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Physics Nobel won by laser wizardry – laureates include first woman in 55 years
- Create 8y ago"Really? Is that all? I thought there might have been more," Strickland responded, sounding surprised. It has now been a while, that achievements are rarely done in trios, duos or in solitude. It is a farce to all other hard working scientists. This recognition is for those, who successfully appropriate the spirit of a given time. Aside from the propaganda/marketing stunt.
- shrewduser 8y agoTry as I might I can't make heads not tails of your comment.
- dx87 8y agoI think what they're saying is that current scientific achievements are usually the result of huge swaths of scientists from all manner of disciplines working together, and giving an award to a single researcher is usually just a popularity contest or publicity stunt that ignores the work of everyone else.
- dpwm 8y ago> It has now been a while, that achievements are rarely done in trios, duos or in solitude. It is a farce to all other hard working scientists. Achievements in modern science are usually seen as incremental, done as part of a larger team and based on a substantial body of prior work. I think the author is trying to say that behind these successes, there are people who may have committed as much to the field but achieved no recognition. In my experience the larger teams / collaborations thing seems to be more of a Particle Physics thing. > This recognition is for those, who successfully appropriate the spirit of a given time. Aside from the propaganda/marketing stunt. The author, I believe, is saying that success is more to do with luck. I'm not sure I agree -- there tends to be a network effect with science that people who have proven themselves get offered better opportunities and so can in some cases have a cluster of successes, but I have heard similar sentiments and they're not so easily dismissed.
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- philipwhiuk 8y agoWhat's the relevance of the quote?
- semi-extrinsic 8y agoFrom how I read it, it's her reaction when being told there have only been a few other women receiving the Physics Nobel.
- alayne 8y agoThat comment was about the number of women who had won. Strickland is the third woman to win.
- m0ck 8y ago>laureates include first woman in 55 years Completely irrelevant information, yet it has to be in the title. Are there any statistics on how many left-handed people, or vegans are laureates?
- simias 8y agoI'm not a fan of pointing these things out so heavy-handedly either but I don't think it's productive to go out of my way to point them out, if you think it's irrelevant then ignore it and focus on what you do find interesting in this news. I mean, think about it, what kind of constructive discussion could possibly come out of your comment?
- m0ck 8y agoI'm willing to sacifrice some of my karma, if it helps people to start considering others achievements equally awesome regardless of what's between their legs or what is their skin tone.
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- emsy 8y agoI agree with the parent. It's important to stop the soft bigotry of low expectations.
- lisper 8y agoLeft handed people and vegans have not historically been the victims of institutionalized societal discrimination. Women have been (indeed still are).
- m0ck 8y agoI don't deny that, but I believe the best way to stop it, is to stop giving so much attention to gender/race of people. That's why so-called "diversity" reports of companies make me sick. If you believe that all races/genders are equally capable to achieve greatness (as I do), then you should hire the best, give awards to the best and never spend a second thinking about their biological background. If we stop making big deal of these things, it won't matter anymore.
- j7ake 8y agoI am surprised that one of them got a nobel prize for work that was done during PhD. Often times the boss would take all the credit, including the prizes. For example, Jules Hoffmann in 2011 won the prize but not Lemaitre, the postdoc in the lab who did the work.
- sleavey 8y agoI guess the Nobel committee are acutely aware of the injustice they served to Jocelyn Bell Burnell in the prize awarded for the discovery of pulsars. She did most of the work and analysis as the student, and her supervisors got the credit.
- cmplxconjugate 8y agoHe supervisor said something that sticks with me: “The person in the crows nest shouting “land ho!” Doesn’t get the credit, it’s the captain of the ship”. While there’s some truth to that, it’s certainly the case that many people who work hard do not get their deserved recognition.
- DanielleMolloy 8y agoThanks for the pointer, the Lemaitre case looks pretty bad. There seem to be several similar cases that were brought to light in recent years, maybe the committee has learned from such mistakes. Especially for PhD scientists it is inspiring and motivating that you can make nobel prize-worthy discoveries at this level. This should not be hidden for keeping up power hierarchies.
- evanb 8y agoPhysics has some history of PhD work being recognized. Abrikosov won for his very first paper, if I recall correctly. Wilczek also won for a paper he published as a grad student (albeit with his advisor). And de Broglie essentially won for his thesis, which was only a few pages long. On the other hand, one need only think of Jocelyn Bell-Burnell to find an instance where a grad student got totally screwed.
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- Upvoter33 8y agoNot pointed out in the article is the fact that Strickland is still an "associate" professor at Waterloo -- something sure to be rectified asap -- indicating that the department there wasn't super keen on promoting her to full professor, for some reason. Oops!
- kgwgk 8y agoDo you know whether she was super keen on being promoted or are you just assuming she was being pushed down “for some reason”? (I have no idea, myself.)
- anon946 8y agoI have no idea either, but it's probably worth pointing out that, for better or worse, promotion to full will entail a certain degree of bean counting. Thus, there are a number of perfectly respectable ways to not meet those metrics. For example, someone who decides to tackle a very hard problem with very high risk of failure is likely to look less productive on paper.
- nopinsight 8y agoIs the admin work for full professors that much more involved than for associate professors?
- api 8y ago> someone who decides to tackle a very hard problem with very high risk of failure is likely to look less productive on paper. This is the central problem with today's academic research environment.
- DanielleMolloy 8y ago+ Arthur Ashkin, at 96, is the oldest nobel prize laureate ever ( https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/lists/nobel-laureates-by-age/ https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/lists/nobel-laureates-by-a... ), and declined an interview this morning because he is "busy doing research". He did much of is research at Bell Labs and has his own lab at home now. + The most cited Strickland / Mourou paper is this one: Compression of amplified chirped optical pulses. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.673.148&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.673... It has a humble length of 3 pages and has collected 4600 citations in 23 years. + This is a good time to remember Lise Meitner: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lise_Meitner#Nobel_Prize_for_nuclear_fission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lise_Meitner#Nobel_Prize_for_n... and check out James Watson's 'opinion' of Rosalind Franklin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBWPzdyyPic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBWPzdyyPic But also note that Marie Curie was one of very few nobel laureates who got awarded twice, and she got her awards very early on in the history of the nobel prize ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Nobel_laureates_with_multiple_Nobel_awards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Nobel_laureates_with_... ).
- bzbarsky 8y agoThough note that at least according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Curie#Nobel_Prizes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Curie#Nobel_Prizes it took Pierre Curie objecting Marie being excluded from the nomination to get the Nobel committee of the time to acknowledge Marie Curie's work...
- DanielleMolloy 8y ago+ This nobel prize is basically about a real life microscopic tractor beam, which already appeared in the original Star Trek in the 60s. Could be another invention inspired by science fiction.
- randlet 8y agoCool! She taught me 2nd year E&M in 2000 or 2001, although truth be told I remember it being one of my least favourite classes during my physics degree. I had no idea at the time the calibre of physicist she was.
- relyio 8y agoNow I feel silly dropping her course during my second year at Waterloo. Well, to be fair I had a packed schedule that semester...
- BeetleB 8y agoI'm glad Ashkin won. Many felt he had been deprived a Nobel in 1997, when his former colleague Steven Chu won it (the cooling and trapping of atoms with laser light). I believe Chu worked with Ashkin, or Ashkin was his mentor, or something like that. Incidentally, Arthur's paper is very readable. https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.24.156 https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.24...
- hsnewman 8y agoWouldn't it be nice to take gender out of the discussion?
- vixen99 8y agoAbsolutely. There are attempts in other fields. For instance it's encouraging to find that no one (I believe and hope) has complained that 82 per cent of obstetrics and gynaecology medical residents in the US in 2016 were female.
- Gauc2 8y agoRelevant creepy music video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6i7A8Plqb8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6i7A8Plqb8
- w0mbat 8y agoThe slightly ambiguous headline might make some think that no woman has won ANY Nobel prize in the last 55 years. That only applies to the Physics prize, many women have won Nobels in other categories.
- woodandsteel 8y agoIt's such a crime that Emmy Noether never got the Nobel Prize in physics. I wonder how many of the physics prizes were for discoveries that would never have happened if not for Noether's theorem.
- ASipos 8y agoProblem is, the prize is usually awarded for experimental work, or for theoretical work whose predictions are validated by experiment. Noether's theorem is a purely mathematical result.
- andrewflnr 8y agoHer first ever scientific paper. All politics aside, let me just say: holy crap, that's awesome.