Slashdot Mirror
Nobel Prize For Medicine Awarded, Physics Soon To Follow
Nobel Prize season is here again, and the first award for Physiology or Medicine was split between two virologists who discovered HIV and one who demonstrated that a virus causes cervical cancer. Coming soon is the announcement for Physics. Look to the right for a chance to pit your selection wit against the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences with a poll for which scientific achievement deserves the prize. Front runners, according to Reuters, are; Andre Geim and Kostya Novoselov, discovers of graphene, Vera Rubin, provider of the best evidence yet of dark matter, and Roger Penrose and Dan Shechtman, discoverers of Penrose tilings and quasicrystals.
This guy has done so much for physics, that at some point, he deserves it just from such an enormous body of work. He inspires Hawking, does all sorts of work with theories of everything, he then writes it all up in a simple book that explains how everything works without skimping too much on the math, what more do you need a man to do?
This is my sig.
The whole award means a lot less since even Gore was able to secure one with little but political rhetoric.
The award meant less when Henry Kissinger won it. Gore's actually more deserving than some of the winners in the past few decades; at least he never actively worked against peace.
Gore? Really? I think that when Arafat got it in '94, it should have been written off all together. Sure the Gore thing was BS, but at least he didn't have such a long-standing history of organizing terrorist attacks against civilians before receiving his Peace Prize.
Of course, there are a number of legitimate gripes.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
The peace prize is not really affiliated with the natural science prizes. Different committee, different time of year, different style for different reasons.
The science prizes are given a long time after the fact, for discoveries that has really truly held up. The peace prize is a current thing and often focus on drawing attention to something.
Some would say that the peace prize gets undue respect from sharing it's name with the science prizes.
How much physics do you know? Dark matter is not a "cheap cop-out". It is a simple model that accounts for observations on many, many scales: from the rotation curves of galaxies, through lensing in galaxy clusters, via cosmic flows, the distance to high-redshift supernovae and all the way up to the fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background. Why do you believe that all matter must be barionic? Or luminous?
For an example of a real cop-outs consider the various "MOND" proposals: in order to account for the rotation curves of galaxies, you change Newtonian gravity at the right length scale. This is easy to do -- and obviuosly by making the right modification you can get the rotation curve exactly on the nose -- but then you'd need a different epicycle for the lensing, yet another one for the fluctuations in the CMB, etc.
In case you are still sceptical, consider the neutrino. Much like today's dark matter, this particle was proposed because laws of mechanics (conservation of momentum in neutron decay) seemed to be violated. Since they are so weakly interacting, it was only much later that neutrinos were observed directly. So was the neutrino a "cheap cop-out"? Should physicists instead have assumed that the laws of mechanics are wrong?