I love the time sink of a day that follows the announcing of Nobel Laureates. I spend most of a Saturday diving down rabbit holes to try and understand even a modicum of the award winners’ work.
This year was no disappointment.
The Nobel in Physics was awarded for “for groundbreaking inventions in the field of laser physics”, with one half to Arthur Ashkin “for the optical tweezers and their application to biological systems” and the other half jointly to Gérard Mourou and Donna Strickland “for their method of generating high-intensity, ultra-short optical pulses”. The second is still more theoretical, the first imagines applications including the removal of small tissue areas (e.g., cancer) with no damage to surrounding tissue. A lot of the breakthrough came from figuring out how to create shorter-and-shorter bursts without sacrificing the energy of the light.
The Chemistry Nobel feels more like a “mid-point” activity — with Frances H. Arnold, George P. Smith and Sir Gregory P. Winter better describing how enzymes evolve to the “phage display” of peptides and antibodies. I think this is in the same category as Crick showing us the first DNA double-helix — breakthrough and interesting, but really just a gateway to the magnificence of potential impact.
The Nobel in Medicine also seems mid-point with a discovery of new inhibitors to cancer cells (cancer “wins” a lot of Nobel recognition).
And finally, moving on to the category I have even the slightest hope of understanding…the Nobel Laureates in Economics.
The first goes to Willam D. Nordhaus of MIT/Yale around his research on the economic impact of Global Warming. It’s easy to stop at “Global Warming” is bad, and barely understand that the ‘warming’ part of the name should really be something more like ‘fluctuation’ since it’s both hotter and colder…and it’s easy to think about ice caps melting or floods or one the plus-side newly arable land…but this speech brings home why it is a crisis. A warning about the the video — this dude is no Malcolm Gladwell, bringing charisma and anecdote to complex ideas…the work is data and algorithm filled and dull to the casually interested. But it is also wildly compelling.
The second Econ Prize went to Paul Romer of NYU (who I’ve seen a few times, and makes for a much more enjoyable evening than Bill Nordhaus). He has contributed to what feels like mostly academic understanding of the measurement/impact of innovation on long-term macroeconomic trends. This is good for encouraging a government to create tax incentives to support innovation, or even supporting decisions like Buffalo, NY which lets startups who move to town go tax-free for 10 years. I find macro-economics more interesting to sit and read with a beer and think about the impact to society, and microeconomics to be read with a piece of paper to take notes to figure out how to incorporate the ideas into how I do business. Paul delivers some straightforward math and some pretty common sense “innovation is good”, and the value is some rigor around “how good” to support investment choices. Thanks Paul!
No Literature Laureate this year.
I always hope Nobel Laureates are more like Neil deGrasse Tyson and make their complex ideas accessible. They almost never are.