Promoting Science and Critical Thinking
We know that Earth is 4.54 ± 0.05 billion years old. There are no rocks from Earth that old because the process of plate tectonics has recycled anything of that era, so the estimate for this age is based upon the probable age of the Solar System. Basically the assumption is that all the solid bodies in the … Read more
You might wonder if I ever reach a point where I am not actually shocked by some of the truly weird things that are inspired and justified in the name of religion. I do confess that I wonder if such a point will ever be reached, and yet when tempted to think along those lines, … Read more
If you want to know about this year’s winner, just jump around my preamble by scrolling down. “Peace” is perhaps the joker in the Nobel pack because this is the award that has often resulted in what can be best described as WTF moments. The other awards are worthy of attention because they spotlight work … Read more
The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2017 is awarded to the English author Kazuo Ishiguro “who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world”. My Immediate Thoughts This is a good choice, it is back to normal after last year’s rather unusual selection. The … Read more
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2017 to Jacques Dubochet University of Lausanne, Switzerland Joachim Frank Columbia University, New York, USA and Richard Henderson MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK “for developing cryo-electron microscopy for the high-resolution structure determination of biomolecules in solution” Like its … Read more
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics 2017 with one half to Rainer Weiss LIGO/VIRGO Collaboration and the other half jointly to Barry C. Barish LIGO/VIRGO Collaboration and Kip S. Thorne LIGO/VIRGO Collaboration “for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves” It … Read more