Actually, Phil Anderson (also a physics Nobelist) thinks that Einstein's photoelectric effect WAS more important than his discovery of relativity, i.e. the Nobel Prize guys got that one right!! Anyhow, my feeling is, in chemistry & physics the Nobel prize did have some screw ups, but they weren't nearly as embarrassing as the Medicine, Peace & Economics prize screwups. I mean, sure, maybe the guy who won it for inventing a gas regulator was not so important, and relativity was omitted, but at least that gas regulator really did work and was of technical importance! (And Raman's student K.S.Krishnan was credited by Raman in his Nobel lecture; even if the prize went only to Raman, Krishnan claimed Raman's description in his Nobel lecture of what happened, was correct & Raman was not trying to steal the credit.) But in the case of medicine, Economics, and arguably peace, the Nobel prize mistakes have in some cases enshrined complete con-men and frauds, and other times totally false "discoveries", and in some cases have caused a great deal of harm. And indeed I think having an Economics Nobel at all is a bad joke, economics is no science, is a highly corrupt and inbred largely-pseudo science. You pretty much cannot get an economics Nobel unless you come from a handful of schools. (Apparently Murray Gell-mann was outraged hearing some physicist describe his experience getting a Nobel and yelled "WHAT! You mean they let the economists onto the SAME PODIUM with you!?!" Wonder whether that story true :) Milton Wainwright is a British scientist/historian who investigated the Waksman-Schatz affair and publicized, long after, the true story. Waksman systematically tried to deny Schatz credit, including telling numerous lies (which Wainwright documented, e.g. telling the thrilling story of how he'd discovered this and that, getting the sample thusly, etc etc while in fact he was not even at Rutgers at the time, the sample was given to Schatz not Waksman, etc etc) and blackballed him resulting in a pretty ruined career for Schatz compared to what probably should have happened. Schatz then spent a large part of his life complaining and suing, which just made him unpopular, plus it pretty much did not succeed at all. Waksman then indeed got the Nobel, and had conned Schatz into signing over his royalties to a charity, the Rutgers Foundation, with Waksman doing the same -- but unbeknownst to Schatz, Waksman had a secret deal with the Foundation that 20% of the royalties would be returned to him, while Schatz got zero! So then Waksman got rich and powerful, while Schatz got various shitty jobs for the rest of his professional life and mostly was unable to do further research in those jobs. All this would have stayed that way, except for the intercession of Wainwright who went back & read the original documents such as lab notebooks and Schatz's thesis, then documented lie after lie told by Waksman in a book and various articles he wrote. Waksman's scientific productivity seems to have been in large part due to him stealing credit from lots of other people, actually; it was not just from Schatz.
On 8/27/2014 2:05 PM, Warren D Smith wrote:
Actually, Phil Anderson (also a physics Nobelist) thinks that Einstein's photoelectric effect WAS more important than his discovery of relativity, i.e. the Nobel Prize guys got that one right!!
It really unified the particle/wave nature of matter, but I don't see it as being as important as relativity. Relativity has also played big role in developing the Standard Model of matter. Another interesting Nobel selection was for Heisenberg, excluding Born and Jordan; even though the latter two had really worked out Heisenberg's idea and published the first coherent formulation of matrix-mechanics. It's thought that the committee didn't want to include Jordan because he had been an enthusiastic Nazi and even joined the SS. And they didn't see how to include Born without Jordan since they were joint authors. So they just left them both off. Born received the prize years later for his work on quantum field theory. Brent Meeker
Anyhow, my feeling is, in chemistry & physics the Nobel prize did have some screw ups, but they weren't nearly as embarrassing as the Medicine, Peace & Economics prize screwups. I mean, sure, maybe the guy who won it for inventing a gas regulator was not so important, and relativity was omitted, but at least that gas regulator really did work and was of technical importance! (And Raman's student K.S.Krishnan was credited by Raman in his Nobel lecture; even if the prize went only to Raman, Krishnan claimed Raman's description in his Nobel lecture of what happened, was correct & Raman was not trying to steal the credit.)
But in the case of medicine, Economics, and arguably peace, the Nobel prize mistakes have in some cases enshrined complete con-men and frauds, and other times totally false "discoveries", and in some cases have caused a great deal of harm.
And indeed I think having an Economics Nobel at all is a bad joke, economics is no science, is a highly corrupt and inbred largely-pseudo science. You pretty much cannot get an economics Nobel unless you come from a handful of schools. (Apparently Murray Gell-mann was outraged hearing some physicist describe his experience getting a Nobel and yelled "WHAT! You mean they let the economists onto the SAME PODIUM with you!?!" Wonder whether that story true :)
Milton Wainwright is a British scientist/historian who investigated the Waksman-Schatz affair and publicized, long after, the true story. Waksman systematically tried to deny Schatz credit, including telling numerous lies (which Wainwright documented, e.g. telling the thrilling story of how he'd discovered this and that, getting the sample thusly, etc etc while in fact he was not even at Rutgers at the time, the sample was given to Schatz not Waksman, etc etc) and blackballed him resulting in a pretty ruined career for Schatz compared to what probably should have happened. Schatz then spent a large part of his life complaining and suing, which just made him unpopular, plus it pretty much did not succeed at all. Waksman then indeed got the Nobel, and had conned Schatz into signing over his royalties to a charity, the Rutgers Foundation, with Waksman doing the same -- but unbeknownst to Schatz, Waksman had a secret deal with the Foundation that 20% of the royalties would be returned to him, while Schatz got zero! So then Waksman got rich and powerful, while Schatz got various shitty jobs for the rest of his professional life and mostly was unable to do further research in those jobs. All this would have stayed that way, except for the intercession of Wainwright who went back & read the original documents such as lab notebooks and Schatz's thesis, then documented lie after lie told by Waksman in a book and various articles he wrote. Waksman's scientific productivity seems to have been in large part due to him stealing credit from lots of other people, actually; it was not just from Schatz.
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This sheds some light on why Einstein didn't get a Nobel for relativity, at least during the 1920's. Not sure why he never got it after emigrating to the U.S. --Dan On Aug 27, 2014, at 2:28 PM, meekerdb <meekerdb@verizon.net> wrote [re Einstein's work on the photoelectric effect]:
It really unified the particle/wave nature of matter, but I don't see it as being as important as relativity. Relativity has also played big role in developing the Standard Model of matter.
Another interesting Nobel selection was for Heisenberg, excluding Born and Jordan; even though the latter two had really worked out Heisenberg's idea and published the first coherent formulation of matrix-mechanics. It's thought that the committee didn't want to include Jordan because he had been an enthusiastic Nazi and even joined the SS. And they didn't see how to include Born without Jordan since they were joint authors. So they just left them both off. Born received the prize years later for his work on quantum field theory.
Discussing what's considered prizeworthy, the politics, the dramas just distracts from the truth that the whole concept of such prizes is bogus. Pray tell, what problem does awarding them solve?
George Bernard Shaw is supposed to have said "Nobel prize money is a life-belt thrown to a swimmer who has already reached the shore in safety." (Though one should be suspicious of such attributions: it's a relIable principle that if an adage sounds remotely Shavian, then regardless of who actually came up with it, sooner or later somebody will attribute it to Shaw.) Jim Propp On Thursday, August 28, 2014, Marc LeBrun <mlb@well.com> wrote:
Discussing what's considered prizeworthy, the politics, the dramas just distracts from the truth that the whole concept of such prizes is bogus.
Pray tell, what problem does awarding them solve?
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An aphorist is a person saddled with a curse: one doomed to have his greatest, best-phrased insights attributed to Mark Twain, Will Rogers, or George Bernard Shaw. On Thu, Aug 28, 2014 at 9:29 AM, James Propp <jamespropp@gmail.com> wrote:
George Bernard Shaw is supposed to have said "Nobel prize money is a life-belt thrown to a swimmer who has already reached the shore in safety."
(Though one should be suspicious of such attributions: it's a relIable principle that if an adage sounds remotely Shavian, then regardless of who actually came up with it, sooner or later somebody will attribute it to Shaw.)
Jim Propp
On Thursday, August 28, 2014, Marc LeBrun <mlb@well.com> wrote:
Discussing what's considered prizeworthy, the politics, the dramas just distracts from the truth that the whole concept of such prizes is bogus.
Pray tell, what problem does awarding them solve?
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On Thursday, August 28, 2014, Marc LeBrun <mlb@well.com> wrote:
Discussing what's considered prizeworthy, the politics, the dramas just distracts from the truth that the whole concept of such prizes is bogus.
Pray tell, what problem does awarding them solve?
How else are respected scientists supposed to obtain reserved parking spaces on campus?
Allan Wechsler: "An aphorist is a person saddled with a curse: one doomed to have his greatest, best-phrased insights attributed to Mark Twain, Will Rogers, or George Bernard Shaw." Another era. Our age is showing. Kids today only know Albert Einstein.
On Thursday, August 28, 2014, Hans Havermann <gladhobo@teksavvy.com> wrote: Allan Wechsler: "An aphorist is a person saddled with a curse: one doomed
to have his greatest, best-phrased insights attributed to Mark Twain, Will Rogers, or George Bernard Shaw."
I think it was actually Shaw who said that. Who's Allan Wechsler? Jim Propp
I think it was actually Shaw who said that. Who's Allan Wechsler?
Someone who invented a brilliant notation (I use Extended Weschler Notation as a standard for canonising small GoL patterns): From: Allan Wechsler Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1992 12:10-0400 Subject: Who called that HWSS a [27deee6]? Date: Tue, 29 Sep 1992 17:17 EDT From: John Conway Mainly to ACW - I loved your observation about the + and o phases of traffic lights in the early universe! By the way, I notice that nobody is taking up this term, so let me add some words about it: i) I've been using it for some time ii) It really feels psychologically "right" - one finds oneself thinking of this as happening a long time ago. iii) The "middle universe" is quite a nice term for the middle density case - it need not carry any temporal suggestions - though it can. iv) it doesn't, I grant, contain its own definition. Here iv) is negative, but not too much so. But the alternatives, such as "sparse universe", "thin universe", sound very colorless. I have been noting down life configurations in octal for quite a long time. So the trouble is that the speakers of this language have hitherto been solipsistic! Let's get everyone talking it. JHC Well then, let's get a formal description down in the archives: Life patterns that fit in fairly small rectangles can be described by short character strings as follows. Each column is represented by one character. Each row is assigned a "weight"; the bottom row has weight 1, the next weight 2, the next 4, the next 8, and so on. A column is assigned a score by adding the weights of the live cells in that column. The character that represents the column is then the nth character in the following (0-origin) string: "0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz", although encoding columns more than 4 rows tall is deprecated. (In other words, we deprecate the use of characters to the right of "f".) To mark representations of this sort, we recommend enclosure in square brackets. For example, [153] is a male glider and [532] a female one. We usually prefer the bounding rectangle of the pattern be chosen, although there are times when this is unwieldy; for example, "A blinker has two phases, [070] and [222].". Here the bounding rectangle has been chosen to retain a coordinate frame between phases. This issue should seldom arise; the recommended use of this notation is to describe single patterns, usually for purposes of naming: "We call the p2 oscillator [318c] a `beacon'.". Some notes on canonicalization. Even assuming that the bounding rectangle is chosen, there are still, in general, 8 orientations to choose from. We recommend putting the rectangle in "landscape" rather than "portrait" orientation, so that it has no fewer rows than columns. Then choose the orientation with the numerically smallest representation. When describing an oscillator, pick the phase with the smallest number of rows, breaking ties by choosing the numerically smallest representation. Thus, the blinker is [111] rather than [7]; the glider is shown in male phase [153] rather than in female [163]; the eater is [178c]; and the toad is always shown resting [1332] rather than panting [2994]. And, oddly enough, we prefer the more populous but squatter phase of the HWSS, [27deee6], to having to use big digits in [21hh197].
Yeah. I've seen "There's lies, damn lies, and statistics" attributed to Disraeli, but some think it's Tvainian. --Dan On Aug 28, 2014, at 6:34 AM, Allan Wechsler <acwacw@gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Aug 28, 2014 at 9:29 AM, James Propp <jamespropp@gmail.com> wrote:
George Bernard Shaw is supposed to have said "Nobel prize money is a life-belt thrown to a swimmer who has already reached the shore in safety."
(Though one should be suspicious of such attributions: it's a relIable principle that if an adage sounds remotely Shavian, then regardless of who actually came up with it, sooner or later somebody will attribute it to Shaw.)
And a propos of originality (if someone actually said that of the Nobel prize), note that Samuel Johnson wrote to Lord Chesterfield, in 1755: .... Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help? .... in response to Chesterfield's belated support for the Dictionary. Fred Kochman On 08/28/2014 09:29 AM, James Propp wrote:
George Bernard Shaw is supposed to have said "Nobel prize money is a life-belt thrown to a swimmer who has already reached the shore in safety."
(Though one should be suspicious of such attributions: it's a relIable principle that if an adage sounds remotely Shavian, then regardless of who actually came up with it, sooner or later somebody will attribute it to Shaw.)
Jim Propp
On Thursday, August 28, 2014, Marc LeBrun <mlb@well.com> wrote:
Discussing what's considered prizeworthy, the politics, the dramas just distracts from the truth that the whole concept of such prizes is bogus.
Pray tell, what problem does awarding them solve?
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* Marc LeBrun <mlb@well.com> [Aug 28. 2014 17:39]:
Discussing what's considered prizeworthy, the politics, the dramas just distracts from the truth that the whole concept of such prizes is bogus.
Pray tell, what problem does awarding them solve?
None? It reflects the fact that humans tend to do things for recognition by peers. As an incentive to work hard these "medals" may be quite effective. Also, the general population occasionally hears about certain things when these are awarded.
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participants (11)
-
Adam P. Goucher -
Allan Wechsler -
Dan Asimov -
Fred Kochman -
Hans Havermann -
James Propp -
Joerg Arndt -
Marc LeBrun -
meekerdb -
Tom Knight -
Warren D Smith