
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2019 - _of
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2019/summary/
======
scotty79
> "for the discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star."

"Solar-type star" is meaningful here because first extrasolar planets we
discovered orbit the pulsar.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSR_B1257%2B12](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSR_B1257%2B12)

~~~
willyg123
This is why I love astrophysics. I assumed the supernova would obliterate any
planet in the star's orbit.

~~~
duxup
It seems like rather than these sort of well defined periods of life and death
... solar systems go through a whole slew of possible life cycles where who
knows what happens.

I remember learning about our own solar system and it was largely "here is how
we got to here" but now it's more about these phases each planet experienced
and maybe will experience. Saturn's rings being a sort of "recent" phenomenon
and such. Geological activity being a sort of on and off thing depending on
various events, even orotundities for life cycling on and off.

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shafyy
Two of the laureates are Swiss. This brings the total number of Swiss
laureates to 28, making it the third country with most Nobel prizes per
capita.

The first two are Saint Lucia and Luxemburg, which have 180k and 600k
inhabitants respectively.

Among the bigger countries, Switzerland has the most per capita Nobel prizes.

Interestingly, UK is on number 9 on that list and has a significantly bigger
population than the top 8 (I'd say 10x more people than the average top 8
country). Super impressive. Of course, Germany (14) and the US (16) are also
not half bad, especially since the US has 5x the population of UK.

Source:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Nobel_lau...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Nobel_laureates_per_capita)

~~~
hobofan
I'd be wary of any such statistics, and trying to draw any conclusion about
the current status of a country from that.

For one, the total timeframe of the Nobel Prize is more than a hundred years,
and even for individual prizes the time between contribution and award is
usually decades. That's a lot of time for possible change in a country.

On top of that, there had been repeated criticism (that has been in part
acknowledged by the Swedish Academy) that the Nobel Prize is too eurocentric,
so the statistics will obviously be skewed.

~~~
shafyy
I don't have deep knowledge about the Nobel Prize selection procedure, so I'm
not going to go into that. But, obviously, all awards will have some kind of
bias because a small group of humans make that decision.

However, the US has more per capita prizes than the EU, so not sure that that
critisicm is warranted.

Anyways, I also wouldn't draw any conclusions about "the current status of a
country" based on number of nobel laureates. Having said that, I do find the
statistics interesting, and I'm sure there are some conclusions to be drawn
from it.

There probably are papers analyzing this statistic further - if anyone has
some reading recomendations, send them my way :-)

~~~
smhost
the term "eurocentric" normally isn't about NA vs EU rivalry, but rather about
"european identity" in the white supremacist sense. (the caveat is that
radical equality is also a distinctly european tradition, but still, this
tradition doesn't seem to get included under the "eurocentric" label, for
whatever reason)

~~~
ikhwan
Ironically, only a Eurocentric worldview could have one believing that "racial
equality is a distinctly european tradition"

There were many celebrated anti-racist movement leaders across the world and
in various time periods. The most well-known of these would be the Prophet
Muhammad, who famously in one of his last sermons declared "Surely all of
mankind – from the time of Adam until our time – are like the teeth of a comb
(all equal to one another) and there is no greatness for an Arab over a non-
Arab or a non-Arab over an Arab and no greatness for a red-skinned person over
a black-skinned person or a black-skinned person over a red-skinned person,
except due to one’s consciousness of God."

~~~
smhost
i didn't say "racial equality", i meant the radical equality that flattens
everything. i'm talking about the tradition that rejects prophets, rejects
hierarchy, rejects teleology, etc.

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melling
Quanta has started their coverage.

[https://www.quantamagazine.org/nobel-prize-in-physics-to-
jam...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/nobel-prize-in-physics-to-james-
peebles-michel-mayor-and-didier-queloz-20191008/)

Here’s yesterday’s article for the Nobel in Medicine:

[https://www.quantamagazine.org/nobel-prize-awarded-for-
cells...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/nobel-prize-awarded-for-cells-
adaptations-to-oxygen-20191007/)

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cowbird
Peebles has been a giant in cosmology over the past 50 years, when cosmology
has gone from really speculation to precision measurements. There's a decent
argument that he should have been included in the 1978 prize with Penzias and
Wilson. He's getting old and this might be the last time the committee could
sweetie him in.

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adrianhon
If Trinity College, Cambridge were an independent country, its 34 Nobel Prize
winners would put it fifth in the world rankings, ahead of Russia, Sweden,
Switzerland, and Japan, and behind only the US, UK, Germany, and France.

Source: [https://www.trin.cam.ac.uk/alumni/famous-trinity-
alumni/nobe...](https://www.trin.cam.ac.uk/alumni/famous-trinity-alumni/nobel-
laureates/)

~~~
duxat_staglatz
Speaking of which, if the École normale supérieure (100M€ budget/year) was its
own country, it would rank only behind the US in terms of Fields medals : 11
vs 12.

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whatshisface
I am not such a fan of this one, they essentially gave two separate half-
prizes this year. James Peebles’ contribution to science was not related to
exoplanets, nor was the exoplanet discovery related to cosmology. Instead,
they could have waited a year, and given them sequentially. Has this ever
happened before in Nobel history? Will this lead to an era where one hundred
$10,000 Nobels are handed out each year? ;)

~~~
LatteLazy
There is a rule that you can't award a prize to more than 3 people.

I remember when the Higgs was confirmed at CERN, there was a lot of discussion
over who (if anyone) should get the prize for that. CERN has something like
2500 permanent, scientific employees, plus 12000 users. So is it appropriate
to give the prize to someone who is ultimately a project manager or
administrator?

It's an interesting question as science moves from a few great thinkers to
huge projects with 100+ contributors...

~~~
whatshisface
I think those accomplishments are large enough to have PR teams, or at least
many people who can spread the word, and they may be outside the domain of
where Nobel prizes are needed. The Nobel given for the Higgs discovery could
not raise anyone's esteem for the LCH team, because the team was so large that
everybody who would hear about a Nobel prize had already heard of the LHC.

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safgasCVS
Still cant believe the economics profession managed to convince people it
deserves a seat at the table of the hard sciences

~~~
ProstetnicJeltz
I don't think anyone is looking at the Nobel prizes to categorise sciences.

The 'table of hard science' according to Alfred Nobel also includes medicine
(not science, but we'll let it pass), literature (really not science), and
peace (really really not science).

Anyway, the Nobel Prize for economics is not actually a Nobel prize anyway.

~~~
GuB-42
Medicine is interesting.

Some of it is hard science, with peer-reviewed papers, experiments and
statistics. There is even some overlap with chemistry.

Some of it is engineering. Doctors are closer to engineers than they are to
scientists. They have a problem (a sick patient who needs help), constraints
(time, availability, cost, ...), tools (drugs, diagnosis tools, ...), and need
to turn all that into a solution.

Some of it is craftsmanship. Surgeons are like mechanics for the human body, a
job requiring dexterity and practical thinking.

Some of it is care. With nurses needing as much empathy as they need practical
skills.

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rurban
Comics, no photos? These are real people. Come on, did they read too many
Google PR campaigns? Or watched too many Marvel movies?

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valevk
"The curve shows how many spots there are of each size in the background
radiation."

"The first peak shows that the universe is geometrically flat, i.e. two
parallel lines will never meet."

Can somebody explain this, please?

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bawana
Is the nobel prize taxable? If you live in St. Lucia do you pay ANY tax on it?

~~~
stan_rogers
That depends entirely on where you are and who you have to pay taxes to. In
Canada, it would be a windfall (like a lottery prize), and therefore not
taxable.

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perseusprime11
Does discovering an exoplanet really qualify for Nobel Prize?

~~~
evanb
It wasn't just a matter of pointing a telescope at a lucky star. They had to
invent new spectroscopic tools to find anything.

Moreover, the avalanche of exoplanets their discovery heralded has changed
questions fundamental to astronomy like "Why is our Solar System this
particular way" into questions about ensembles, as in "In what proportion of
planetary systems do we get rocky inner planets in the habitable zone and
outer gas giants".

