Noble Prize - Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, and Peace

**NavyDiver** · 5th October 2021, 08:31 PM

I searched for "Noble Prize" and found nothing Excuse me If I missed it. Just in case I started one.

Not to be confused with those "Ig Nobles" which I love as well

Physics is todays news via BBC
Three scientists have been awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work to understand complex systems such as the Earth's climate.

Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann and Giorgio Parisi were announced as this year's winners at a news conference in Stockholm.

The winners will share the prize money of 10 million krona (£842,611).

The Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel founded the prizes in his will, written a year before his death in 1896.

The Nobel Committee said that Manabe and Hasselmann "laid the foundation of our knowledge of the Earth's climate and how humanity influences it".

The committee said Parisi's discoveries made it "possible to understand and describe many different and apparently entirely random materials and phenomena".

This understanding applied not only to physics but also in other, very different areas, such as mathematics, biology, neuroscience and machine learning (an area of artificial intelligence).

**JDNSW** · 6th October 2021, 05:59 AM

Note the spelling - Nobel not Noble.

Alfred Nobel became a millionaire thanks to his invention of high explosives*, starting with dynamite. His leaving his money to the foundation for the prizes was his attempt to try and make amends for the improvements in warfare capabilities that resulted from his inventions, although I believe his inventions were aimed at mining rather than munitions.

*Historically, the only explosive available was gunpowder. By the early nineteenth century nitroglycerine had been invented, and was found to be a far more powerful explosive, but not really practical, as even small shocks could detonate it. Nobel discovered that absorbing it into a suitable porous medium made it safe to handle, while retaining its power. Not only was it far more powerful than gunpowder, it did not explode with a spark, it needed a detonator, and even if set on fire, it did not explode unless confined. This not only led to more inventions by Nobel in this area, but spurred on other research. And for most of the next century most of the world's explosive manufacturers paid royalties to Nobel and his heirs!

**RANDLOVER** · 6th October 2021, 08:15 AM

From Did a Premature Obituary Inspire the Nobel Prize? - HISTORY Some say the obit is a myth but it is a interesting idea.

"What persuaded the “dynamite king” to devote his fortune to charity? Nobel never spoke publicly about the motivations behind the pledge, but many believe it was inspired by an earlier case of mistaken identity. In 1888, Nobel’s brother Ludvig had died in France from a heart attack. Thanks to poor reporting, at least one French newspaper believed that it was Alfred who had perished, and it proceeded to write a scathing obituary that branded him a “merchant of death” who had grown rich by developing new ways to “mutilate and kill.” The error was later corrected, but not before Alfred had the unpleasant experience of reading his own death notice. The incident may have brought on a crisis of conscience and led him to reevaluate his career. According to biographer Kenne Fant, Nobel “became so obsessed with his posthumous reputation that he rewrote his last will, bequeathing most of his fortune to a cause upon which no future obituary writer would be able to cast aspersions."

Thread: Noble Prize - Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, and Peace

Thread Tools

Noble Prize - Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, and Peace

Tags for this Thread

Bookmarks

Bookmarks

Posting Permissions