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Nobel Prize winner Art McDonald receives Paul Harris Award

Rotary Club of Sudbury Sunrisers present physicist with one of its highest honours

Physicist Dr. Art McDonald, the SNOLAB neutrino researcher who won a Nobel Prize in Physics in 2015, was presented with one of the Rotary Club's highest honours by the Rotary Club of Sudbury Sunrisers today (June 13).

The Paul Harris Award was established in 1957 in the Rotary founders’ name to acknowledge significant humanitary efforts that embody the Rotary motto “Service Above Self”. There are more than a million recipients worldwide. Paul Harris Bursaries provide funding to humanitarian efforts around the world.

"This really is of significance to me, because it's an award from the community," McDonald said during a luncheon at Bryston's on the Park in Copper Cliff, where he was presented with the award. "We've had such wonderful support from Sudbury, so it's very important to me to be recognized in this way."

The Paul Harris Fellowship Award has extra significance, because McDonald's own father was a Rotarian in Sydney, N.S. He was involved in the international program that brought scholars to Canada. McDonald said he used to attend meetings with his father whenever he visited Sydney.

McDonald shared the 2015 Nobel Prize, the most prestigious in science, with Dr. Takaaki Kajita a researcher from Japan. Their work demonstrated that neutrinos, tiny subatomic particles once thought not to have any mass to them, actually have some weight to them. 

For particle physics, this was historic. For 20 years, the Standard Model of the universe and its inner-workings explained quite a bit about how reality works, but that model requires neutrinos to be massless.

McDonald’s and Kajita’s discoveries showed that the Standard Model cannot be the complete theory of the fundamental constituents of the universe.


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