Life in optical

This is just a reply to @sciencebase but it doesn’t fit in 140 characters :)

What prompted my reaction was the following tweet:

Couldn’t they create a separate #biology Prize? So disappointing when real chemists miss out. #nobel09 #chemistry

I heard the same yesterday about the physics prize – that in fact there should be an engineering prize for things like the CCD and leave the physics prize for more fundamental stuff.

I can’t agree. Science is multi- inter- and even trans- disciplinary. It is international and collaborative. Science pushes every boundary: between specialties, between people, across languages and the boundary of our collective knowledge.

Boxing various scientific endeavours into disciplines is equivalent to dividing people – and this happens enough already in the everyday life of science… theoretical physicists vs experimentalists – observers vs theorists in astronomy – now physicists and engineers – chemists and biologists, the list is endless.

And then science takes over and reclaims the areas where it was divided with “new fields” like astrochemistry, biophysics, bioengineering, molecular biology, etc. When you think about it, just a few scientific generations ago, those were all mixed up differently.

In my view, it’s the subtle evolution of a population of increasingly specialised scientists. They come from different backgrounds, form clusters of interest called disciplines, which eventually dissolve again according to breakthroughs and demand.

So really, it’s all the better if the boundaries of scientific eligibility remain blurred for the Nobel Prizes. Wouldn’t it be sad if a group making a breakthrough in nano-optics for example received a Nobel Prize but only the member in the collaboration with a physics degree got the prize because his/her co-discoverer has an electronics engineering degree and is therefore not a “real physicist”?

The prizes may be historically divided into disciplines but the big picture is, they are an annual celebration of science and that’s unquestionably great.

Right, that was a long twitter reply ;)

PS: If the animation isn’t self-explanatory, drop me a comment