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The Nobel Prize in Physics often goes to "tooling" experimental work. Think: blue LEDs, CCDs, fiber optics, optical tweezers, things like that. Not that anybo
by evanb 5y ago
The Nobel Prize in Physics often goes to "tooling" experimental work. Think: blue LEDs, CCDs, fiber optics, optical tweezers, things like that. Not that anybody asks me, but I would advocate a similar tooling award split between Berners-Lee (www), Knuth (TeX), and Ginsparg (arXiv). I can think of no people who had a more profound change in how physics is actually practiced.
- prionassembly 5y agoMaybe that's a sign that theory research in physics has become iredeemably suspect? The Swedish bank (not an OG Nobel prize, but effectively one of them) prize for economics pretty much alternates (A) sharing the prize between econometrics (ie. tooling) and empirical research and (B) awarding deep theory.
- evanb 5y agoI would push back on this. Irredeemably suspect? The Nobel committee doesn't make theory awards until they are supported by experiment. There was basically no new particle physics data for 30 years. Then they found the Higgs and that's nothing else. Theory beyond this is speculative, nobody knows if it's important or not.
- bborud 5y agoThat's a very good point. Surely people on Hacker News collectively know enough people to get a nomination done? :-) PS: the above list good, are we missing anyone important who ought to be on that list?
- speedcoder 5y agoMaybe the HN community could set up an award?
- ngc248 5y agoI second this. lets do one.
- speedcoder 5y agoHow would we go about doing so?
- dekhn 5y agoI would love if there was a "Nobel Prize in Math, Computer Science, and Information Processing".
- vecter 5y agoThere’s the Godel Prize for theoretical computer science, the ACM Turing Award for more general contributions to computing, and of course the Fields Medal (and nowadays the Abel Prize) for math.
- drdeca 5y agoIirc, Nobel specifically didn’t want there to be a category for math itself? But I could be misremembering or have misinterpreted what I saw, which was in a non-authoritative source.