Tomorrow, in Philadelphia, Queen's University professor Arthur
B. McDonald is scheduled to receive a half-share of the Benjamin
Franklin Institute's annual physics prize. It is the latest in a
long series of honours for Prof. McDonald, who was the director
of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO). As one of the oldest
internationally recognized honours for research achievements,
the Franklin Medal puts him on an altogether new plane, amidst
what the French call les nobelisables. The scientific prestige
surrounding the SNO, which ceased collecting data in November of
last year, is still growing. As an experiment, it performed
exactly as promised, and in an environment of institutional
cost-cutting, it did so at a cost (about $70-million) much lower
than that required by other particle-physics projects around the
world. For every plaudit the SNO receives, there are hundreds,
perhaps thousands of Canadians eligible for a share of reflected
glory. They ranged from the dozens of physicists who worked on
the data-