6 replies to this topic

[the L]

http://edition.cnn.c...sics/index.html

Serge Haroche of France and David Wineland of the United States will share the $1.2 million prize, the second of six Nobel Prizes announced this month.

[unit]

$1.2 mil pales in comparison with a lottery win, CEO's salary and many other things.. where is the incentive here?

...and this leads us to something called the 'God' particle?

i think i can see a trend here, ...i wonder if this makes sense to anyone else out there?

[sepulchrave]

unit, on 09 October 2012 - 10:34 PM, said:

$1.2 mil pales in comparison with a lottery win, CEO's salary and many other things.. where is the incentive here?

The Nobel prize isn't about the money. People study physics (or chemistry, or medicine, or biology, or art for that matter) because it is their passion, not because they want to get rich quick. Winning the Nobel prize in physics is probably the highest honour a physicist can achieve.

unit, on 09 October 2012 - 10:34 PM, said:

...and this leads us to something called the 'God' particle?

The Higgs boson, yes. You may recall that it was discovered by the LHC earlier this year, and had been predicted by Peter Higgs (and 5 others) in the 1960s. In physics, predicting the existence of something new and then having that prediction verified is kinda a big thing.

[Hilander]

Winning the Nobel Prize is more than the money, its the recognition.  Which will hold weight when wanting a grant or getting on a team of scientists working on something big.  Guarantees you your work won't be soon forgotten, at least not by everyone.

[Render]

The Higgs Boson is NOT confirmed yet. So why would they give a Nobel Prize for it? Yes they found out a lot more stuff along the way, but the Higgs itself is not yet fact, more testing needs to be done.

The Nobel Prize went to the right people and they can now use the money for more research towards the first real quantum computer. This will open the path towards getting closer to the singularity. This is major.

[questionmark]

Render, on 10 October 2012 - 07:38 AM, said:

The Higgs Boson is NOT confirmed yet. So why would they give a Nobel Prize for it? Yes they found out a lot more stuff along the way, but the Higgs itself is not yet fact, more testing needs to be done.

The Nobel Prize went to the right people and they can now use the money for more research towards the first real quantum computer. This will open the path towards getting closer to the singularity. This is major.

You beat me to it. Though I had a discussion this morning with a bunch of retired physicists and they all would have put their money on the Higgs boson, where they did not mention the CERN team as likely candidates but all those who have foreseen it, which is not only Higgs.

[Rafterman]

It also generally takes 5-10 years after something comes out for it to win a Prize.

The guys that won it this year did their work in the 90s if I'm not mistaken.

Well, unless you're Obama, then you get the Prize before you even do anything.