Mr. Neville used to work at Lawrence Berkeley Lab with Saul Perlmutter. It was announced today that Saul Perlmutter is one of the recipients of the Nobel Prize in physics for 2011. It’s for his work on the Supernova Cosmology Project, which showed that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.
Mr. Neville sometimes works with Adam Riess, one of the two other recipients of this year’s Nobel in physics.
A researcher at my institute got a Nobel in Medicine this year. I’ve only met him once but weeee!
Physics winner Yang treated me to lunch!
I majored in physics at the University of Chicago, so there were a number of Nobel winners in the area.
–Hans Bethe visited and stayed with the head masters of the dorm I was in. He was featured at a couple of meals that students in the dorm attended. I sat across the table from him.
–I was looking for a lab position, so I was going around handing my resume off to any research physicist. I asked James Cronin for a position, but he said that he was taking a sabbatical from research that year. But he suggested that I go upstairs to a guy who had a habit of getting students jobs. And I did get that job.
–I also attended a few talks by S. Chandrasekhar, though I didn’t follow much after the first 15 minutes or so. He got his Nobel shortly after I graduated.
–I may have gone to a dinner get together at the house of another Nobel prize winner there, but my memory is fuzzy. It may have been a party hosted by the daughter of a Nobel winner (also a student at UC) at the family house.
All of these are just interactions, though. I couldn’t claim to know any of them.
The chemistry prize was announced today - Danny Shechtman of Technion, Israel for quasi crystals. Shechtman was very gracious in his public statements, but it did make me smile how he wasn’t shy about bringing up past grievances and getting some digs in at the naysayers, specifically Linus Pauling. Like any great scientist, Shechtman knows that a rival being long dead is no reason not to even the score, in fact it’s the perfect time to do it.
It sounded like he had hell getting the idea accepted, with Pauling openly ridiculing him. Pauling’s last paper in fact was a rejection of the quasi-crystal concept. Another dent in Pauling’s latter career, known amongst crystallographers for ages, but will probably get wider play now.
Sad for the guy who shared the physiology prize, Steinman. Died last Friday, but will still receive the prize posthumously, so to speak.
I don’t know any Nobel-winning scientists, but I’m within one degree of separation: several times, I’ve had a graduate student of Steven Weinberg as my waiter.
One of my work colleagues said yesterday that he’d met Brian Schmidt, the Australian who is a co-recipient of this year’s Physics prize with Saul Perlmutter and Adam Riess.
I won a Nobel prize, just last week. For… eh, I forget, but it was really important at the time.
My old therapist had a Nobel Peace Prize.
Cool!
Linkto a totally geek-hilarious bit from NPR, where the guy speaking describes his Nobel Fantasy-league picks (text version on the page, too). Turns out he nailed the Lit category, too!!
That sounds like something we should try. Fantasy football is just so old hat.