The Nature of Things

The contributions of women to scientific research and resultant breakthroughs are frequently overlooked or their importance downplayed. This has undeniably been a continuing theme throughout history.  One of the most egregious examples was that of Rosalind Franklin . Franklin, using X-ray crystallography at King's College in London, was able to obtain images of DNA which allowed James Watson and Francis Crick to create their famous double helix model. Franklin unfortunately died from cancer in 1958 at age 37 and when the Nobel Prize was awarded to Watson and Crick in 1962, Franklin was not mentioned even though at that time there was no rule against awarding the prize posthumously.  I've been pondering this recently because I've been reading a book called The Tangled Tree by David Quammen , a book which details the history of the struggle to understand evolution at the molecular level. Again, women have participated in the research and, in some cases, have made significant...

This is so cool!   This Russian billionaire named Yuri Milner has established a prize called the Fundamental Physics Prize to reward distinguished physicists around the world. Physicists are known for not being very knowledgeable about money, maybe mostly because they don't have much of it. And also maybe because they are too preoccupied with trying to figure out how the universe got here and what makes it tick to worry about things like money. Milner, himself, it seems, is a physics drop-out. He dropped out of graduate school in 1989 and went on to make his billions by investing in Internet companies like Facebook and Groupon. Anyway, Milner established this physics prize which carries with it an award to each winning individual of $3 million, making it the most   lucrative academic prize in the world. The Nobel Prize, by comparison,  comes in at a paltry $1.2 million. The winners of the prize were nine physicists from around the world, most of whom I had never hear...