National Geographic

The 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to Adam Riess, Brian Schmidt, and Saul Perlmutter for their discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe.  It is one of the times when astronomers have won the Nobel Prize in Physics.  It is perhaps the most important scientific discovery of the last quarter of the 20th  Century.   (The most important scientific discovery of the previous quarter century? Watson and Crick’s discovery of the structure of DNA.)