Over 100 years ago, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel gave a bunch of money to some Swedish and Norwegian committees in order to dole out six annual prizes. Nobel wanted to support and encourage cultural and scientific advances.
The six prizes were awarded last week. And, like every year, the prizes actually matter. Especially if:
1. You are a closet agnostic.
The prize for physics went to two scientists who theorized and predicted the existence of the “God Particle.” The particle (called the Higgs boson) was actually discovered last year; most scientists don’t really like the name “God particle” because the particle doesn’t actually prove or disprove the existence of God. The Higgs boson is a sub-atomic particle that confers mass on matter. It earned the notorious nickname after a 1993 book title that was chosen tongue-in-cheek. What’s fascinating is that the Higgs boson is like God in as it underlies every physical object that exists. And like God, it’s very difficult to detect.
2. You are a Canadian Feminist
Canadian literati went gaga when Alice Munro was announced as the literature winner last Thursday. If you took any English university-level courses, you probably read some Alice Munro. She writes short stories and short novels about women’s experiences, and kind of invented a genre called Southern Ontario Gothic. And I just have to say, though Canada’s history might not be very colorful, it produces some really intensely beautiful and complex literature.
3. You have a loved one with diabetes, Parkinson’s diesease, Alzheimer’s disease, or an immune disorder
The three scientists who won the medicine prize separately made big breakthroughs in research on vesicle trafficking machinery. Bascially, that’s like cargo delivery within cells. If you have diabetes for instance, as a result of the recent discoveries, researchers are better able to understand how your pancreas cells aren’t releasing insulin or how your muscle and fat cells aren’t responding to insulin.
4. You like peace
The Nobel Peace Prize is often referred to as the world’s most prestigious prize, so it’s a hot potato topic. This year, the prize was given to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). It’s the enforcement arm of a treaty signed by 190 nations to get rid of chemical warfare. They have workers in Syria right now, as Syria has actually signed the treaty. (The United States and Russia still haven’t.) Pundits murmur the prize should have been awarded to Malala Yousafzi, a 16 year-old Pakistani girl who spoke up for girls’ rights to education, and who was shot in the head for it. She miraculously survived, and even wrote a book on her experience.
5. You aspire to be a homeowner one day
It’s the ultimate mark of full-fledged financial independence, isn’t it? If you could predict the housing market, the burst of the dot-com bubble, and stock and bond prices, then you might have been influenced by the work of the three winners of the Nobel Prize for Economics. These three economists studied asset pricing and behavioural finance, helping us understand past and maybe future financial crises.
6. You are a computer geek.
The three chemists who won the chemistry prize made computer models that mirror chemical reactions occurring in real life. Maybe one day chemists won’t even need to get their hands dirty because that’s how sophisticated computer modelling will get.
Flickr photo (cc) by Vegardig
