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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.
In the 80's Robert Gallo was celebrated as the discoverer of HIV and that, oh yeah, maybe
some French scientists helped too. Turns out Mr. Gallo either intentionally or mistakenly
(through cross-contamination in a sloppy lab) cultivated a sample of the French-discovered
strain of the virus. Even after he should have realized a mistake, he misled people and
caused the United States blood supply to use a much poorer HIV test (than the French one)
and as a result people needlessly died. His claims of original discovery ultimately fell
apart because HIV mutates with amazing rapidity, and so his HIV strains were traceable to
the French one his so closely matched.
The book "Science Fictions" by John Crewdson is worth your time to read. It's a long read,
not an easy read, but I got hooked.
Have you wondered why some less technically talented coworkers are able to influence
management and, even worse, make you the fall guy when things go wrong? I think this book
gave me insight into that.
If Mr. Gallo had only half the talent for science as he did for obfuscation, he would've
been a great scientist indeed.
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.
I did a paper on some of these topics in 1990. In short:
1) the American scientist was a dickhead
2) Even at the time of his "discovery", it was suspected that the lab had stolen the sample from the French - I think they settled on "contamination" so that it wouldn't turn into a political incident (this happened at NIH)
3) The elephant in the room was money - there was a metric fuckton of money to be made for the people to develop a test for HIV that could be applied to the blood supply. The French and the American basically split it.
4) The American scientist made out like a bandidt - not only did he recieve credit where he shouldn't have, the NIH built him a WHOLE BUILDING to be his sandbox.
It is some small measure of justice that the Nobel committee awarded the prise thusly. Too bad the people who award the non-scientific prizes have no such measure of judgment.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Come on, they've discovered hugely dangerous things through their "scientific" discoveries. HIV and HCV kill millions of people every year and these people are being praised for discovering them. Much like the lauded Newton who discovered gravity which has led to millions of deaths through falling and having heavy things land on people it is typical of the scientific community to reward these people who discover things that only give harm to people. These claims of "evolving" viruses are really just more proof that scientists are waging a war against normal people.
Only the other day I was hearing that scientists were poisoning our children by suggesting that di-Hydrogen Monoxide should be drunk instead of Sunny Delight, its appalling what we let these scientists get away with.
Brought to you by the people who think that Evolution is a scientific conspiracy.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
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?
Nobel prize, at least for peace, has no credibility to almost all Indians, as Mahatma Gandhi the absolute paragon of peace and non-violence in modern history, was never awarded the prize. In all sincerity, it would have honored the prize and not the person, in this case. Indians are generally highly divided about most issues, but, on Mahatma Gandhi's commitment to peace and non-violence, there is almost unanimous agreement. Please note that, there were dissenters who thought non-violence wasnt the best way to attain freedom, but nobody doubted Mahatma's non-violent credentials.
Nobel prize, like most western institutions, has an enormous western bias and is unable to see beyond the borders of western civilization, for most parts. This is not a complaint, it is just a fact!!