Domain: nobel.se
Stories and comments across the archive that link to nobel.se.
Comments · 178
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Re:Not too young
But stand for a psychologist or neurologist to correct me.
How about a physicist instead? Consider Hans Bethe who was still keeping up at age 95 and beyond.--TRR
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Re:As we have known all along
My left hand and my right hand are totally dofferent entities in a way, but shouldn't they do whats best for the whole? I work a contract company for a major automotive manufacturer, and they try to do the same thing. They always try to protect there own division and not the company as a whole. What they end up doing half the time, at least from an IT perspective, is beating themselves into the ground. Hell, even from the IT perspective, my company bids against itself for the same contract. Like I said before it just seems odd. Maybe its that I agree with the Neo-Walrasian General Equilibrium School and John F. Nash, Jr.
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Re:Frankenfood
I'd go to the site, but Showtime apparently thinks the internet works like 1920's telephone service. The actual episode in question is one of my favourites.
I have that episode (actually, all of them) handy. I'll present some quotes to help you out:
Charles Margulis, Greenpeace GE specialist: "We're concerned that Genetically Engineered food is a disaster waiting to happen."
"Human beings have never before created lifeforms (plants) in the laboratory and released them into the environment and nobody knows what's going to happen in the long-term either in the environment or in our diets."
Penn: "Created lifeforms, disaster waiting to happen, that's Bullshit! These greenpeace dudes want us to believe that GE crops will ruin other crops and harm any person or animal that eats these foods."
Norman Borlaug: "Producing food for 6.2 billion people, adding a population of 80 million more a year is not simple. We had better develop an ever improved science and technology including the new modern technology to produce the food that is needed for today".
Norman Borlaug: "We're 6.6 billion people now. We can only feed 4 billion. I don't see 2 billion volunteers to disappear." (Regarding organic only foods)
Juliano, Raw Food Chef: "A tortilla is made in a dingy, dirty factory by some dude who hates his job, boss, life, and you. And sends that hate into the food, and you eat it and send it to the center of your core being."
Penn: "Even if this nut had some odd fruit that had grown wild somewhere, it was delivered to him on a truck, it was kept fresh through refrigeration, he washed it in his sink alongside his lettuce tortilla, where did that water come from? He cut it with a knife and cleaned it up with cloth or paper towel. There is no food or water without technology. NONE. Just SHUT THE FUCK UP AND GET A JOB!"
Charles Margulis: "There is no Government requirement that genetically engineered foods be tested in the United States. There's not a single government agency, neither the FDA, USDA, EPA; None of them require genetically engineered foods to be tested for human health effects."
Terry Lomax, professor of botany and plant pathology at Oregon State University: "There are no animal genes in plant crops"
Terry Lomax: "These genetically engineered crops are actually the most highly tested crops that we've ever had. They're regulated by the EPA, the USDA, and the FDA. The EPA regulates them if there's a pesticide involved; The USDA [on] where they're grown and how it will affect the environment, and the FDA for food safety. They go through millions of dollars of testing and many years to be able to be approved as a commercial crop."
Alex Avery, studying global food issues at the Hudson Institute: "The president of Zambia was told by Greenpeace and friends of the earth that the food was poisonous."
Norman Borlaug: "These are utopian people that live on cloud 9 and come into the third world and cause all kinds of confusion and negative impacts on the developing countries"
Penn: "Unless you and yours are starving you need TO SHUT THE FUCK UP".
BTW: Most of the work Norman Borlaug did, for which he was awarded a nobel prize, was done before 1970 (1944, to be accurate). And he's still continuing it, thank God. Oh, and this was the only time Penn got pissed off enough to tell people to shut the fuck up. And I can see why.
Why not donate to help starving people worldwide? -
Re:so what cool things
Nope, it's named for Brian Josephson , who as the link mentions won a share of the 1973 Nobel for it. I've read, however, that his more recent research interests have strayed well outside the scientific mainstream- parapsychology, ESP, cold fusion, homeopathy, etc...
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uh, there's one for literature . . .
see here
isn't that close enough? does that mean I deserve one? cool!
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Re:I'm particularly stuck by this one
Does not seem so Nobel page site (i think), seems to say photoelectric effect. Yes, his theory of Brownian motion is important, but he didnt win a nobel for that.
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Re:I'm particularly stuck by this oneThat is only partially true. True, most (but by no means all) of Einstein's important papers had a single author, but by no means did he work in isolation. He frequently visited other scientists, gave lectures at other universities, attended conferences etc, exactly as scientists do today.
He certainly was not suppressed, at least not by the scientific community. When General Relativity was published, for example, many other people working in the field immediately realized the significance and jumped on it. IIRC, Minkowsky himself was only months away from figuring it out himself. It is absolutely untrue that no one accepted the theories until the eclipse experiment (which, ironically, was later shown to to be "probably fraudulant" in fact! A great example of post-war anglo-german cooperation, publicised to the point that they HAD to get a result so much that it was ultimately faked). By that time, Einstein was already very famous, and relativity was by far the most likely contender for the theory of gravitation.
Of course, there were (and still are) competing theories. A major test of relativity occurred in the late 70s / early 80s when the rotational speed of a binary pulsar was measured to be slowing down, in accordance with the loss of energy from radiating gravitational waves, predicted by general relativity. At the time, there were several theories that reproduced the previously tested predictions of relativity but predicted a different rate of slowing down. The 1993 nobel prize was given for this in fact.
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Re:pricing discussions
I'll tell you why they didn't want you to talk about it: asymmetric information benefits the supplier.
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Re:Patent system
its a REWARD you nit wit! Set up by the trust fund from the sale of Dynamite! Arafat got one... that alone is laughable.
http://almaz.com/nobel/nobel.html
http://www.nobel.se/index.html
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Schr�dinger. It starts to get a bit Heisenbergian the more you think about it.
I think you mean "Schrödingerian."
;-)Everything is music,
-Toddhisattva -
Nobel prize winner?I can't find any reference to Dee Hock having won a Nobel prize. Searching the Nobel e-Museum doesn't find him.
Is Slashdot in the business of granting Nobel prizes now?
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Re:ironically (or, sadly)
Perhaps a lot of scientists do donate the money. After all, Nobel Laurettes don't generally have problems getting grant money.
If you read Nobel's will, it seems he wanted the prizes to be awarded to people that "conferred the greatest benefit on mankind", and it is generally believed he excluded mathematics on the ground it wasn't practical enough. -
Re:Dark MatterI'm no astrophysicist here, but this is how I understand it:
There are three types of neutrinos: electron, muon and tau, each having a different characteristic mass and energy spectrum. The experimentally measured flux of solar electron neutrinos based upon the solar nuclear fusion reactions turned out to be too low by ~50% based on the theoretical GUT and QED calculations. As a means of explaining the apparent discrepancy, it had been postulated that neutrinos are capable of "oscillating" between types over distance and time, thereby affecting the number of measured events (the experimental measurement being limited to certain energies). However, theory suggests that in order to oscillate, the neutrino must have mass.
Ingenious experiments now seem to confirm that what was once considered a massless particle does indeed have mass, albeit vanishingly small.
Since neutrinos are produced in stellar fusion reactions and supernova explosions, etc., in very great quantities (the flux here on Earth is estimated to be over 10^10/cm^2/sec), they would be expected to be in a higher density in the vicinity of galaxies, and thereby could account for a large part of the "missing matter" holding galaxies together.
I think this is what the NPR story was referring to
... but maybe not.A couple of links:
Physics Web articleon neutrinos.
Super-Kamiokande at UC Irvine Neutrino page.
UniSci article on oscillation.
The confirmation of Solar Fusion by neutrino detection 2002 Nobel Prize press release. -
Perhaps they mean carbon semiconductors
Over the last 10 to 15 years or so, there has been interest in using carbon based fabrication instead of silicon. I'm not a physicist and my memory could be fuzzy on this, but I think the idea is that Carbon can be induced to assume fairly large molecular configurations other than diamond, graphite and "coal", including "Buckyballs" by Smalley, Curl and Kroto and "Nanotubes". These forms have different electrical conducting properties than the other forms of carbon (in fact they act as semiconductors), permitting very small device size (at the molecular level). Doping is not needed, since the conducting paths are made of the same material (albeit in a different molecular configuration) as the rest of the wafer. For an introductory treatment, try this technology review article.
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Re:RNA?
Until recently, RNA was thought to do little more than carry out DNA's instructions for building proteins.
However, the new picture, which Science says came into focus this year, shows small RNAs at the heart of many of the cell's genetic workings.
This is an oversimplification, probably intended for a lay audience. For the past 20 years or so, RNA has been known to have enzymatic functions. At first this catalytic property of RNA had been thought to be limited to primitive organisms. However, recent research has shown that rRNA, which is the RNA component of ribosomes, is in fact the catalytic component of the peptidyltransferase reaction that creates polypeptides, which in turn make up proteins. Moreover, although there is no direct proof yet, there is plenty of circumstantial evidence that indicates mRNA splicing in eukaryotes is also catalyzed by RNA (in the form of "small nuclear RNAs" or snRNAs). To state that RNAs are only part of the information chain from DNAs to proteins is a misjustice to the complexity of RNA biology.
The small RNAs that are described in this article are not even catalytic; in fact, to your average RNA biochemist these small RNAs are not all that interesting. They are, however, very interesting to people who study gene regulation, because that appears to be the normal role of these small RNAs. Biotech companies are also interested because they are a way to target specific genes for inactivation. -
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Nobel
John Bardeen of the University of Illinois won the Nobel Prize in Physics twice, once in 1956 with William Bradford Shockley and Walter Houser Brattain for inventing the transistor, and again in 1972 with Leon Neil Cooper and John Robert Schrieffer for a theory of superconductivity.
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Nobel
John Bardeen of the University of Illinois won the Nobel Prize in Physics twice, once in 1956 with William Bradford Shockley and Walter Houser Brattain for inventing the transistor, and again in 1972 with Leon Neil Cooper and John Robert Schrieffer for a theory of superconductivity.
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Minor Correction
"4. Tanaka Kouichi (A pioneer in Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy who recently won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry)"
Minor Correction: Tanaka's work was actually in Mass Spectrometry (MALDI method used to ionize large molecules, such as proteins). The prize was shared with John Fenn (also Mass Spec) and Kurt Wüthrich (for NMR).
I also noticed that some sources are spelling his name "Koichi". This is the spelling that appears on the Nobel Foundation site. -
Re:Green is not the real color...
DO THE CAPITAL LETTERS SOMEHOW MAKE YOUR DRIVEL MORE TRUE?
The Nobel Prize for Economics was recently awarded to three Americans whose work looked at the notion that asymetric information is a cause of inefficiency in markets. Or do these highly respected economics professors just need to "learn some economics", too? -
Re:Welcome to America
It isn't just America. Nobel Prize winning novelist Anatole France once wrote about French justice that The Law in all its majesty forbids equally the rich and the poor from sleeping under a bridge. The quote is applicable to most countries.
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Linux will prevail
I am not well-versed in the world of Linux, ( have my own allegiances but am being drawn to it more and more. Reading the article, it felt very clear to me that Linux will prevail (with a nod to William Faulkner's Nobel speech).
Consider a few quotes from the article:
The LinuxThreads implementation of the POSIX threads standard (pthreads), originally written by Xavier Leroy
A group at IBM and Intel, led by Bill Abt at IBM, released the first version of the New Generation POSIX Threads (NGPT) library in May 2001
On March 26-27, 2002, Compaq hosted a meeting to discuss the future replacement for the LinuxThreads library. In attendance were members of the NGPT team, some employees of (then distinct) Compaq and Hewlett-Packard, and representatives of the glibc team
On September 19, 2002, Ulrich Drepper and Ingo Molnar (also of Red Hat) released an alternative to NGPT called the Native POSIX Thread Library (NPTL)
Perhaps others have already pointed this out, but I am newly impressed with the universal nature of Linux. The power of an operating system that *everyone* is interested in improving, and has the opportunity to improve, is awesome. Yes, Microsoft has tremendous resources, and very earnest, good-willed, brilliant people. But to improve Microsoft's kernels, you have to work for Microsoft. That means switching the kid's schools, moving to Redmond, etc. etc. On the other hand, everyone from IBM to HP to some kid in, say, Finland, can add a good idea to Linux. When the kernel's threads implementation is a topic for conversation at conferences, with multiple independent teams coming up with their best ideas, Linux is sure to win in the long run.
I'm struck by the parallels to my own field of scientific research: Yes, the large multinational companies have made tremendous contributions in materials science, seminconductors, and biotech. They work on the "closed-source", or perhaps "BSD" model of development. But it is the "GPL"-like process of peer-reviewed, openly shared, and collaborative academic science that has truly prevailed.
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Just back from China..
I'm just back from a trip through China, and I was amazed at how much of the land is used. Granted, we were on trains and roads the whole time, but apart from tourist spots, I saw very few forests of trees. Just about all the land we saw was cleared for subsistence farming: rice paddies and the like.
I remember hearing on NPR the story of who I presume was Carl Bosch... who invented nitrous fertilizers. Without this invention, the world would not be able to feed its current population, and China is now the largest single consumer of them.
However this report is interpreted, it really does feel like the planet earth is on the brink... of something. -
The Nobels lost their innocence in 1969
I would like to see, in the context of this excerpt from the Last Will and Testament of Alfred Nobel, a justification for the Nobel Prize for "Economic Sciences", first awarded in 1969.
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Go to the source!I would like to recommend the Nobel prize homepage. There is a lot of information there. In particular, go check out the "further information" links for the public, where nice presentations of the science is available.
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Re:Chemistry prize shared betweenOfficial site.
Motivations: "for their development of soft desorption ionisation methods for mass spectrometric analyses of biological macromolecules" (John B Fenn, Koichi Tanaka) and "for his development of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy for determining the three-dimensional structure of biological macromolecules in solution" (Kurt Wüthrich).
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Re:lets have more winners
Split it ten ways.
Not possible. Paragraph four of the statutes of the Nobel foundation clearly states that a maximum of three people can share a prize.
It's even been mentioned in the television series (where the laureates of the year are interviewed) by some US physicists that they did indeed have that in mind when applying for grants etc. I.e. not to be more than tree eligible researchers not to spoilt their chanses.
Check out the statues of the Nobel Foundation.
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Agriculture.
It's not about spying or ICBM's or anything, the key factor here is, believe it or not, agriculture. I know other patriotic Indians have problems accepting this, but India is still largely an agriculture-based economy, with the population especially concentrated in rural areas. With the exploding population creating pressure on food resources, the Indian Council of Agricultural Research actively involves itself in creating better yielding food varieties .
Students of Indian history would have heard about the green revolution that created self-sustainence in food; a crucial post-independence achievement considering food scarcity situations such as the 1943 Bengal Famine (the one on which Amartya Sen did economic research and won the 1998 Nobel Prize for Economics).
Now with satellite technology, ICAR can identify which land areas are suitable for which crops and therefore goad farmers into growing those varieties (remember that India is a sub-continent; you have all sorts of terrain, from deserts to plains to plateaus to, of course, mountains.
So accurately knowing which crop goes best where is critical information for the hungry masses (over-cliched, but it's true). Methinks that this will be the biggest use, followed closely by telecommunications and satellite television AND then by urban planning (Mumbai will have 24.7 million people by 2005).
PS:- Note that I'm not saying that satellite technology wont be used for other purposes; I definitely want India to use cutting-edge technology against a couple of motherfuckers, but talking only about that would be misleading.
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Agriculture.
It's not about spying or ICBM's or anything, the key factor here is, believe it or not, agriculture. I know other patriotic Indians have problems accepting this, but India is still largely an agriculture-based economy, with the population especially concentrated in rural areas. With the exploding population creating pressure on food resources, the Indian Council of Agricultural Research actively involves itself in creating better yielding food varieties .
Students of Indian history would have heard about the green revolution that created self-sustainence in food; a crucial post-independence achievement considering food scarcity situations such as the 1943 Bengal Famine (the one on which Amartya Sen did economic research and won the 1998 Nobel Prize for Economics).
Now with satellite technology, ICAR can identify which land areas are suitable for which crops and therefore goad farmers into growing those varieties (remember that India is a sub-continent; you have all sorts of terrain, from deserts to plains to plateaus to, of course, mountains.
So accurately knowing which crop goes best where is critical information for the hungry masses (over-cliched, but it's true). Methinks that this will be the biggest use, followed closely by telecommunications and satellite television AND then by urban planning (Mumbai will have 24.7 million people by 2005).
PS:- Note that I'm not saying that satellite technology wont be used for other purposes; I definitely want India to use cutting-edge technology against a couple of motherfuckers, but talking only about that would be misleading.
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Fields page...
We need a cool funky page like the Nobel's Page for the Fields award. Currently we only have these text based ones because the people maintaining them are too busy working on math to create a cooler looking one.
:-)
It would be really cool to have a nice looking math page online. Something that will get people's attention.
Does anyone know of a better looking and still accurate Field's page? -
Studies regarding early brain developmen
The Postnatal Development Of The Visual Cortex And The Influence Of Environment: Nobel lecture by Torsten N. Wiesel [PDF] Google Cache
Development And Plasticity In The Brain by Morten Kringelbach & Adam Engell [PDF] Google Cache
The above links touch upon experiments performed upon newborn kittens and monkeys. Both animals exhibit a window in early life in which visual stimulus must be present in order for proper development of the brain to occur. An animal blinded in one eye during the first few weeks of life will not be able to utilize that eye for the entirety of life. Physical examination of the brain of such an animal shows significant differences in the visual cortex associated in the experimental eye as opposed to the control eye.
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karma whoring
In 1959 Richard Feynman said that all the information accumulated in all the books in the world could theoretically fit in a cube 1/200th of an inch on a side.
You can read the transcipt of the speech from when he made that prediction.
Feynman worked on developing the atomic bomb, he won a nobel in physics and is known as much for his scientific research as for his story telling. -
Re:25 Hours in a day?Yeah, it's not like the telephone was invented in the US or something...
...by an Italian, as recently recognized by the U.S. House of Representatives.And what about another wireless communication inventor
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Interesting name
What's interesting is that guy's name... any relation to Otto Hahn?
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I Smell Fake....
The Kid's name is Hahn! The same name as Otto Hahn, one of the forerunners of nuclear science. Here's a bio of Hahn.
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Nobel Prize
TWR writes:
...or getting $1,000,000 (which is what a Nobel Prize is worth).
The cash award of the Nobel Prize is 10,000,000 Krona (Swedish Crowns), which is roughly $1,036,055 USD today (or 1,096,383 Euros) -
Re:How science / development often work(sic)Blockquoth the poster:
'Science' often believes the myth that it is an objective undertaking, not subject to whim or 'current fashion'.
That's certainly the middle-school version of it, enshrined in textbooks and handed down as wisdom. As a physics teacher I do my best to work against the myth that science is not about people. But almost every single deconstructionist/revisionist in the field of science sociology makes the equally unwarranted leap to the statement that science therefore is just subjective with no special claim on truth.
This, of course, is bull-crap.
Science is a subjective endeavor that leads to objective truth. While there are trends and fashions in science -- because scientists are humans -- the process of peer review and independent replication do move us closer to the truth. Or, at least, they push back the bounds of ignorance, which is much the same thing.
Even the most outlandish theories can gain acceptance, if the evidence bears them out. It can regrettably take a decade or two, sometimes even longer. But every example you offer indicates the strength of the peer review process, not its weakness.
What use is it if a lone wolf "gets it right", if we can't tell that he/she got it right? Peer review is an overwhelmingly successful mechanism for weeding out the wrong and discovering the right. Due to the human nature of the participants, sometimes the glorious unbiased evaluation of new work is more honored in the breach. But the system does work, because if a crazy theory happens to be right, the evidence will accumulate -- even through "safe" channels -- and eventually, the peer review system will correct itself.
Of course, as was once quipped, sometimes you have to wait until all the old scientists are dead. :)
By the way, Poincare could not have "noted the implications of both Relativity and Quantum Mechanics a couple of decades before Einstein". Quantum Mechanics did not even begin to exist until the discovery of the electron in 1897. Indeed, Planck established the ad hoc basis of the field only in 1900(ref). Einsten published his first papers on quantum mechanics in 1905. I will grant that Poincare saw a lot of the implications of non-Euclidean spaces, a fundament of Einstein's General Relativity. -
Do some research fuck-knuckle
You probably have not heard of Marie Curie.
You will definitely not have heard of Louis-Victor Pierre Raymond, who won the prize for physics in 1929.
Jean Baptiste Perrin won in 1926. They all attended the Sorbonne. There are tonnes more, but I wouldn't have expected you to have done any basic research. What with all your high 'falutin universities I guess you know everything already! -
Teddy Roosevelt
I find it about as funny as a carrier named after Teddy Roosevelt, a man who won the Nobel Prize in 1906.
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Re:Not only Milton Friedman but 5(!) Nobel prizes
Yes, it is very impressive array of talent - I only mentioned Friedman because he's the one most non-economists have heard of. For what it's worth, having Coase on board is important, because his work bears directly on issues like this: the Nobel prize citation explains it here.
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Re:Too restrictive definition?
I forget which novel I read it from (it was years ago), but there was a sci-fi author (Asimov?) who put forth the idea that maybe there could be an intelligent life form that is electro-magnetic based
Fred Hoyle "The Black Cloud." Hoyle was a very prominent physicist, who rejected the idea of what he derisively labled as the "Big Bang," and championed the idea of a steady state universe which balanced the expansion of space with the continuous creation of matter. After Penzias and Wilson discovered the cosmic backround radiation, physicists flocked to the Big Bang theory. Penzias and Wilson won the Nobel Prize in 1978 . Hoyle spent much of the rest of his life arguing for the validity of the steady state model, but he also spent a lot of his time championing some fringe concepts as the inter-stellar origin of life. He died last year. -
Re:Atomic clock in 1948 Invented by William Libby
Erm... you don't know your history, anybody worth their scientific salt is aware of Louis Essen
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"Essen is the only British physicist ever to have been honoured for his contribution to science by both the USA and USSR during the Cold War.
He received the Rabi Award from America and the Popov Medal from the former Soviet Union."
Now... William F. Libby was a brilliant Chemist in his own right, but he didn't invented the Atomic Clock, he created C14 dating (carton dating), he recieved the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1960, according to the Nobel Institute.
So ironically you've gone on to prove the very opposite of your insults and suppositions, the Atomic Clock was actually invented in Britain and you quote a Chemist that actually invented something quite different (though still valid).
Get your facts right unless you want to make an idiot of yourself. -
Re:Very Semantical Correction
No, he means physicians. Read about the Nobel prize and learn something.
here -
Re:Very Semantical Correction
Semantically, you're correct, but for more details, people should check out The Official Web Site of The Nobel Foundation...
Nobel himself (in his will, I think) simply stated that prizes be given to those who, during the preceding year, "shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind" and that one part be given to the person who "shall have made the most important discovery within the domain of physiology or medicine."
John Nash is mentioned here.
Incidentally, it is correct to refer to Nash as a "Nobel Laureate" for winning his prize, the same as prize winners in Physics Chemistry, Medicine, etc. -
Autobiography
I saw the movie, and it got me wondering about the real John Forbes Nash, Jr. He's got a short (but interesting) online autobiography here, although he skips over his schizophrenic years and focuses on his academic work.
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Nice experiment to prepare the way for LISA...
It will be interesting to see whether this experiment gets the results everyone seems to be anticipating, or mirrors the 'success' of the Michelson-Morley experiment.
The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) (launching in 2009) should return significantly better data, but it'll be nice to get a sneak preview from Cassini.
"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny ...'" — Isaac Asimov -
Re:Math has been shunted into other disciplines...
There are no nobel price in economics. The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel
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Those "safe securities"From The Nobel Foundation:
"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."
The Nobel Foundation is a private institution established in 1900 on the basis of the will. The investment policy of the Foundation is naturally of paramount importance to the preservation and, if possible the augmentation of the funds and, thus, of the prize amount. According to the original 1901 investment rules, the term "safe securities" was, in the spirit of that time, interpreted to mean gilt-edged bonds or loans backed by such securities or backed by mortgages on real estate. With the changes brought about by the two World Wars and their economic and financial aftermath, the term "safe securities" had to be reinterpreted in the light of prevailing economic conditions and tendencies. Thus, at the request of the Foundation's Board of Directors, in the early 1950s the Swedish Government sanctioned changes, whereby the Board for all practical purposes was given a free hand to invest not only in real estate, bonds and secured loans, but also in most types of stocks.
From 1901, when the first prizes (SEK 150,000 each) were awarded, the prize amounts declined steadily. But with this freedom to invest, along with the long-fought-for tax-exemption granted in 1946, it was possible to reverse this trend and, on average, even keep pace with increasing inflation. The real value of the prize amount in SEK terms was finally restored in 1991. The amount of the 2001 Nobel Prize is SEK 10.0 million, an increase of around 11 per cent compared to the 2000 Prizes.
The investment capital at market value as per December 31, 2000, amounted to SEK 3,894 million (approx. USD 409 million). Foreign and Swedish assets accounted for 52 and 48 per cent, respectively."
There's also a table there breaking down the investments in more detail, but it was too big a PITA to get it to post correctly.
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Those "safe securities"From The Nobel Foundation:
"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."
The Nobel Foundation is a private institution established in 1900 on the basis of the will. The investment policy of the Foundation is naturally of paramount importance to the preservation and, if possible the augmentation of the funds and, thus, of the prize amount. According to the original 1901 investment rules, the term "safe securities" was, in the spirit of that time, interpreted to mean gilt-edged bonds or loans backed by such securities or backed by mortgages on real estate. With the changes brought about by the two World Wars and their economic and financial aftermath, the term "safe securities" had to be reinterpreted in the light of prevailing economic conditions and tendencies. Thus, at the request of the Foundation's Board of Directors, in the early 1950s the Swedish Government sanctioned changes, whereby the Board for all practical purposes was given a free hand to invest not only in real estate, bonds and secured loans, but also in most types of stocks.
From 1901, when the first prizes (SEK 150,000 each) were awarded, the prize amounts declined steadily. But with this freedom to invest, along with the long-fought-for tax-exemption granted in 1946, it was possible to reverse this trend and, on average, even keep pace with increasing inflation. The real value of the prize amount in SEK terms was finally restored in 1991. The amount of the 2001 Nobel Prize is SEK 10.0 million, an increase of around 11 per cent compared to the 2000 Prizes.
The investment capital at market value as per December 31, 2000, amounted to SEK 3,894 million (approx. USD 409 million). Foreign and Swedish assets accounted for 52 and 48 per cent, respectively."
There's also a table there breaking down the investments in more detail, but it was too big a PITA to get it to post correctly.
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Herbert Simon!
The Nobel Laureate was Herbert Simon, who won the prize in 1978.
Not that anyone cares, seeing as how most people have no attention span for this kinda stuff anyway, but you can check out a brief autobiography at the Nobel e-Museum.