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Noble Piece Prize != Nobel Peace Prize

Which instances did you have in mind? Are you including Chandrasekhar, or Martin Ryle?

Which instances did you have in mind? Are you including Chandrasekhar, or Martin Ryle?

Not that physics is always that understandible: A few weeks ago at a day organized by our national physics society I heard a talk by Frank Wilczek, who won this years prize. He was introduced by 't Hoofd, who won it a few years ago, as being an excelent speaker. I think only a small part of the audience (all physicists) had a clue about what he was talking about, most of my colleagues had to resist falling asleep. I saw a talk by the other guy a year earlier and that was not much better.

Mightbe it is because both men did something in high energy/small partical physics, but I think there are not much nobel prizes that could get the kids to study science. Mightbe x-rays or a MRI scanner, but how do you explain the joy of a Bose-Einstein condensate, a high Tc superconductor or some bloody neutrino?

Not that physics is always that understandible: A few weeks ago at a day organized by our national physics society I heard a talk by Frank Wilczek, who won this years prize. He was introduced by 't Hoofd, who won it a few years ago, as being an excelent speaker. I think only a small part of the audience (all physicists) had a clue about what he was talking about, most of my colleagues had to resist falling asleep. I saw a talk by the other guy a year earlier and that was not much better.

Mightbe it is because both men did something in high energy/small partical physics, but I think there are not much nobel prizes that could get the kids to study science. Mightbe x-rays or a MRI scanner, but how do you explain the joy of a Bose-Einstein condensate, a high Tc superconductor or some bloody neutrino?

Profit-minded? Sure, no doubt that exists in corporate management. But there are real scientists with philanthropic goals doing the actual work here. You don't think these guys know what they're doing? They're *very* careful now when introducing new strains to the environment, and don't just do so willy-nilly. These are guys like Norman Borlaug, a Nobel peace prize winner, who've worked tirelessly to successfully introduce new strains of high-yeild, disease-resistant crops to needy people. Do you think *he's* profit driven? The man's more than 90 years old and hasn't even retired. And regardless of effects on the ecosystem, it ultimately comes down to choosing whether or not to save millions upon millions of human lives.

As far as food goes, This guy already turned India (and Pakistan) around. They went from being short on food to having a food surplus. He also prevented a second "Dust Bowl" (same weather conditions) in the Midwest. If China (and any other nation for that matter) did what he outlined, they would no longer have a food shortage. Your observation on production per capita is dead on correct though.

but then if you didn't know it wsa a Nobel Prize winning classic, would you think it was well written?

James Joyce won the Nobel Prize?

There's also something fundamentally puzzling about the idea of literature which you don't "know" is well written until someone tells you.

Hmm, I could propose this to a Nobel Laureate who got the prize for giving the first indirect evidence of gravity waves, but he probably doesn't need the money. He's also the one who taught me Special Relativity. That being said, just looking at the proof is riddiculous. The x=ct and x'=ct' is absurd and completely unjustified. It's only true in a special case, when v=c. When v=c, you get all kinds of wierd and funny things. Anyway, that's all the time I had to glance over it. If he could legitimely disprove GR, he'd definitely get a Nobel.

You are thinking of World of Chemistry! However, based on his other post, that wasn't what the grandparent was looking for.

World of Chemistry was the best.

"IA-odin... Po-TAZ-zium" "Wow, look at that!"

Don Showalter was the host for most of the show, and Noble Prize winner Roald Hoffman did some of the other stuff. That was one of the best chem shows around, especially with all the sexual innuendoes. I'll never forget: "pv=nrt; which you can remember as pervnert..." "Excuse me Miss" "Ahhhh!" The pervnert flasher. There was another one where he was making rubbing a glass rod to make it statically charged, and then he stuck it between two balls wrapped in tin foil. It reminded me of something from the Ambiguously Gay Duo.

Great show. You can buy all 26 episodes on VHS for $199.

.. why I don't believe the "Global Warming is being caused by greedy corporations" spiel..

Global warming != ozone layer.

quite simply, it's because most people (scientists included) quite simply don't have enough information to say for a FACT that THIS or THAT is causing ozone depletion:

It's a fact that CFC causes ozone depletion. They awarded a Nobel Prize to the 3 guys who figured it out.

Honestly, it's people like you who don't know what they're talking about that make me not believe the "[insert-disaster-here] is a natural phenomenon and isn't caused by humans" spiel. I bet you also believe a single volcano eruption produces more CO2 than humanity has in 100 years.

... why I don't believe the "Global Warming is being caused by greedy corporations" spiel..

And what does Global Warming have to do with ozone-layer depletion?

These are two completely seperate phenomena.

quite simply, it's because most people (scientists included) quite simply don't have enough information to say for a FACT that THIS or THAT is causing ozone depletion

Wrong. CFCs do cause ozone depletion. That is established. The mechanisms of how CFCs catalyze the degradation of ozone into oxygen are fully understood. It is something you can easily reproduce in a laboratory. This has been done many times. A Nobel prize was awarded for this. They don't give out Nobels for things which aren't considered to be well-established.

You are confusing this issue with global warming, which is far more controversial, and something which is far less easy to know with certainty.

As for the quote:
"While chlorofluorocarbons are still blamed for ozone depletion, scientists said this study shows they don't properly account for the sun's impact."

It is also correct. But what they are saying is that the extent of ozone destruction due to CFCs wasn't correct before, since they didn't take this factor into consideration. It does not mean that CFCs don't destroy ozone. They do. And it's no theory.

One of the examples Kahneman cited was research of addmittance process in medical school. According to it, medical school was much better off when making decision just by looking at the application, as opposed to interviewing prospects, because after interview people in charge of admission were much more likely to use their intuition, which led to more mistakes than they would make, have they based their decision on statistics.

That being said, I had dinner with Kary Mullis after he gave a lecture about various things, including how he is not convinced the HIV is the cause of AIDS. Now there are lots of scientists who think he is a quack, and I'm not sure I buy his arguments either...but there is reasonable logic behind them. And a large part of his point was that once people (even the ostensibly impartial practitioner of science) get emotionally involved in an idea, it is hard to have a rational discussion. This point was proven almost perfectly in his lecture, as a post-doc got up and heckled him about HIV!=AIDS, despite the fact that his statements were anything but objectionable. (ie, "I have not been shown data that convince me that HIV causes AIDs.") Anyway, way off topic.

-Ted

It took a guest lecture of a nobel laureate to convince me that there are legitimate uses of color in mathematical formulae on overhead slides. That, and a great lecturer who worked heavily with Mathematica notebooks he modified and evaluated in-class, made me rethink my somewhat fundamentalist attitude to computers in class. The technology is not bad per se, but instead of enhancing the learning experience it's too often used to save time, work or money (in the extreme case replacing teacher time by CBT; I very much agree with Andrew Cumming's CAL rant on this).

They have gotten so used to being taught that they find it impossible to do something they haven't learned or to learn through trial and error.

There is a lot of truth to that. Generally one of the best things about graduate school is that they remove the safety net and give you a chance to do something original. If you get a good advisor like I was fortunate enough to have it can be a truly mind expanding experience that puts you in a position to stand on your own.

No offense mate, but you're off your rocker.

There *was* a beginning to the universe, it is widely accepted that the universe is 'the ultimate free lunch,' and was brought into existence by a quantum fluctuation. Not only that, but we have a pretty good picture of what happened during the first 3 minutes, as well as what happened after that.

As any astronomer would explain to you, there is a point which we could call the end of the universe, depending on who you believe about when the universe will end. I'm speaking of the two possible eventual outcomes for our universe: Heat Death or collapse. (Although at this point the majority of cosmologists agree that our universe is expanding at an accelerating pace, and thus the universe is doomed to become a very chilly place indeed).

"But how," you ask, "can you claim that heat death is the end of the universe, or of time?" Sure, time will go on after heat death, but there will be nothing around to MEASURE that time, because all activity in the universe will have stopped with the temperature at a very cold 0K.

I also found it a bit funny that you think we need a new Galileo or Copernicus, when we have someone even better. Weinberg is one of the most brilliant physicists that has ever lived, certainly the most influential of my life (if that gives you a clue to how old I am). Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to belittle Copernicus, Galileo, Newton or even Einstein. But Weinberg came up with a theory to unify two of the four fundamental forces (weak and electromagnetic), as well as the Inflationary theory.

Now, as far as escaping our universe and getting to another universe, this is all highly theoretical stuff. But there are a fair number of scientists who believe that our universe is but one in a larger multiverse. There are numerous theories about how these other universes would be formed, as well as how they could be kept seperate from our own which I will not go into here (some involve black holes, others involve the period of unknown time immediately (picoseconds) after the Big Bang.

The Nobel Prize for economics a couple of years ago went to Daniel Kahneman, who demonstrated that

Kahneman also demonstrated that the Heritage foundation's intuition is poorly suited to understanding the economics and statistics of the real world.

Kahneman showed that people often prefer to choose a pair of gambles that equate to

• 25% odds of winning $240 and
• 75% odds of losing $760

• 25% odds of winning $250 and
• 75% odds of losing $750

Kahneman's colleague Colin Camerer also demonstrated that taxi drivers work longer hours on nights when they make less money per hour and knock off early when they make more money per hour. In other words, the supply of cab drivers increases when the demand decreases and vice-versa!

Camerer's results violate the Heritage Foundation's intuition and suggests that increasing taxes might well lead people to work harder because people often work until they earn a target, after which they decide to knock off early and enjoy their leisure.

In the real world, people's choices frequently violate in a fundamental manner the postulates of economic rationality and thus refute trite intuitive assumptions that people act to maximize their income, wealth, or other measures of utility.

You clearly didn't read the definitions. A law is an observation of the natural world, usually (if not always) described in mathematics. Thoeries are attempts to explain why the natural world behaves as it does, and usually consist of a number of laws or mathematical formulas. The theory of relativity, for instance, has e=mc^2, as well as the gravity formulas (that are incredibly close to Newton's in a non-relativistic scope). Also, laws have a context, like Newton's being for non-quantum, non-relativistic bodies, and Einstein's, which were applicable to our observable universe (you don't expect it to work in another one without tweaking, do you?)

Oh, and BTW, the people who hand out Nobel prizes seem to have concluded that Einstein discovered a few laws, too, and used them to develop his theory of relativity. Note the last chapter, and how laws and theories relate.

Zhores I. Alferov comes to mind. He got Nobel prize in physics for inventing laser diods some 40 years ago.
A quote: Laser diodes built with the same technology drive the flow of information in the Internet's fibre-optical cables. They are also found in CD players, bar-code readers and laser pointers.
If Alferov and Herbert Kroemer patented their ideas, they would be billionaires.

Except, mainstream economists mostly don't use those methods. For a perfect example of some of the absurd assumptions (precisive abstraction), see "perfect competition". And even if they did, it still wouldn't redeem them. Economic phenomena are not continuous. Actors can choose. Preferences can and do change, making indifference curves humbug.

Your mathematical description of the effects of inflation may be true, but so what? It aids in nothing. There are no constant mathematical relationships in human action. Your little mathematical description only expresses in mathematical terms what I said in words. It, however, falls far short of the lofty and unrealistic ambitions of mainstream economists, which is to predict how much prices will rise given a certain amount of inflation. The problem is that because circumstances can and do change -- and more problematic for these "measurers" that people can change their preferences, time-preferences, and time-preference schedules -- while increasing the monetary base by X% may have resulted in Y% price-increase in the past, it isn't sure to do so in the future, even if all measureable things are the same.

To clear up your confusion, I suggest Logical Catallactics Versus Mathematical Catallactics by Ludwig von Mises. A lesser critique of this idiocy can be found in Hayek's The Pretense of Knowledge

people are not mathematical equations [...] operations of calculus are completely invalid

Say, did you read the same article that I read? The one that quoted Einstein as saying "As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality." It seems like you're overstating a point that the author already completely agrees with.

reality of game theory is that it is a bunch of humbug [...] article on John Nash and Game Theory

So this guy from Shenandoah University (3000 students, "the 'yes you can' university") is telling us that the Nobel Prize was given out for a bunch of humbug? Well heck, that's good enough for me.

Sure, Nash's work didn't mean that they just called it done and shut down the Economics department, but game theory was a big step forward not only in economics but also in evolutionary biology, especially in understanding the evolution of social behavior. Simple games don't completely model human behavior, but if you're trying to understand reciprocal altruism in parrots, it works a treat.

Secondly, human beings can choose.

This, unless you're a raging ghost-in-the-machine dualist, doesn't mean anything about the analyzability of human behavior. The fact that people can and do choose doesn't mean that we can't, through science and mathematical modelling, improve our understanding of how they choose.

And if you are a raging ghost-in-the-machine dualist, you're still pretty much screwed; read Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting for details.

The efficient British administration bungled on this as late as Bengal Famine, 1943. In fact, 3 million are supposed to have died in this famine, and caused , among other things, caused Amartya Sen to take up economics, in particular, famine studies.

On the other hand, basic science (like space research) deserves to be encouraged by all (civilized) nations. Imagine medieval Italians or 18th century Britons waiting till all poverty was eradicated. Science and civilization do not progress in such a manner.

They also had instructions there on building linear accelerators based on Van der Graaf generators. That wasn't good enough for me, though -- I wanted a circular accelerator, like they had at CERN. (Somewhere, between old report cards and essays on democracy, is a reply from Carlo Rubbia, head of CERN at the time, to a fan letter I wrote him.)

I got as far as convincing the local welder that he should join some copper pipe in a circle for me for free. I'm great on ideas, but follow-through...Kudos to these guys for doing it. That's just cool beyond belief.

That certainly depends on your definition of 'nature'!

If you check out this years Nobel Price winners (it's about Quarks and the Strong force in atomic nuclei, Quantum ChromoDynamics, QCD), you'll find that nature, at its innermost core, is described in terms of waves and quite advanced mathematics. The deeper you examine the nature of space and matter, the more mathematical and abstract it gets.

It's quite fortunate that it simplifies to Newtonian physics in most everyday situations, or it'd be a nightmare to make stuff like cars etc. work.

Eulers Formula is a reminder that the Universe is a much more magical place than we usually think of. With all due respect for the others, this one wins my heart.

Thank you for a very good answer, you gave me something to think about :)

You made me see that my reply is a strawman fallacy (or very similar). Thank you for taking the time to point it out to me, I really didn't see it that way at all, I'll try giving a better explanation of my view. Kissingers actions are well documented and can be discussed, no doubt about it. My problem with accusing him for war crimes is that:
- the level of direct accountability is raised so high that one (in my opinion) would have to accuse just about every major politican during the cold war, on all sides.
- the power of one single individual, even a secretary of state, is exaggerated and becomes reminiscent of finding a scapegoat rather than anything else. Likewise the ultimate personal responsibility of a single individual is raised beyond what seems fair. If the bottom hundred of a thousand people in a hierarchical structure does something criminal all the blame shouldn't be put on a person in the top hundred part of same structure. Some relevant blame yes, but not all the blame, especially when all the individuals are supposed to be accountable first and foremost for their own actions. The My Lai massacre and tragedy, as well as the following military trial, is a very good example of this, as well is the Abu Ghraib scandal.
- it seems very ad hoc: the interpretations of Kissingers actions are biased towards specific opinions which is shared mostly within a very homogeneous small minority because it fits them well. This is where my view of the whole thing becomes that of it being mostly a propaganda tool for the mentioned groups.

I can understand that you think it's wrong for me to be sweeping opinions away because of their origin. Actually I agree fully in principle that doing so is wrong, but I am not a perfect being and after time and time again (the DU example was meant as a reference to this) finding very little of lasting value from those sources I simply sweep them away as irrelevant (or having a too high noise-to-signal ratio) and prioritize sources that in my opinion have better quality.

The third area I would like to discuss has to do with the problem of the millions who live under subnormal conditions and who have now come to a realization that they may aspire to a fair share of the God-given rights of human beings. Their aspirations present a challenge to the more favored nations to lend assistance in bettering the lot of the poorer. This is a special problem in the present crisis, but it is of basic importance to any successful effort toward an enduring peace. The question is not merely one of self-interest arising from the fact that these people present a situation which is a seed bed for either one or the other of two greatly differing ways of life. Ours is democracy, according to our interpretation of the meaning of that word. If we act with wisdom and magnanimity, we can guide these yearnings of the poor to a richer and better life through democracy.

You might find the information over at the Nobel website more interresting: http://nobelprize.org/chemistry/laureates/2004/pub lic.html.

The Nobel committee has also completely given up on the idea that the prize should be awarded for work done in the last year. From Nobel's will:

The whole of my remaining realizable estate shall be dealt with in the following way: the capital, invested in safe securities by my executors, shall constitute a fund, the interest on which shall be annually distributed in the form of prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind.

I have also met Doug Osheroff and he actually got the nobel prize in 1996 for something he did as a graduate student. So, they exist too.

I have also met Doug Osheroff and he actually got the nobel prize in 1996 for something he did as a graduate student. So, they exist too.

The full history is here: Gerardus 't Hooft - Autobiography:

"At CERN, I became interested in the quark confinement problem. I could not understand why none of the expert theoreticians would embrace quantum field theories for quarks. When I asked them, why not just a pure Yang-Mills theory?, they said that field theories were inconsistent with what J.D. Bjorken had found out about scaling in the strong interactions. This puzzled me, because when I computed the scaling properties of Yang-Mills fields, they seemed to be just what one needs. I simply could not believe that no-one besides me knew how Yang-Mills theories scale. I mentioned my result verbally at a small conference at Marseille, in 1972. The only person who listened to what I said was Kurt Symanzik. He urged me to publish my result about scaling. 1f you don't, someone else will", he warned. I ignored his sensible advice. I had also made a remark about scaling in my 1971 paper on massive Yang-Mills fields. No-one had taken notice.

Veltman told me that my theory would be worthless if I could not explain why quarks cannot be isolated. He attached more importance to another project we had embarked upon: we had started a lengthy calculation concerning the renormalizability of quantum gravity models. Although complete renormalization would never be possible, it was still worth-while to study these theories at the one-loop level, and there were some important things to be learned. Our work would be continued by Stanley Deser and a fellow PhD student of Veltman's, Peter van Nieuwenhuizen, who discovered patterns in the renormalization counter terms that would lead to the discovery of supergravity theories.

But I also continued to think of gauge theories for the strong interaction. Quark confinement was indeed a problem, and I started to work on it. It was this question that led me to discover the magnetic monopole solutions in Higgs theories, the large N behaviour for theories with N colours (instead of 3, the physical number), and later the very important effects due to instantons. In the mean time, the scaling properties were rediscovered by H. David Politzer and by David Gross and Frank Wilczek in 1973, who now realized that this invalidated the age-old objections against simple, pure Yang-Mills theories for the strong interactions. The pure Yang-Mills theory with gauge group SU (3) was finally being accepted as the most likely explanation for the strong interactions, and it received the beautiful name "Quantum Chromodynamics" (QCD). "

Waksman was a professor at Rutgers, New Jersey, where he discovered the mycin (streptomycin,actinomycin) class of drugs and their effectiveness against TB. Streptomycin has been listed as one of the top ten inventions that has shaped the world (itnearly erradicated TB from the world back in the 30's 40's) Waksman bio.

Doom 1908?
Rutherford will never know what hit him.

It's not a "Wild Ass Guess", Hulse and Taylor won the Nobel in 1993 for their discovery of a binary pulsar system which is slowing down precisely as predicted by general relativity - because the gravitational waves being emitted are carrying off energy. See here.

(Yes, I know you mean ripples in spacetime. But it's pretty clear that the other poster thought you meant gravitational waves, and that's what the Hawking quote was about, too.)

Does gravity travel faster than light?

If I send an object in one direction at 0.75*c (3/4 the speed of light), and another object in the opposite direction, also at 0.75*c, aren't they traveling apart from each other at 1.5*c?

If I had a steel rod that was 4,000 miles long, and I pushed on one end of it, would a spectator at the other end see their end of the rod move simultaneously, or would something about relatively cause a delay?

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.