Physicist Kenneth G. Wilson died Saturday at age 77. He won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1982 and his work "changed the way we all think," a fellow Nobel laureate said.
Physicist Kenneth G. Wilson, who earned a Nobel Prize for breakthrough research that explained how factors like temperature and pressure lead to sudden transformations of matter, such as boiling water's shift from liquid to vapor, died Saturday in Saco, Maine. He was 77.
The cause was complications of lymphoma, according to Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., where he worked when he won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1982.
The prestigious award recognized Wilson for his sophisticated approach to answering such elemental riddles as why water boils or freezes and why magnets lose their power. Although these problems seem simple, the solutions had eluded scientists who attempted to explain the phenomena mathematically.
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