Naked Science Forum
General Discussion & Feedback => Just Chat! => Topic started by: satrah on 28/05/2012 02:09:23
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Hello all
What does a person have to do to win a nobel prize?
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Do something he or she believes in maybe?
And be interesting enough that he or she will get recognized by those old grizzled fuzzy (mostly men) making the Nobel committee up :)
Maybe?
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There seem to be several things that lead to Nobel prizes.
1) Lifelong achievement that leads to significant advance in a scientific field. Perhaps a decade or more of research efforts towards a breakhrough.
2) Solving or proving a major unknown in science. For example the Watson&Crick were "young" researchers, a graduate student & a research fellow who determined the double-helix structure of DNA.
3) Getting Elected to President of the USA??? It still puzzles me that Barack Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize within months of being elected the the President of the USA.
It took 3 years into his presidency to mostly withdraw from Iraq, and 4 years into the presidency and we're still muddling around in Afghanistan.
Nothing much has changed with hotspots such as Iran, N. Korea, or Cuba.... or Mexico?
Perhaps he did bring about renewed focus on racial inequality in the USA. But is he truly a leader in Civil Rights on the par with Martin Luther King?
Anyway, I would have waited until the end of his Presidency (4+ or 8+ years), rather than the beginning to truly evaluate his track-record as a global leader, but then again, if we did something stupid like invading another Middle Eastern country, he might not be a viable candidate anymore.
4) Thinking about World changes, and I can foresee the possibility of an Egyptian or an Arab Spring Nobel Peace Prize. But, perhaps waiting a while to see how things progress.
5) Why wasn't there a 2005/2006 IRA Nobel Peace Prize?
6) Psychology, Sociology, and Anthropology seem to be under-represented in the Nobel Prizes.
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Hello CliffordK
Thanks you for your lengthy reply and there is a lot of information that I can use as a guide. I did not know that Barack Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize, OMG. I currently am completing a degree in Occupational therapy. I love getting ideas and concepts that are beyond my level and trying to work out the best possible way of solving out these problems and a noble prize is one of these concepts. Even though it is beyond me I will still try.
I think information and achievement is weird, Greek philosophers believed that the heart was the central organ in the body that was controlling the body. They were proved to be wrong but in the process of being wrong what they did was spark curiously so other can think and understand the body better and as technology got better so did understanding. I ask this question because I believe that as humans we can speed up evolution and be able to learn faster to keep up with knowledge by multi tasking more effectively or to read a book by just looking at the page. This sounds crazy but I like to ask what is the limit to human intelligence? I am thinking in 20 to 1000 years or possibly 5000 year. I am currently writing a paper/essay on this and will keep you posted on my finding.
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I like to ask what is the limit to human intelligence?
birth-canal width ... http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/the-benefits-of-a-long-childhood
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I like to ask what is the limit to human intelligence?
birth-canal width ... http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/the-benefits-of-a-long-childhood
That may have been a past limitation, but is no longer a limitation with humans being able to survive birth sizes from 1 lb to 10+ lbs. (½ kilo to 5+ kilos). And, there is no requirement for babies to be born through the birth canal, nor for one to wait for a natural childbirth.
I did find an interesting study (http://www.bmj.com/content/323/7308/310?view=long&pmid=11498487) that correlates birth weight to intelligence, even through "normal" sizes. The larger the baby, the higher the intelligence at school age, so smaller natural births would have potentially been bad for humanity.
However,
I had interpreted the statement to mean the Rise in IQ Points (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect) which according to some is an average of about 3 IQ points per decade. What is the reality behind the new super-preschools?
At least when I was a child, parents would teach children the numbers and alphabet, but it was discouraged to teach the children to read before first grade. Now, many schools expect all the children to know rudimentary reading, writing, and arithmetic before starting 1st grade, perhaps even before kindergarten.
With a tremendous amount of information available at one's fingertips, is there a limit to what a child can learn?
Or...
On the flip side, will we eventually just become TV Vegetables?