Each year the Nobel committee recognizes excellence and achievement in major cultural/scientific fields. Each year I discover how little I know about what is important in major cultural/scientific fields. Let’s see about 2017…
The Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine: Jeffrey Hall, Michael Rosbash, and Michael Young for their discovery of “molecular mechanisms controlling the circadian rhythm.” I like it — our sleep patterns and their underlying “management layer”, the circadian rhythms, are a legacy of early man’s need to conserve energy. On the one hand, think of the life transformation of requiring only 3 hours of sleep (assuming we could squeeze the mental restoration in there) — could we move to a 3/4 day work week? Could we all feed our souls with the excess time? Alternatively, idle hands are the Devil’s Playground and enough people are “bored” as it is for a big chunk of the day. I’d love it, not sure if it is a boon to society.
The Nobel Prize in physics: Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish, and Kip Thorne “for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves.” Don’t have the slightest idea what that means. Let’s start with LIGO – Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory. As best I understand: big gravity objects bend light and create ripples in space-time, the fabric of our universe (thank you Mr. Einstein). These ripples are called gravitational waves and these fellas built two super cool observatories (required) to detect and measure them). This falls into that giant category of “hard to make the link to value but could be immeasurable”. This is the kind of stuff that delivers nothing for 200 years and then we invent an FTL (faster than light) drive. Keep going fellas, I want to live on Mars!
The Nobel Prize in chemistry: Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank, and Richard Henderson “for developing cryo-electron microscopy for the high-resolution structure determination of biomolecules in solution.” At first glance this looks like a super-microscope for looking at liquids. <time passes/> We explore the nature of molecules and their microscopic biologic structures to better understand how proteins do their magic. Among other things, it leads to research to cure diseases. One roadblock to this work has been that to observe these structures you need to get the target very cold, and ice crystals mess up the observance. These fellas fixed the ice problem. I find it fascinating that these super-smarts have been working for so long on this incredibly specialized and specific goal. Thanks for your focus and determination.
Lest we conceive a too stereotypical image of these researchers, Professor Dubochet’s academic CV lists important accomplishments including:
- October 1941
Conceived by optimistic parents. - 1946
No longer scared of the dark, because the sun comes back; it was Copernicus who explained this.
My guess is that he’s the Louis CK Jerry Seinfeld of molecular biology.
The Nobel Prize in literature: Kazuo Ishiguro “who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.” Characterized as “Jane Austen mixed with Kafka” which is what, a cockroach in period garb? People are still half-bent that Bob Dylan won last year.
And the biggety big one, that I think is better characterized as “thanks for the effort” because I think of all the categories it regularly has the least long term impact…The Nobel Peace Prize: International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) “for its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons.” I’m sure they’re doing good work, but I can also imagine Kim Jong Un saying “그들에 대해 들어 본 적이 없다” (never heard of them). Okay, I can’t really imagine it because it would sound something like “geudeul-e daehae deul-eo bon jeog-i eobsda”, but there’s only a handful of folks on earth with nuclear sway, and I’m not sure what the impact of this type of group is.
Lastly, the step child Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel: Richard Thaler “for his contributions to behavioral economics.” Hey, I know this one! This dude came and spoke to our senior econ class back in the late 1800s. I think he was at Cornell then (now at U of C, NUs bitter local econ rival…stupid Keynesians!). A tonnnnn of economic theory sits on the premise of rational decision making combined with ceteris paribus (all things being equal). Doc Thaler pushes hard on “people rarely make purely rational choices” but he had a couple of great frameworks for describing many people’s rules of thumb for making most of their decisions. He’s the dude to call to understand if pricing something at “$x.99” still makes sense or the roots in the use of phrases like “expensive” instead of “costs a lot” (e.g., $1,500 a year for your cell phone contract is more often characterized as ‘costs a lot’ while a $50 health copay is ‘expensive’).
Thank you Alfred, I think I did better this year than usual (the behavioral economics thing put me over the top) and I once again will avoid making any kind of explosive pun to wrap up the coverage.