While the Nobel prize for medicine has been awarded for work on smell, this year's physics Nobel stems from research on colour. But it is not exactly colour as we know it. The prize has been scooped for work on 'colour interaction': the poetic way in which physicists refer to the strong nuclear force, which binds together the fundamental particles called quarks that make up protons and neutrons in an atomic nucleus. The prize is shared by David Gross of the University of California, Santa Barbara,David Politzer of the California Institute of Technology and Frank Wilczek of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for their work illuminating the bizarre nature of this force — and making it calculable, at least some of the time.
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