41–50 of 149 posts
I keep hoping they'll give one to SciHub.
†since she has helped so many researchers, affected their lives, it shall count as well-beyond-lifetime
The abstract of the 5,154-author paper that this article mentions: https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.11... I first thought it was this one http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2008JInst...3S8003A which is also by Aad et al., but that one has a mere 2,926 authors (because it includes only the ATLAS collaboration and not the CMS collaboration). Seeing all of these people listed definitely lends some we…
Is it just alphabetical at that point, or is Aad both special and alphabetically advantaged? (If I want to go into physics, should I first change my name to Aaalweachter?)
So, that suggests that you should not only change your name to Aaalweachter, but also be sure to work on the AARDVARK research collaboration. (Or found one if it doesn't already exist.)
Personally I find peace prizes abominable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_Peace_Prize_laur... They just got way too political.
Alfred Nobel only wanted to reward people for making discoveries. There are many reasons one can argue that this is counterproductive (Like this article points out, science is not a single-person endeavor, but even more importantly is that it invokes a huge survivorship bias: You only get the prize for being correct , so someone else who did just as important work on another theory that showed that it was not correct…
I'm not a lawer, so I don't know is it possible to change Nobel Prize principles. All I want is to point to futility of blind following the old rule.
Want to briefly hijack this thread to quickly point out that there is no such thing as a Nobel Prize in Economics. Literally a Swiss bank made it upon the 70’s and dubiously said their prize was to “honor Alfred Nobel”. They were very forceful and never backed down from the prize, ultimately winning the PR battle and forcing the real Nobel org to sort-of acknowledge them. They did this to originally award distinction…
> Literally a Swiss bank made it upon the 70’s and dubiously said their prize was to “honor Alfred Nobel”. They were very forceful and never backed down from the prize, ultimately winning the PR battle and forcing the real Nobel org to sort-of acknowledge them. 1. Swedish, not Swiss. Both start with “Sw”, but, still, completely different countries. 2. And not just some random Swedish Bank, but the Swedish central ban…
This seems like less of an issue with the Nobel Prizes and more that the author doesn't like prizes in general. Not everyone that contributes to a movie gets to go up on stage to collect the Oscar. There are always going to be problems with subjective awards in terms of leaving people out, people being overshadowed who would have won in other years, etc. I think the award does a good job of celebrating achievements t…
Sport/Media are ripe with awards and top personalities are paid a salary directly proportional to their recognition. Science powers the whole world, yet scientist receives a very minimal recognition for it, either in salary or prizes. Nobel Prizes are basically the only way that scientists achieve a bit of that.
It does give visibility to science, which hopefully, motivates a few more people to grow up to want that achievement.
Personally, I think we need more prizes and “sports” for these endeavors:
I was a collaborator on the SNO project. I worked with Art McDonald, who co-won the 2015 Nobel prize in physics for the project. There were hundreds of people involved. We couldn't have done it without the hundreds of people. While Art was a fantastic guy and a tireless worker, a good chunk of his contribution was management. i.e. A competent manager. He not only understood all of the physics involved, but a good chu…
It doesn't matter who gets a shiny medal, the only thing that matters is that we push science to next level. To help our understanding of the world and to help the people.