..... has been a bit surreal really. I posted earleir today about the sadness of Steve Jobs passing and that really kind of sums things up. It has been odd.
Lets start with physics shall we. Last week, we learned that some bods had sent some nutrinos from CERN in Switzerland to Italy, through rock. That in itself I thought was quite an achievement. However, they turned up early. Early? Well, the maximum speed anything is supposed to be able to travel is c, or the speed of light (as in Albert says E = mc^2). the fact that these things turned up early threatens the utter foundations of theoretical physics!! I'm glad my son Tom is just in the first week of his Physics degree at Leeds becasue the are probably re-writing the course as we speak.
As if that was n't enough, this week evidence was published that the expansion of the universe following the big bang is not slowing down, as believed for centuries, but is actually speeding up! Again, it kinds threatens the whole basis of physics. Funnily enough, there was a story that Einstein actually predicted this, but then looked at his work and screwed up the piece of paper believing it to be nonsense!!
This week the winners of the Nobel Prizes were announced. One of the prizes for medicine was awarded to Jerry Steinman from the University of Rockerfeller, New York. His work on dendritic cells was seminal in understanding how the body fights infection. Unfortunately, the morning it was announced he had won this amazing and prestigous prize (and the near £1 million that goes with it) his university announced that he had died a few days before. Normally, the Nobel committee don't award prizes posthumously, but I understand, they plan to make an exception.
For the field closest to my heart, chemistry, the prize was won by Danial Shechtman from Isreal. He discovered quasicrystals - which break all the rules of crystalinity with their perfectly ordered but never repeating units. You would have thought his discovery would have been celebrated but no, it seems not. Indeed, to quote form the BBC website ""The head of my lab came to me smiling sheepishly, and put a book on my desk and said: 'Danny, why don't you read this and see that it is impossible what you are saying,'" Dr Shechtman recounted in an interview with Technion.
The Israeli researcher was later told that he was a disgrace to the group and asked to leave.
On returning to Israel, Dr Shechtman published the results.
"Then all hell broke loose," he said.
Many scientists from around the world started telling him that they too had seen the same crystal structure.
Not everyone was convinced, however. To his dying day, Linus Pauling, the head of the American Chemical Society, said that Dr Shechtman was "talking nonsense".
But Bassam Shakhashiri, president-elect of the American Chemical Society, told BBC News: "This is how we make progress in science.
"[If] someone comes up with a discovery that we are sceptical about…we [have to] take time to verify the observations and discuss the conclusions among ourselves."
He added: "This is a really great example of the triumph of science.
"And an opportunity for all of us... who are curious about nature, to be vigilant, to be careful, and to engage in respectful debate about the interpretation of results."
NO, this is an example of when a bunch of arrogant dicks thought they knew better than the facts in front of their eyes. Sometimes, smart people can be incredibly dumb !!!!
