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> Islam's past is just as violent.

However, this next one is wrong. Just plain wrong. Look up what 'islam' means sometime. It might be enlightening.

> Any Muslim nobel prize winners?

Yes there are. Look Herefor the 1994 award and much more recently (...as in accepted the award 8 days ago) is a Muslim woman from Iran.

Just for the hell of it, I'll add one more. I don't care if you are Christian or not, but a statement such as the one you made take less than 90 seconds on Google to prove or disprove. It would not surprise me if there are more; I just did a very quick glance.

> Islam's past is just as violent.

However, this next one is wrong. Just plain wrong. Look up what 'islam' means sometime. It might be enlightening.

> Any Muslim nobel prize winners?

Yes there are. Look Herefor the 1994 award and much more recently (...as in accepted the award 8 days ago) is a Muslim woman from Iran.

Just for the hell of it, I'll add one more. I don't care if you are Christian or not, but a statement such as the one you made take less than 90 seconds on Google to prove or disprove. It would not surprise me if there are more; I just did a very quick glance.

> Islam's past is just as violent.

However, this next one is wrong. Just plain wrong. Look up what 'islam' means sometime. It might be enlightening.

> Any Muslim nobel prize winners?

Yes there are. Look Herefor the 1994 award and much more recently (...as in accepted the award 8 days ago) is a Muslim woman from Iran.

Just for the hell of it, I'll add one more. I don't care if you are Christian or not, but a statement such as the one you made take less than 90 seconds on Google to prove or disprove. It would not surprise me if there are more; I just did a very quick glance.

Secondly, take a look at this: example one
example two

I read an article about these two. I really haven't done a survey of nobel Laureates.
My favorite quote about the first one was:
Years later, when Caltech was offering me a faculty position, I confided that I did not have a very illustrious career as an undergraduate. To this remark the division chair replied "That's OK Doug, we are not hiring you to be an undergraduate."

The latter spent a few years in the army before returning to grad school. Actually, he even considered going to get an MBA before deciding to return to school to finish his PhD. Apparently, he ended up going to Duke for his PhD, because his grades weren't good enough for the "good schools".

Secondly, take a look at this: example one
example two

I read an article about these two. I really haven't done a survey of nobel Laureates.
My favorite quote about the first one was:
Years later, when Caltech was offering me a faculty position, I confided that I did not have a very illustrious career as an undergraduate. To this remark the division chair replied "That's OK Doug, we are not hiring you to be an undergraduate."

The latter spent a few years in the army before returning to grad school. Actually, he even considered going to get an MBA before deciding to return to school to finish his PhD. Apparently, he ended up going to Duke for his PhD, because his grades weren't good enough for the "good schools".

Aage Bohr also won the Nobel price of physics.

Good stuff, the more areas of human activity that the free software way of producing things spreads to the better, another science thing is featured on the front page of Creative Commons at the moment, PLoS:

The Public Library of Science is a nonprofit organization dedicated to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource. PLoS emerged in October 2000 through the effort of three dynamic and highly respected scientists: Nobel Laureate and former head of the National Institutes of Health Harold Varmus, molecular biologist Pat Brown of Stanford University, and biologist Michael Eisen of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and UC Berkeley. This trio's dream, as the L.A. Times put it, is to build "a world in which the many thousands of scientific journals . . . are placed in an electronic library open to the public."

Science and education seem to be areas where this is taking off at the moment, the design of things seems to be happening at a lot slower rate. Perhaps the lack of free CAD software to compete with AutoCAD is one of the main things holding this back?

I'm looking forward to the day when I can buy a washing machine and vacuum cleaner that are build from designs under GPL style licences...

Most slashdotters understand intuitively the fact that laws just don't fix the problem, in such cases. Unfortunately, many are probably not aware of the detailed reasons why this is so.

Milton Friedman (a Nobel laureate) covers the details in his book Free to Choose, for which he and his wife (and co-author) received a Pulitzer Prize.

It's worth a read. You'll understand a lot more about how, and why, the world works.

I recently heard Noam Chomsky respond to a comment like yours. He said that this woud be the same as saying to Alexander Solzhenitsyn that since he didn't like the regime in USSR he should just leave.

If he had maybe we would still be in the thralls of the Cold War.

We agree, I think, that the current system of patents and marketing is (pun intended) sick. However...

Although you claim it, I don't think all that many medical breakthroughs come from outside the U.S. You have to go to 1991 to find a Nobel medical prize untainted by American researchers.

Consider for example the field of birth-control research, which American researchers won't touch due to political and legal liabilities. Though there is some talk of a male contraceptive these days, the only real advance to reach the public was RU486 (from France) nearly a quarter century ago. In fairness, I must concede that because of American squeamishness, the U.K. is easily leading the field in stem cell research and its relatives.

That said, America's lead in basic medical research is probably mostly due to the fact that its research universities are more desirable (and open) to top-notch researchers. Drug research, though, including expensive assays and clinical trials, are a private preserve.

Which is why Rowland and Molina got the Nobel Prize in chemistry, right, for helping fabricate the hoax? Here is Molina's Nobel Lecture.

My recolection is that the big advantage of TNT touted by Nobel (Yes, THAT Nobel) was not its explosive power, but its stability.

And Nobel discovered that dynamite could be used to kill people as easily as it could be used in mining or construction. What's new?

Particularly germane to the subject of nuclear weapons, Nobel felt that the deterrent nature of explosives was its most valuable asset.

"...on the day that two army corps can mutually annihilate each other in a second, all civilised nations will surely recoil with horror and disband their troops," he once wrote.

One could certainly argue that Nobel's belief was naive, especially considering the advancement in destructive power of weaponry we've seen throughout the 20th century. But it's certainly significant that his stated views did not stop him from continuing to work on problems of munitions and explosives. "Good wishes alone," he once said, "will not ensure peace."

Whether every single open source developer who has contributed to the Linux kernel feels the same way as Nobel is beside the point. Nobel clearly believed that the ills that can come of science do not outweigh the good merely by virtue of their existence. As evidence of the wisdom of this belief, I doubt many people will point to dynamite as one of the world's lasting evils today, and yet in Nobel's time some people would probably have characterized it as such.

And, one could further infer that Nobel recognized that man's propensity for war has far predated any kind of scientific or technical advancement and that, therefore, the latter cannot be blamed for the former.

not to pick nits, but that's Dr. Heisenberg.. :-)

Then again, maybe they'll give it to that great peacemaker, Yasser Arafat, LOL.

Not sure if you're being sarcastic but Yasser Arafat has already won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994.

That Bush gave THREE reasons for invading in his SOTU speech: The NON-imminent threat of WMD (pre-emption); links to terror (see: ansar al-islam); to foster democracy in a dangerous, arse-backward region.

The last one is good enough for me, and if successful, Bush should get the Nobel. Then again, maybe they'll give it to that great peacemaker, Yasser Arafat, LOL.

The system makes a lot of sense from the standpoint of the company going public as well as for the individual investor. It works like this: A deadline for offers is set, along with a target price. Investors bid a number of shares they wish to purchase, along with the highest price they are willing to pay. When all the bids are in, the banker starts filling orders beginning with the highest bid. Everyone who bid at that level gets all the shares they ordered, then the banker goes down to the next highest bid, fills all the orders at that bid, and so on until all the shares are distributed.

The bid price where the shares run out is the price everybody pays, even if they bid higher. So in the case of Ravenswood, I bid 12, and got my shares at 10 1/2. (**)

Everyone bids once, so you don't get the bidding frenzy of a typical auction and everyone gets an equal opportunity to buy (unlike eBay).
The company selling the shares leaves less money on the table, because the price they get is set by the auction and not by an investment banker who underwrites the IPO (and makes windfall profits if it can sell the IPO shares for more than they paid they company for them)
And since the market sets the initial price, you don't get those huge first-day runups and subsequent collapses that marked many IPOs in the stock market bubble.
It's even more efficient to do since most of the deal can be done online, and you don't have to pay brokers for schmoozing big institutional investors.

*--I'm enough of a zinfandel fan that my office is decorated with posters signed by winemakers like Joel Peterson ( Ravenswood ), Kent Rosenblum (Rosenblum Cellars), and Matt Cline (Cline Cellars), so I was familiar with the Ravenswood business plan (***) and knew the shares would be a good investment.

**--It indeed turned out to be a very good investment. A coupla years later, Canandaigua Brands (Almaden, Paul Masson) bought out Ravenswood for $29.50 a share, so I nearly tripled my money.

***--They used the proceeds of the IPO to construct a second winemaking facility, so they could expand production of their County series zins, and start making merlot too.

Actually, by Rutherford's time the atomic theory was well established experimentally by Jean Perrin Rutherford contributed to the nuclear theory of the atom (i.e. that it is composed of a nucleus which holds most of teh atom's mass and orbiting electrons of opposite charges).

On special relativity:

We do not have to wait until Poincare's 1904 speech at the International Congress of Arts & Siences in St. Louis (USA) to find evidence of his relativity principle. He was working on it since the 1880s. In 1889 he's quoted to have said "we have no direct intuition about the equality of two time intervals." (website of the Nobel Committee )

In "La Science et l'hypothese" (Flammarion, Paris, 1902), we read in chapter VI on "space" (p. 111-112): "1. Il n'y a pas d'espace absolu [...]; 2. Il n'y a pas de temps absolu [...]; 3. Nous n'avons pas [l'intuition directe] de la simultaneite de deux evenements qui se produisent sur des the^atres differents [...]; 4. Enfin notre geometrie euclidienne n'est elle-m^eme qu'une sorte de convention de langage [...]" Here, Poincare states there is no absolute space and time, he discusses the problem of simultaneity and he concludes that Euclidian geometry itself is nothing more than some language convention. There is nothing primitive or in the "old way of thinking" about this! The fourth point, Poincare's conventionalism, has never been popular. It was proven wrong by the general theory, where geometry indeed has implications (gravity!) on physical reality. Perhaps it was his conventionalism which prevented Poincare from getting to the general theory too.

Poincare's book caused at publication in 1902 some fuss among the "Akademie Olympya" that was founded in Bern by Albert Einstein, Maurice (Moritz) Solovine and Konrad Habitch. Together, they read and discussed this book. (ref.: letter from Albert Einstein to Maurice Solovine, published in French as "Lettres a Maurice Solovine", Gauthier-Villars, Paris 1956; or also: J. Stachel, Ed., The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Vol. 2, Princeton University Press, (1989), p. 255, Ref. 13). So, we know for sure Einstein was more than aware of the work done by Poincare before he wrote his article in 1905.

In 1904 at St. Louis, Poincare listed the major principles of physics; among them was: "the principle of relativiry, according to which the laws of physical phenomena should be the same, whether for an observer fixed, or for an observer carried along in a uniform movement of translation; so that we have not and could not have any means of discerning whether or not we are carried along in such a motion." (ref: Ralph Baierlein, "Newton to Einstein, the trail of light" Cambridge 1992, p. 187)

In his june 1905 paper "Sur la Dynamique de l'Electron, Comptes rendus hebdomadaires des seances de L'Academie des sciences, 140" (1905), pp. 1504-1508, Poincare wrote for the first time in a complete and correct form the coordinate transformations, which he called "Lorentz transformations": "Le point essentiel, etabli par Lorentz, c'est que les equations du champ electromagnetique ne sont pas alterees par une certaine transformation (que j'appellerai du nom de Lorentz) et qui est de la forme suivante a) x' = kl (x + e t), y' = l y , z' = l z, t' = kl (t + e c) x, y, z sont les coordonnees et t le temps avant la transformation, x', y', z' et t' apres la transformation. D'ailleurs e est une constante qui definit la transformation k = (1 - e 2) -1/2 et l est une fonction quelconque de e On voit que dans cette transformation l'axe des x joue un role particulier, mais on peut evidemment construire une transformation ou ce role serait joue par une droite quelconque passant par l'origine. L'ensemble de toutes ces transformations, joint a l'ensemble de toutes les rotations de l'espace, doit former un groupe, mais, pour qu'il en soit ainsi, il faut que l = 1 ; on est donc conduit a supposer l = 1 et c'est la une consequence que Lorentz avait obtenue par une autre voie." In there is also Poincare's proof that the requirement that Lorentz transformations (including rotations of space) form a group implies l = 1. The essential point here stressed by Poi

I did some more looking around the Nobel website while responding to some posts and found this gem in the Statues of the Nobel Foundation:
" 10. No appeals may be made against the decision of a prize-awarding body with regard to the award of a prize.

Proposals received for the award of a prize, and investigations and opinions concerning the award of a prize, may not be divulged. Should divergent opinions have been expressed in connection with the decision of a prize-awarding body concerning the award of a prize, this may not be included in the record or otherwise divulged.

A prize-awarding body may, however, after due consideration in each individual case, permit access to material which formed the basis for the evaluation and decision concerning a prize, for purposes of research in intellectual history. Such permission may not, however, be granted until at least 50 years have elapsed after the date on which the decision in question was made."

So in 50 years Damadian and his supporters might be able to find out exactly what criteria the prize committee used to award the Physiology or Medicine prize to Lauterbur and Mansfield but not to Damadian, but they'll never be able to appeal that decision.

From the Nobel wesite

"Q. Has X been nominated as a candidate for the Nobel Prize? Where do I find a list of Nobel Prize nominees?

A. According to the Statutes of the Nobel Foundation, nominators must not make public the names of the nominees nor inform nominees privately of the proposals. Even invitations to propose names are confidential. Proposals received for the award of a prize, and investigations and opinions concerning the award of a prize may not be divulged. The names of the nominees are classified as confidential information for at least fifty years."

Damadian might have had an idea of whether or not he was up for one through a scientific rumor mill, but it is clear by the rules governing the awarding of a Nobel prize that he does not now know and will not know for another 50 years 100% for certain whether or not he was nominated.

From http://www.nobel.se/nobel/nobel-foundation/finan-m anag.html

On November 27, 1895, a year before his death, Alfred Nobel signed the famous will which would implement some of the goals to which he had devoted so much of his life. Nobel stipulated in his will that most of his estate, more than SEK 31 million (today approximately SEK 1,500 million) should be converted into a fund and invested in "safe securities."

The income from the investments was to be "distributed annually in the form of prizes to those who during the preceding year have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind."

Read that last part again: greatest benefit on mankind.

It doesn't say the most clever scientist, the most "pure" scientist, or the most religiously skeptical.

This is the guy that took MRI beyond theory and turned it into a machine that saves people's lives everyday.

Yet, the pure theorists get the award and he gets ignored. The decision of the Nobel Foundation is inconsistant with it's own charter.

Rosalind Franklin passed away by the time they got the idea of giving Nobel prize for DNA structure. The rules of Noble prize forbid awarding it posthumously.

Linus Pauling got the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954 for work on chemical bonds and the Peace prize in 1962 for his guts...

Linus Pauling got the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954 for work on chemical bonds and the Peace prize in 1962 for his guts...

Sorry to be pedantic, but there is no such thing as the "Nobel Prize for Economics."

Alfred Nobel's will makes provision for four Swedish prizes (Physics, Chemistry, Physiology, Literature) and one Norwegian prize (Peace.) The reason for the seperation is due to Nobel's analysis of the relative merits of the two cultures - he believed that Norwegian society was more enlightened than Sweden thus better equiped to award the Peace prize.

There is an additional prize called the 'Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel" Which is (as the name suggests) awarded by the Bank of Sweden, NOT by the Swedish or Norwegian Nobel committees. Prestigious as it is, it is not a Nobel Prize.

More information on the prizes is available here

The winners of the Physics prize are all old men, the youngest being 65 and the oldest 87.

So what?
Have a look at former nobel prices in physics. Most of the research turned out to be important in the long term. Meaning the laureates get the price in an age they also could expect a funeral. This doesn't tell much about science in the present.

You might have a point in thirty years if the commitee doesn't find any work worth a Nobel price.

Alexei A. Abrikosov, born 1928 (75 years) in Moscow, the former Soviet Union, American (and Russian) citizen. Doctor's degree in physics in 1951 at the Institute for Physical Problems, Moscow. Distinguished Argonne Scientist, Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, Illinois, USA.

Vitaly L. Ginzburg, born 1916 (87 years) in Moscow, Russia (Russian citizen). Doctor's degree in physics at the University of Moscow. Former Head of the Theory Group at the P.N. Lebedev Physical Institute, Moscow, Russia.

Anthony J. Leggett, born 1938 (65 years) in London, England (British and American citizen). Doctor's degree in physics in 1964 at the University of Oxford. MacArthur Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA.

One other point, the committe takes into account personal background. If you deserve an award, but they feel your personaly life would lead you to "wasting" it, they will give the award to someone else.

Are you sure about that? While I cannot find a source for it, I can definitily remember hearing a member of the Nobel Committe stating that they totally disregard any comments in a nomination about the nominee's character, and that they would give the prize to a criminal if he/she had conferred the greatest benefit to mankind. The statues, at least, do not mention anything about the character of the nominees (though, incidentally, the original will says that the prize should be given to the ones who had done the most to benefit mankind in the preceeding year, so they do not appear to be followed too strictly).

Anyway, here's the real link.

The official press release from The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet.

Nobel Prize 1999 Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded to Ahmed Zewail of California Institute of Technology, US, for probing chemical reactions with femtosecond (10-15 second) laser pulses. The studies have helped understand how catalysts and biological processes function and how molecular electronics should be designed.

In the late 1980s, Zewail began imaging molecules, as they react, by bombarding them with laser pulses at intervals of tens of femtoseconds. The technique became known as femtosecond spectroscopy, or femtochemistry. Chemical reactions occur on a timescale of typically 10-100 femtoseconds so the imaging technique allows chemists to watch bonds within molecules break and reform.

The technique now allows chemists to observe the unstable, short-lived species formed as intermediates during reactions.

In femtosecond spectroscopy the original substances are mixed as beams of molecules in a vacuum chamber. An ultrafast laser then injects two pulses, a 'pump' pulse and then a 'probe' pulse. The first, high-energy pulse starts the reactions and the second, weaker pulse shows what is happening. Altering the time interval between the two pulses allows chemists to see how the molecular structure changes during the reaction. Each step in the reaction gives a characteristic spectrum that serves as a fingerprint. Comparing this with theoretical calculations gives the structure of the intermediate products.

this new division in time is also known as the point time stops for chemistry because chemical bonds can now be seen changing from one substance to another in real time, now we can see not only the bonds before and after they change but the actual process in-between which was something we could not do before, think of it as getting a film camera over a still and how much more you can see/understand about a process in each 25th of a seconds frame than an image every 1min, this discovery is very significant, more than a lot of people realise.

AS

Hmm, I can't document that Flemming ever actually refused to patent his discovery. Perhaps I'm guilty of spreading an urban legend. But the military funding of penicillin production research is well documented.

as long as I don't have to pay the dental bills of the idiots that vote out fluoride.

No, as I've said ealier, it's us in western europe that don't flouridate, so you don't have to pay our dental bills. And that's notwithstanding the fact that our teeth are about the same as yours.

Anyway, I'll reply in kind with: "As long as I don't have to pay the medical bills of the idiots that flouridate." Which of course I don't have to.

P.S. And Linus Pauling while being a gifted chemist isn't really in his own field when he's talking about vitamin C. (He got his nobel prizes in Chemistry and Peace). Arvid Carlsson OTOH is a pharmacologist, and recived his prize in medicin. So if you wish to argue by (reference to) authority, I think mine beats yours, hands down. (Quite a common phenomenon that, world renowned experts talking out of their arses when they open their mouths on a subject they really don't know anything about.)

P.P.S. And getting back to the topic; as far as we're concerned Michael Robertson can keep both his Lindows and his flouride. ;-)

A slightly alternative and more precise examination of the economic study of social behavior can be found in the works of Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker.

You can read an interview with him here, or examine his book Social Economics: Market Behavior in a Social Environment, or check out his Nobel Prize speech.

A slightly alternative and more precise examination of the economic study of social behavior can be found in the works of Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker.

You can read an interview with him here, or examine his book Social Economics: Market Behavior in a Social Environment, or check out his Nobel Prize speech.

So if you want to know about ultracold gasses, have a look at these links:

* Doppler cooling, or: how to use a laser not to hup stuff but to cool it: Nobel prize 1997

* the Bose-Einstein condensate: a weird state of matter that is formed by bosonic atoms at really ultralow temperature: Nobel prize 2001

* not that cool but still quite cool: suprafluid helium flowing against gravity: Nobel prize 1996

So if you want to know about ultracold gasses, have a look at these links:

* Doppler cooling, or: how to use a laser not to hup stuff but to cool it: Nobel prize 1997

* the Bose-Einstein condensate: a weird state of matter that is formed by bosonic atoms at really ultralow temperature: Nobel prize 2001

* not that cool but still quite cool: suprafluid helium flowing against gravity: Nobel prize 1996

So if you want to know about ultracold gasses, have a look at these links:

* Doppler cooling, or: how to use a laser not to hup stuff but to cool it: Nobel prize 1997

* the Bose-Einstein condensate: a weird state of matter that is formed by bosonic atoms at really ultralow temperature: Nobel prize 2001

* not that cool but still quite cool: suprafluid helium flowing against gravity: Nobel prize 1996

Are you that ignorant of economics, or are you just a troll, not realizing that Hayek won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1974?

But catching an atom in the act of bonding would be quite difficult.

You raise some valid points, but you need to come off your high horse. Back in the time when the USA was, what you call, a backward country, the US was all so pleased to get Fermi, Einstein fleeing totalitarian regimes in Europe (to name just a few). They did not come to their theories and research in isolation, but were a product of their environment and education in those countries. But they started or helped a developing industry and research in the US.

Later, the US even incited top leading researchers to go to the States, well in many cases, they had little choice, but it was better than being deported by the USSR.

In short, this has happened before (and was done by those that had little to protect or complain about, but are now the first to be scorned), and is happening again. Nothing new here, move along.

In times of world Economy, I am still dazzled to see that ppl seem to find reasons to protect their little countries (in fact, the country they are in can do anything they want, but everyone else should be good, unfair competition anyone?). I am just glad to see another alternative processor and in the long term, it can only benefit us with lower prices and better performance.

OSI is going to be giving Open Source Awards with cash prizes of up to $10,000. The idea is to create the "Nobel Prizes" of Open Source.

> But if energy was cheap enough, I'm sure we could come up with a way to increase the rate at which heat is radiated back into space, and/or decrease the rate at which heat is absorbed from the sun. :P
>=Smidge=

I've actually thought about this - and I believe that the answer lies in a discovery that was awarded the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics - Laser Cooling. Now the technique as described is for cooling atoms to near-absolute zero so as to be able to observe them better, but with Unlimited Free Energy(TM), it should be possible to generate a huge super-cooled mass in space and drop it down to Earth for cooling.

Of course, you don't need free energy to do this. Just go to the asteroid belt, capture a huge block of ice, and crash it into an ocean. For extra points, do this near the harbors of your enemies :) Just remember to check whether you have any allies within range of that tsunami you're about to generate...

Well, since you don't know anything about the Nobel Peace Prize, I highly recommend looking it up. Here it is, straight from the horse's mouth, so to speak.

Since Torvals (and Linux) has done nothing to prevent wars and such, I can't imagine why he would ever be considered for a Nobel Peace Prize, despite the usefulness of his creation. Linux doesn't really qualify as something that "confers great benefit to mankind" (paraphrasing).

Take a look through the list of Laureates for this Prize. You'll notice that things like terminating apartheid, promoting peace between warring nations and advocating human rights, get people nominated for this Prize. It's quite an interesting read. Please learn about it.

Well, since you don't know anything about the Nobel Peace Prize, I highly recommend looking it up. Here it is, straight from the horse's mouth, so to speak.

Since Torvals (and Linux) has done nothing to prevent wars and such, I can't imagine why he would ever be considered for a Nobel Peace Prize, despite the usefulness of his creation. Linux doesn't really qualify as something that "confers great benefit to mankind" (paraphrasing).

Take a look through the list of Laureates for this Prize. You'll notice that things like terminating apartheid, promoting peace between warring nations and advocating human rights, get people nominated for this Prize. It's quite an interesting read. Please learn about it.

Thank you for your revelation. You should inform the Nobel commitee so they can take back Chandrasekar's prize.

Yes, indeed, a fusion reaction does emit light, and not photons. That's why I pointed out the difference between radiation pressure and degeneracy pressure, which keeps at least white dwarfs, neutron stars, and, in theory, quark stars from collapsing. You can test electron degeneracy pressure in everday life by trying to compress a metal. Yep, that's what pushes back on you. If you don't believe me, try this link on for size. Notice specifically this part:

Now the star begins to cool and to shrink. It is stopped by the pressure of electrons. Since the pressure from the electrons grows faster than the pressure of gravity, the star will stay at about earth size even when it cools.

So there's still something holding that star up after fusion and radiation emission stops. And yes, fermion degeneracy pressure is that strong.

I propose a new unit of ego: The ESR

Too late. Robert Millikan ceaselessly bragged about his famous experiment to measure the electron mass. In the end, some witty soul came up with the idea of a unit for self-plugging named "kan", the most common derivative being the "millikan".

Some people would say: yes, he is.

This reminded me of something I read in the paper years back, turns out back in 1996 some scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize for discovering a liquid that actually flows uphill, some sort of special property about temperatures approaching absolute zero that cause liquid to move in a coordinated manner and lack all inner friction. That's the extent of the stuff I can understand, check the article out for yourselves.