Science: America's Nobel Sweep

Ever since the ancient Greeks, scientists have been seeking to identify and understand the basic building blocks and structure of matter. Last week Sweden's Royal Academy of Sciences honored three Americans whose discoveries have advanced this understanding. It awarded the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physics to Burton Richter of Stanford University and Samuel C.C. Ting of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for their investigations of subatomic particles, and gave the chemistry prize to William Lipscomb of Harvard University for his work in explaining the structure of the chemicals called boranes. Together with the...