Chronology Current Month Current Thread Current Date
[Year List] [Month List (current year)] [Date Index] [Thread Index] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Prev] [Date Next]

Nobel & mortality

At 09:49 AM 3/6/97 -0800, Leigh Palmer wrote:

I also noted in the news that Robert Dicke of Princeton died
yesterday at the age of eighty. Dicke was insulted by the Nobel
committee when they awarded the Prize to Penzias and Wilson for
discovering by accident what Dicke had predicted and was seeking
with more modest equipment. Dicke was ultimately responsible for
explaining to them what they were seeing after an associate of
his heard about Penzias and Wilson's "noise problem". One rumor
has it that if Dicke were to be included, Peebles would also
have to be included, and the Nobel can go to no more than three
people, so the engineers got it instead of the scientists.

If one were to award the prize based on who got there first, _that_ prize
should have gone to Ralph Alpher and Robert Hermann (and possibly George
Gamow who supervised their work) who predicted the CBR on theoretical
grounds in 1948! They had the bad luck to predict something which could not
be measured with WWII radar technology.

I am presently a member of only *one* committee, a result of my
spending a year on leave. I'll try to see that committee does
not do anything really stupid. I will likely fail.

Leigh

I'm jealous - I'm on one committee by election, and three others
ex-officio. Just call _me_ stupid!

George Spagna **********************************************
Department of Physics * *
Randolph-Macon College * And so some day, *
P.O. Box 5005 * The mighty ramparts of the mighty universe *
Ashland, VA 23005-5505 * Ringed round with hostile force *
* Will yield and face decay *
phone: (804) 752-7344 * and come crumbling to ruin. *
FAX: (804) 752-4724 * - Lucretius, De Rerum Natura *
e-mail: gspagna@rmc.edu **********************************************
URL: www.rmc.edu/~gspagna/gspagna.html