that climber was the Nobel winning physicist. Thanks for confirming that he is. Who's next? Ed Hartouni, what are you working on?
;>)
John
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Curt
climber
Gold Canyon, AZ
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Lester Germer a well-known Gunks habituee in the 50s and 60s, was a Bell Laboratory scientist who was a Nobel finalist during the same period as Shockley.
Yep. Close but no cigar. Germer's boss at Bell Labs (Clinton Davisson) did win the Nobel prize in physics, but Germer did not get a share of the prize. Interesting, because the seminal work cited is still called the Davisson-Germer experiment.
Curt
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Alan Rubin
climber
Amherst,MA.
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Thanks Curt, I had heard that Lester Germer was 'somehow overlooked' when the Prize was awarded but wasn't certain enough about the details to include them in my prior post, so glad you did. I don't know if this had anything to do with what happened around the Nobel, but Lester was definitely an eccentric individual--at least in the climbing world, who often didn't 'see eye-to-eye' with the 'powers that be'. His personality and 'niche' in the Gunks is discussed in some detail in Guy and Laura Waterman's book Yankee Rock and Ice.
I met Mike Kosterlitz briefly in Chamonix in the late '60s---he was definitely a well-respected climber amongst his peers at that time.
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Curt
climber
Gold Canyon, AZ
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Irving Langmuir (1932) and Manfred Eigen (1967) were both chemistry Nobel laureates and apparently mountaineers.
Disclaimer: so says a Google search--I have no personal knowledge of this.
Curt
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Ben Campbell-Kelly
Gym climber
Oslo, Norway
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Great post Chris..
Back in the early 70's I climbed with Mike Kosterlitz quite a few times. I read somewhere we did the FFA of The Pin on the Shelter Stone crag in the Scottish Cairngorms - not that I can remember so clearly through the fog of time (The Pin was a RAB Carrington creation). But the highlight of the trip had to be outwitting the ferocious Scottish midges that were determined to eat us alive. Be warned!
Sadly, the UK went into recession in the 70's and many of us had to leave to get jobs in Europe and North America. I moved to Norway and Mike and many others moved to USA. In fact all the three Nobel laureates for the 2016 Physics prize are brits living and working in USA.
As a matter of interest Mike's father Hans Kosterlitz was the man who identified endorphins and enkephalins. Endorphins, being the body's natural painkillers, are responsible for the rush we get out of climbing. Mmmm.. so good!
Now I can say one of my climbing friends is a Nobel prize winner - how cool is THAT!
Thanks for the share.
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Mighty Hiker
climber
Outside the Asylum
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Hi, Ben! Would Blob want to know the news?
Did the Kosterlitz family emigrate to England?
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AP
Trad climber
Calgary
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The last great physicist to make contributions to both theory and experiment:
Enrico Fermi
He was an avid climber, both in the Alps and Peru
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Gnome Ofthe Diabase
climber
Out Of Bed
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To many great things being mentioned by far more worthy participants !
But Dr E Hartouni, may not want to share a name.
I'm waiting and always expect to see the TorR attached to that award.
I'll leave it at that.
The Bell Labaratorys at/in Murry Hill - No one calls it that .
The Labs are In Berkley Heights NJ. The Campus is huge and goes underground a ways
There are active gun turrets overlooking the whole shebang.
Growing up, its presence was felt in many ways. Both because parents who worked there, schools in the area benefit too and the Diabase I sprout from is walking distance,
or a very short down hill ride from the Labs.
The climbers and Canoe club was a thing.
It was the 1st organization to try to get climbing open in New Jersey.
( failed - got a great resource noticed and so closed - yup )
My climbing partner, Victor Benesh(sp?) was a solid soloist, well into his 50s.
I met many of the Labs guys and got to hear 1st hand stories of the search for archives,
and other things that went on in the vast complexe. It always sounded like fun.
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Mike Bolte
Trad climber
Planet Earth
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ha, ha Ed H.
I've had my brush with the Nobel. In 1995 Craig Hogan, a cosmologist at U Chicago, and I were asked to write a review for Nature about the hot topic of the time which was that the ages estimated for the oldest stars in the Galaxy was 15 billion years, but the expansion age of the Universe since the Big Bang was looking more like 8.5 billion years. Either the our understanding of stellar structure and evolution was significantly flawed or there was something wrong the General Relativistic models of the Universe and our measurements of the current day expansion rate and the expansion history of the Universe.
We looked carefully at all the random and systematic errors in all the relevant observations and all the cross-checking observations and concluded that the most likely resolution of the discrepancy between stellar and expansion ages was a non-zero value for the so-called cosmological constant in Einstein's GR equation. We even concluded the article by suggesting that the best observational test would be to make measurements of a particular type of supernova at large distances and look-back times.
The 2011 Nobel prize was given to members of the two teams who used those supernovae to demonstrate a non-zero cosmological constant The number measured for the cosmological constant was even the value Craig and I suggested in our 1995 article.
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rgold
Trad climber
Poughkeepsie, NY
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With regard to Alan's comment, many mathematicians climb, not necessarily at world-class levels. The only Fields Medalist I can think of is John Milnor, who used to climb some in the Gunks and elsewhere.
There are quite a few prominent mathematicians who climb; I'm sure I don't know even close to the full list and won't begin to attempt it here. From BITD, Hassler Whitney (Steele Prize, Ford Prize, Stiefel-Whitney classes, Geometric Integration Theory) comes to mind, as does Georges de Rham (de Rham cohomoogy), who climbed with Milnor in Switzerland in the 60's (when in his late fifties) and who had quite an alpine career for his day, being among the best climbers in Switzerland from 1930 to 1960.
There are many contemporary mathematicians who climb; among them John Gill who we all know stands out for his vision and accomplishments, but it is far beyond my present capacity to attempt a better list.
Although this has little to with mathematics, (now we're into astrophysics) it is not totally inappropriate to bump a thread I started on Lyman Spitzer, a climber, wonderful human being, and "father of the Hubble Telescope." http://www.supertopo.com/climbers-forum/1596980/An-Astronomer-Climber
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Flip Flop
climber
Earth Planet, Universe
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Check out the big brain on Bolte. Shazaam. That's up there.
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donini
Trad climber
Ouray, Colorado
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Surely Chongo must be on the Nobel short list.
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NutAgain!
Trad climber
South Pasadena, CA
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Mike Bolte, that's pretty badass. Suggesting the experiments to resolve a dilemma and suggesting a value to resolve the discrepancies that is later verified by others experiments seems to be the major conceptual breakthrough.
That said, working out the details to have precisely calibrated machines and careful measurement for modern physics experiments is no trivial matter.
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Mike Bolte
Trad climber
Planet Earth
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sorry! did not mean to be tooting my own horn so loudly. It was really fun to be at the middle of such an interesting moment in sorting out the Universe, but there were lots of smart folks out there doing the clever work.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Our own John Roe was elected a Fellow in the American Mathematical Society. And Hassler Whitney was awarded the National Medal of Science and both the Wolf and the Steele prizes.
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AP
Trad climber
Calgary
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OK not Nobel but still relevant
How many active climbers have Science PHD's?
I have at least 6 partners with PHD in science
Of course George Lowe has a PHD in Physics
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donini
Trad climber
Ouray, Colorado
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George Lowe active? Why it's been over two weeks since we tied in together in Pakistan!
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Chris Jones
Social climber
Glen Ellen, CA
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 9, 2016 - 05:03pm PT
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In the parochial North Wales climbing scene of the mid 1960s, we knew almost everyone who climbed, or at least wanted to climb, at the top standard. I was based in London, and we managed to get up to Wales maybe a couple of times a month. Other weekends we might be at Harrison’s Rocks, the Avon Gorge near Bristol, or the gritstone edges near Sheffield. Mike Kosterlitz would have been someone we had heard about. Likely I bumped into him at the Padarn Lake around 1964, which for a time was the spot to drink, play competitive darts, and hear all the latest fact and rumor - although one never knew which was which.
We had done a few climbs together when he brought up the subject of The Skull. This was a then-unrepeated route in North Wales on Cyrn Las put up by Martin Boysen, then one of the finest rock climbers in England - quite possibly the finest. Mike and I had both done repeat ascents of some of the current test pieces, but I don’t think we had ever taken on such a hairy route. There was one particular pitch, a sort of impending inside corner, which according to local lore was the crux. Mike, a damn good crack climber, said he would take first shot at this pitch; that is how you talk a doubting partner onto these things. At that time there was a point where you yanked on a piton or stood in a sling, which was then typical - the route had yet to be climbed all free. The lead-up pitches were magnificent, and then Mike settled into the crux. It was very hard, but he stuck with it and pretty soon was up. I remember thinking that I could not have led the damn thing as I pulled over to the belay to see a grinning Mike.
In 1965 Mike was an undergraduate at Cambridge, and so would have most of the summer free; and that meant the Alps. I was then a working stiff, but lured by tales of endless vistas of unclimbed rock (perpetrated by the likes of Gary Hemming, Lito Tejada-Flores and other Americans who I had met in Chamonix the year before), I had decided to quit my job in London and move to the promised land - California. Naturally, I arranged this move so I could spend the summer in the Alps. Together Mike and I dreamed up quite a list of objectives, although in hindsight we made an obvious error. Rather than starting out on a couple of warm-up climbs, getting acclimated to the altitude and working on our fitness, we instead chose for our first fling Bonatti’s route on the East Face of the Grand Capucin, then a fairly serious undertaking. It makes no sense to go from a desk job onto a major Alpine face. Like most Brits in the mid 1960s we were pretty slow on aid pitches, and at that time there was quite a bit of aid involved. As we topped out on our second day, the weather was already deteriorating. We eventually reached the glacier in steady snow. Fortunately, Mike had climbed in this exact area previously and was familiar with the lay of the land - our objective was the Requin Hut. But fairly soon I began to lose steam wading into the deepening snow and we decided to get out our bivouac sac. Once inside the sac for a short time, Mike assessed my condition and concluded that waiting out the storm was not going to work. He would make for the Requin Hut. Traveling alone on the glacier in falling snow was not a strictly by-the-book plan. With a reassuring word that the rescue team would arrive before long, he set off. Night had fallen and I was dozing when I heard voices, and saw climber’s headlamps. “Can you ski?” they asked, peering into the bivi sac. Fortunately I could, as skis were the answer to the deep snow. After a warm drink and some food, in the company of these wonderful guys, and on skis, I was rejuvenated. We skied across to the Torino Hut, and from there down to Chamonix by cable car. I was bundled off the the hospital, likely for fluids and observation. A day or so later I was once again hanging out at the awful Snell’s Field campground, probably making light of the incident. But in truth it is evident that Mike saved my life. We did not dwell on his bold effort to alert the rescue services as we continued to climb together. But I would like to dwell on it now, some 50 years later, and thank him once more. Chapeau Mike.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Good to see that.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Surely Chongo must be on the Nobel short list.
probably not on the list, but I give Chongo a lot of credit for taking up his study seriously... I believe he has been back to school to learn the intricacies of quantum mechanics. Good on Chongo!
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Peater
Trad climber
Salt Lake City Ut.
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All my climbing partners over the years have been super smart people (with some notable exceptions}.
I climbed with Bill Shockley's son in the 70's and he couldn't talk about the work he did.
Others who I knew or climbed with worked as astro physicists at Mt Wilson and scientists (his mice got loose in his car) and engineers (who made his own Jumars) and even if they talked we wouldn't understand.
To start climbing you can be dumb but if you keep doing it then climbing makes you smarter.
Maybe not enough to win a prize though.
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DrDeeg
Mountain climber
Mammoth Lakes, CA
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Oct 11, 2016 - 02:51pm PT
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I met Mike Kosterlitz in Chamonix in 1965 and climbed with him when he visited Yosemite in the summer of 1966. Among our adventures was an ascent of Coonyard to the Oasis with Robbins and Whillans. A colleague of mine sent this copy of the summit register, which I think is now in the Bancroft Library.
I liked the climb so much I did it again a couple of weeks later, with John Morton and Bill Peppin.
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the goat
climber
north central WA
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Oct 31, 2016 - 08:49am PT
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I remember climbing with a number of notable physicists, physicians (Dan Reid comes to mind) and other academic types. Gocking, Gonzales, Zauman were just a few off the top. Climbing and acadmeic prowess seem to go hand in hand, so what happened to me?! Anomalies in every field I guess.....
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guido
Trad climber
Santa Cruz/New Zealand/South Pacific
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Oct 31, 2016 - 06:44pm PT
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"So we have a paint salesman (Royal), a plumber (Whillians), a future professor emeritus (Dozier) and a future Noble Laureate (Kosterlitz) on a first ascent we named after a little person! Just a typical climbing team back in the 60s......"
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Gregory Crouch
Social climber
Walnut Creek, California
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Oct 31, 2016 - 07:15pm PT
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Although not (yet) a Nobel laureate, we have climber, West Point grad, and former Cadet-in-Charge of the Cadet Mountaineering Club Scott Ransom, one of the world's experts on pulsars.
Here's his Wickedly Cool Stellar Undead talk, strangely apropos tonight.
He's an engaging speaker.
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Mike Bolte
Trad climber
Planet Earth
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Oct 31, 2016 - 08:15pm PT
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Yup, Scott is a smart fellow doing really innovative work.
He is one of the leaders of a really clever approach to detecting gravitational waves by monitoring pulsars through high-precision timing
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Gregory Crouch
Social climber
Walnut Creek, California
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I've had that one described to me, Mike. Very unique window into the nature of the universe pulsars should be able to provide.
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the goat
climber
north central WA
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BTW- I climbed with four of the names in that summit register, does that make me old? I won't laugh the next time I'm asked "does this make me look fat?"
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Brian in SLC
Social climber
Salt Lake City, UT
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Shout out to a couple of local math guys here...Nat Smale and Bob Palias. Who's dads are also Math guys?
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Hendo1
Trad climber
Toronto
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>>>>What other rock climbing or mountaineering Nobel laureates are there? >>>>
I was reading up yesterday on the Victorian mountaineer Emil Zsigmondy and learned that his brother Richard, also an alpinist though not at the cutting edge of the day like his brother, was later awarded a Nobel prize.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Adolf_Zsigmondy
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Up to about 1976 (age 46) Stephen Smale, a justly famous American mathematician, climbed in places like the Tetons and Colorado Rockies.
Stephen Smale
FA: Direct Underhill Ridge on the Grand, with Bill Buckingham in 1953.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Kendall died while diving at Wakulla Springs in Florida. About 1950 I used to swim in flippers and face mask out over the huge chasm where the spring begins , maybe 180 feet deep and perfectly clear water - a real spooky feeling. That year or next a well-known Florida State football player - "Brick" Bradford? - went down to the bottom with an air hose and didn't come up. While swimming across the chasm I could look up at the reeds and rushes on the other side and see Alligators staring back.
FWIW
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