The Nobel Prizes are given every year in October to those who have most benefited mankind in one of six fields: peace, literature, medicine, physics, chemistry, and economics. For each prize, 9 million Swedish kronas (equal to US $1.11 million or 68,600 crowns or 80 talents of silver) is split among the winners.
The winners for 2017:
Medicine & Physiology:
Jeffrey Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael Young win for their work on circadian rhythms, the body’s clock. It is why jet lag is so terrible and why some of us are night owls. They found three genes (period, timeless and doubletime) and one main molecule (the protein PER) that make it work. They studied it in fruit flies but it is the same in every cell in every plant and every animal. The Nobel committee says their work has “vast implications for our health and well-being.”
Physics:
Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne and Barry Barish win for the discovery of gravitational waves, something predicted by Einstein’s theories in 1915 but not found till 2015. It opens a whole new field of astronomy. Weiss gets half the prize, but is the first to admit that it took 40 years and the work of some 1,000 people to find them. The three were expected to win last year along with Ron Drever, whose work on lasers made the discovery possible. Drever died in March at 85 and so does not share the prize. He is hardly the first to miss out on a Nobel Prize because of an “early” death.
Chemistry:
Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank and Richard Henderson win for coming up with cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM). They worked out how to take pictures of molecules in a way that preserves their natural shape (important for understanding biological molecules) and which turn fuzzy two-dimensional pictures into a three-dimensional one sharp enough where you can see the atoms (anything larger than half a nanometre). It only works on larger molecules, like enzymes, proteins and viruses, but they are generally the more interesting ones.
Literature:
Kazuo Ishiguro, a British novelist best known for “The Remains of the Day” (1989), made into a 1993 film starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. The Nobel committee likes his novels “of great emotional force” which have “uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.”
Peace:
ICAN, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, wins for having “in the past year given the efforts to achieve a world without nuclear weapons a new direction and new vigour.” They pushed for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which 50 countries have so far signed, Iran among them.
Economics:
Richard Thaler wins for being a founding father of behavioural economics, using psychology to understand why people make bad decisions, especially about money.
Winners listed by country of birth:
- Australia: ICAN
- Britain: Henderson
- Germany: Weiss, Frank
- Japan: Ishiguro
- Switzerland: Dubochet
- US: Hall, Rosbash, Young, Barish, Thorne, Thaler
by county of immigration:
- Britain: Ishiguro
- Switzerland: ICAN
- US: Weiss, Frank
– Abagond, 2017.
See also:
- Twitter: @NobelPrize
- Nobel Prizes past:
- Posts on individual Nobel Prize winners:
- Fritz Haber – Chemistry, 1918
- Einstein – Physics, 1921
- Jane Addams – Peace, 1931
- Winston Churchill – Literature, 1953
- Martin Luther King, Jr – Peace, 1964
- Solzhenitsyn – Literature, 1970
- Kissinger – Peace, 1973
- Aung San Suu Kyi – Peace, 1991
- Toni Morrison – Literature, 1993
- Nelson Mandela – Peace, 1993
- United Nations – Peace, 2001
- Barack Obama – Peace, 2009
- US dollar
- crowns
- Attic units
- human evolution: the last 4 billion years
- Amy Chua
575
Michael Rosbash’s parents fled Nazi Germany. Maybe today we’re accepting refugees whose children will be Nobel Prize winners.
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wow
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Updated with the Chemistry Prize.
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Kazuo Ishiguro wins the Literature prize.
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A few comments regarding the topics behind the Nobel laureates of Medicine, Chemistry and Physics.
Medicine:
Interesting. It’s those mechanisms that remind us that we are, in fact, children of the Earth, in the sense that in the details of our constitution there are many things which were fine-tuned in a lengthy process of evolution (millions if not almost a billion years) to the specific physical conditions of our planet – its mass and therefore its gravitational field, its periods (translational and rotational), etc – besides the biological conditions (ecosystem).
In another planet we would be certainly out of place (unless we did some re-engineering of our bodies to adapt to that planet! maybe in the future we will be able to do that, who knows!).
Chemistry:
This reminds people that scientists actually do not see atoms not even most of the molecules. This can appear as a surprise for people outside those fields as Physics or Chemistry but it’s true. Those small (micro, or better, nano or pico) realities are mostly captured by conceptual models. Those models are tested mostly indirectly.
One question that I would ask myself (I must do some reading on the matter) about these new microscopes is: do they allow to see moving scenarios at that scale or not?
Regarding microscopes we should remember that in high school we all learned that there at least two types (two levels): the optical microscope (based on properties of light) and electronic microscope (based on properties of electrons; actually wave properties of electrons). The electronic microscope allows a higher zoom in than the optical one. This new microscope sounds to be even more powerful!
Physics:
I don’t agree with the use of the word discovery in the sentence above.
Who discovered the existence of gravitational waves was Albert Einstein back in the first quarter of the XXth century. The work of the above-mentioned scientists consists of inventing a device or set of devices to allow the detection of those waves. Very important without a doubt. But not the discovery as such of this particular aspect of reality.
If we follow many important discoveries in the field of Physics (but not all, by the way!) oft is the case that they jump from theoretical speculations first, and a laboratory confirmation later, sometimes much later!. This is true for example in following cases, for example:
— the existence of electromagnetic waves by James Clerk Maxwell;
— the existence of the neutrino by Enrico Fermi;
— the existence of the Higgs boson by Peter Higss; etc
Laboratory confirmation in all those cases came later.
On the contrary, the discovery that the speed of light was pretty constant at the vacuum – one of the pillars of the Relativity Theory of Albert Einstein – actually was made during the set of experiments carried out by Albert Michelson.
Another comment I would like to make about gravitational waves is that they are a direct and inevitable consequence of the Relativity Theory of Einstein. We know that bodies have mass and because of that they are surrounded by a gravitational field. Any change of position of those bodies is followed by a change in the spatial distribution of their gravitational field. What Relativity Theory requires is that that change in the spatial distribution of the gravitational field cannot be instantaneous and, therefore, most occur across space in gradual wave-like moving pattern. This is the gravitational wave. But it’s clear that only the change of status of very large bodies – like stars or black bodies – can produce gravitational waves tangible enough that can be detected by a very sensitive device. And this is were the new invented device of the mentioned Nobel laureates comes in. It’s very important, without a doubt. It will add to the panoply of devices – optical, electromagnetic, etc – with which scientists try to pierce deeper and deeper into the recesses of the cosmos (space and time)!
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@ Mira
Thanks!
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@ munubantu
From what I read, it can only take still pictures. They cool down water rapidly to catch the molecule in mid-movement.
To my way of empiricist thinking, Einstein predicted gravitational waves. The prediction could have turned out to be wrong, which would have been an even more profound discovery.
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Added the Peace prize.
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Added the Economics Prize. That concludes this year’s Nobel Prizes.
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Sensing mighty gravitational waves, in vivo:
http://edition.cnn.com/2017/10/16/world/neutron-star-collision-gravitational-waves-light/index.html
Powerful and short lived, at once!
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