13 posts
The Nobel Prizes are a deeply flawed institution both out of touch with science as it is done today and with an outsized influence on scientific practice at the most demanding levels. Yet these relati…
For all their flaws, the science Nobel Prizes – at the time they’re announced, in the first week of October every year – provide a good opportunity to learn about some obscure part of the scientific e…
Say Someone has won the Nobel Prize for physics, perhaps the most prestigious honour (as awards go) for a physicist. What would it mean for all the future awards given to this Someone? One thing that…
This article on Founding Fuel has some great suggestions I thought, but it merits sharing with a couple caveats. First, in narratives about making science "easier to do", commentators give…
What is the collective noun for a group of Nobel laureates? I'm considering ballast. A ballast of Nobel laureates is appealing because these people, especially if they are all white and male, ofte…
The physicist, thinker and writer Freeman Dyson passed away on February 28, 2020, at the age of 96. I wrote his obituary for The Wire Science; excerpt: The 1965 Nobel Prize for the development of [qu…
Note: A condensed version of this post has been published in The Wire. Around this time last week, the world had nine new Nobel Prize winners in the sciences (physics, chemistry and medicine), all bu…
Note: One of my editors thought this post would work for The Wire as well, so it's been republished there. "… for the greatest benefit of mankind" – these words are scrawled across a ba…
Note: One of my editors thought this post would work for The Wire as well, so it's been republished there. "… for the greatest benefit of mankind" – these words are scrawled across a ba…
An award of the Indian Science Congress has become subverted into becoming an instrument of negotiation for political agents: "You let me interfere in your duties, I will give you a fancy-sounding award".…
I went into this year's Nobel Prize Announcements Week a little confused about why I was excited. For me the prizes have always highlighted the recipients' work, and that's likelier than n…
About three weeks from now, the Nobel Foundation will announce the winners of the 2015 Nobel Prizes. Every year, commentators, opinionators and enthusiasts try to guess who will win the awards – some…