One of my elementary teachers used to make a big deal of the Nobel Prizes every year. We’d get the newspaper clips on the prizes, calculate how much they were worth, and discuss what the people did to win them.
Several years ago I started offering grade boosts to economics students who could predict the winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. One year I actually had to pay up, after another teacher discovered a Nobel handicapping site, and one student got very, very lucky. What other uses can you find?
I especially remember the prize to Penzias and Wilson in Physics in 1978, because it meant we didn’t have to study Steady State any longer (and I’d always found that description confusing). Steady State was still in some books, more than a decade after their discovery of Big Bang.
Here’s the schedule for Nobel announcements, over the next week or so:
Announcements of the 2007 Nobel Prizes and The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel will be held on the following dates:
Physiology or Medicine – Monday, October 8, 11:30 a.m. CET (at the earliest)
Physics – Tuesday, October 9, 11:45 a.m. CET (at the earliest)
Chemistry – Wednesday, October 10, 11:45 a.m. CET (at the earliest)
Literature – Thursday, October 11, 1:00 p.m. CET (at the earliest)
Peace – Friday, October 12, 11:00 a.m. CET
Economics – Monday, October 15, 1:00 p.m. CET (at the earliest)
While working in education policy years back I noticed that Nobel winners come disproportionately from the U.S., and disproportionately from the public schools. Watching such trends tends to be a practice of journals outside the U.S., however, such as the Times of India:
Americans tend to dominate the science prizes and last year they made a clean sweep, taking the medicine, physics, chemistry and economics awards.
For the peace prize, to be announced in Oslo on Friday, a total of 181 individuals and organisations are known to have been nominated.
The battle against global warming is seen as a strong candidate for the prestigious award, with former US vice president Al Gore and Canadian Inuit Sheila Watt-Cloutier believed to be contenders.
Gore has brought the issue to the top of the international agenda with his 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth , while Watt-Cloutier, the former head of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, has campaigned to draw attention to climate change in the Arctic.
Climate change has a direct impact on world peace, according to observers who note that humanitarian efforts around the world will amount to nothing if low-lying countries are wiped out by rising sea levels and massive waves of refugees storm into others.
Last year, the honours went to Bangladeshi microcredit pioneer Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank.
For the Literature Prize, to be announced on Thursday, the guessing game is in full swing, with Stockholm’s literary circles divided over whether the Swedish Academy will go with a dark horse or a favourite.
On Ladbrokes’ online betting site — which last year correctly had Orhan Pamuk of Turkey as the winner — Italian novelist and essayist Claudio Magris is in top spot with 5-to-1 odds, followed by Australian poet Les Murray and US author Philip Roth.
Lesser-known writers such as French poet Maryse Conde or Estonian author and poet Jaan Kaplinski are mentioned as possible laureates, while big names cited include US author Don DeLillo and Syrian poet Adonis, the pseudonym for Ali Ahmad Said.
Others making the rounds are Italy’s Antonio Tabucchi, Amos Oz of Israel, South Korean poet Ko Un and Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes.
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
[…] I suppose there’s little chance she was educated in U.S. public schools . . […]
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Not discovery of the Big Bang by P & W, if you please; confirmation of it.
No surprise that textbooks took forever to catch up, anyway; did you ever read Gould’s essay on how Eohippus (now Hyracotherium) was “the size of a fox terrier”, and how one author copied another for generations in using that description?–despite hardly anyone knowing how big a fox terrier is.
Hoyle himself worked to his dying day on ways of getting around the cosmic background radiation and reviving Steady State. Incidentally, “Dead of Night”, which inspired the Steady State theory according to Hoyle (did I just say that?) is a fine movie, regardless of the merits of the theory.
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