41–50 of 110 posts
Sticking Hawking and Tesla in with Bose and Poincare is .... eccentric. It's not a popularity contest. Fun fact: one of Bose's grandsons worked as a bartender at Triple Rock in Berkeley for a while.
Sticking Hawking and Tesla in with Bose and Poincare is .... eccentric. It's not a popularity contest. Fun fact: one of Bose's grandsons worked as a bartender at Triple Rock in Berkeley for a while.
I mean, Tesla was as ubiquitous (if not more) in my EE degree as Bose and Poincare were in my Physics degree. I don't think I heard Hawking mentioned once during my Physics degree but I also didn't care to take any astronomy coursework.
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+1 for Noller. In a previous life, I worked as an undergrad in an RNA lab (remains the best job I have ever had) and we studied Noller's work closely.
Harry was a great teacher (I had him for Biochem 101 and a lab class). Very understated but quite good at communicating his enthusiasm for the biophysics underlying biology). The lab class, "Biology of Macromolecules" was challenging: you're handed a pile of microbial cells, told the species, and then you have to go to the primary literature and learn how to purify restriction endonuclease from it (using the original…
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I mean, Tesla was as ubiquitous (if not more) in my EE degree as Bose and Poincare were in my Physics degree. I don't think I heard Hawking mentioned once during my Physics degree but I also didn't care to take any astronomy coursework.
Hawking was a cosmologist not an astronomer. It would have come in any class covering advanced black hole theory.
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Yes. That is true. She passed away before the Nobel. Anyone interested in this topic should read "The Double Helix" by Watson. It is a real page turner and discusses how Watson and Crick kind of stole Franklin's research.
Absolutely. Now there is an interesting question. How could Watson and Crick have figured out Franklin's data faster than she did? The answer turns out to be coincidence. There are 230 crystallographic groups. As a crystallographer, Franklin knew them all, and had to rule them all out. However Watson had done his PhD research on a protein that happened to have the same crystallographic group as DNA. So he knew one gr…
A few other important points: Franklin published a paper in the same journal edition as W&C with her own work. W&C thanked Franklin (she's in the acknowledgements). She got more credit than people today believe (mainly because of the misleading book "Dark Lady" and the terrible book "The Double Helix").
The best original source I've found on this is The Eighth Day of Creation, which is based on primary sources (Franklin's notebooks which she willed to Aaron Klug, along wiht interviews with most of the people involved). After reading that I concluded that the work Franklin did on this project did not warrant a Nobel Prize even if she had not died before it was awarded.
(my PhD is on DNA structure, and I spent a huge amount of time researching its history)
Top greatest writer who never won a Nobel prize: Jorge Luis Borges.
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Harry was a great teacher (I had him for Biochem 101 and a lab class). Very understated but quite good at communicating his enthusiasm for the biophysics underlying biology). The lab class, "Biology of Macromolecules" was challenging: you're handed a pile of microbial cells, told the species, and then you have to go to the primary literature and learn how to purify restriction endonuclease from it (using the original…
I got into the UCSC grad program at the time you were there but didn't go. Funny how our paths almost crossed. I actually wanted to study with Haussler whom I met over lunch once. Yeah, I chose the SE life with family, kids myself. IMO there are too many scientists discouraging students from being scientists. Yeah, it is hard, but anything of value is going to be a challenge no matter what you do.
Personally I now actively advise people to avoid becoming (academic) scientists unless they are willing to dedicate an unreasonable amount of their life to it (more or less agreeing with Harry). It's really unfortunate but there just aren't enough jobs out there and too many of the folks who do manage to get positions aren't particularly honest or ethical.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/einstein-fantasy-physics_b_49...
The Nobel for inventing MRI went to Lauterbur and Mansfield, even though Damadian played a major role and is recognized by many as "an inventor of MRI". Full page ads ran in newspapers at the height of the controversy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Damadian#Nobel_Prize_c...
Top greatest writer who never won a Nobel prize: Jorge Luis Borges.