Mt. Airy native receives Nobel Prize in Physics in Sweden

Saul Permutter, who grew up in Mt. Airy, today received the Noble Prize Award in Physics for his contributions in discovering that the Universe is expanding at an accelerating speed.

The Nobel Prize was awarded to Perlmutter and the other half jointly to Brian P. Schmidt and Adam G. Riess.

“It would be a little like throwing an apple up in the air, and you would expect that it would be pulled back down due to gravity,” Perlmutter tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. “What we were seeing was a little bit like throwing the apple up in the air and seeing it blast off into space.”Saul Perlmutter, a graduate of graduate of Greene Street Friends School, Germantown Friends School, is an astrophysicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley.Earlier this week Saul Perlmutter delivered his Nobel Lecture on 8 December 2011, at Aula Magna, Stockholm University. He was introduced by Professor Börje Johansson, Member of the Nobel Committee for Physics. Watch his lecture.