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Tag Archives: Nobel prize
Happy new year, from Arthur Compton in 1931
It’s the year 2011. (By the way, can we please agree to say “twenty eleven”? “Two thousand and ten” was tiresome enough, I don’t think I can handle two extra syllables). Instead of making my own new year predictions, I’d like to share those of Nobel Prize winner Arthur Compton.
In 1931, the New York Times collected opinions from leading thinkers on what the world would be like 80 years hence. Compton and others made some surprisingly insightful guesses. I encourage you to read the original article yourself, if only to appreciate the language nuances (apparently, no one blinked an eye at the word “corpuscles”).
Compton, who was professor-at-large at UC Berkeley when he died in 1962, had this to say on the fate of science:
“China, with its virile manhood and great natural resources, will be taking a more prominent part in world affairs, and science will no longer be a monopoly of the West.”
Nobel update: Was Cal short-changed?
As I pointed out a few weeks ago, neither of this year’s winners of the Nobel Prize in physics has a significant connection to UC Berkeley, but it turns out that may only be because the Nobel committee gave the prize to the wrong graphene researchers. At least one prominent physicist believes the Nobel committee took some serious shortcuts in their selection process that caused them to overlook the contributions of two former Cal scientists, Walter De Heer and Philip Kim. Do I smell a recount?
A showdown in Nature between Chu and Cohen-Tannoudji
The argument stems from the interferometry work published in Nature earlier this year:
Müller H, Peters A, & Chu S (2010). A precision measurement of the gravitational redshift by the interference of matter waves. Nature, 463 (7283), 926-9 PMID: 20164925
Cohen-Tannoudji says, “Wrong.”