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Maybe that shows how scientific discoveries come to be. It's not a genius sitting alone in their chamber for a decade and then suddenly they emerge with this hu

Maybe that shows how scientific discoveries come to be. It's not a genius sitting alone in their chamber for a decade and then suddenly they emerge with this huge thing. That's Hollywood fiction. Scientific progress is the colaborative effort of countless researchers over long periods of time, communicating, exchanging ideas, many of them wrong, tweaking, trying, thinking, arguing. When a breakthrough happens then it's the tip of a mountain of work that came before it. If two individuals stand on that mountain and feel there is something somewhere then it's not too strange that they take the last step at roughly the same time because conditions were right. The preconditions were in place at that time, the results required for this were available and the focus was on this specific thing. I'd say it illustrates well that this last piece, the person celebrated for the achievement, is disproportionally overvalued and the rest of the work they are standing on is disproportionally ignored.

a_bonobo 28d ago
This ties back into AI, too, right? I always like to bring up how many decades of research, how many hundreds of years of entire PhD-theses, how many sleepless nights were used up to generate all the protein structure data that made up the corpus of Protein Data Bank - that was then hovered up by the AlphaFold team, and guess who got the Nobel Prize...
- teiferer 28d ago
  Just like all non-AI related nobel prizes before them. Every laureate stands on the shoulder of giants which is their field as a generations-spanning body of researchers. They did the last step and get recognized. The good ones acknowledge that in their acceptance speeches.
- dekhn 27d ago
  Individual crystal structures, while heroic, probably don't qualify for the Nobel Prize (the only counterexample that I can think of is the crystal structure of the ribosome, which finally demonstrated that the active site was RNA, not protein). And don't forget that AlphaFold worked because of sequence data (similarly laboriously collected by a large number of people). A big part of the problem is that we award prizes to the small number of people who do something first, or who were in charge- the LIGO NP should have been awarded to the entire consortium, not Kip Thorne and a couple other people under this logic.

a_bonobo 28d ago

This ties back into AI, too, right? I always like to bring up how many decades of research, how many hundreds of years of entire PhD-theses, how many sleepless nights were used up to generate all the protein structure data that made up the corpus of Protein Data Bank - that was then hovered up by the AlphaFold team, and guess who got the Nobel Prize...

teiferer 28d ago
Just like all non-AI related nobel prizes before them. Every laureate stands on the shoulder of giants which is their field as a generations-spanning body of researchers. They did the last step and get recognized. The good ones acknowledge that in their acceptance speeches.
dekhn 27d ago
Individual crystal structures, while heroic, probably don't qualify for the Nobel Prize (the only counterexample that I can think of is the crystal structure of the ribosome, which finally demonstrated that the active site was RNA, not protein). And don't forget that AlphaFold worked because of sequence data (similarly laboriously collected by a large number of people). A big part of the problem is that we award prizes to the small number of people who do something first, or who were in charge- the LIGO NP should have been awarded to the entire consortium, not Kip Thorne and a couple other people under this logic.