All About the Science!!

6:19 am... Nobel prizes are being awarded for 2016, an event which always draws my interest. Which I think is really the point of the award. The money, of course, is super helpful to the researchers, allowing them a little financial breathing room for a while. But bringing attention to the scientific work being done in a wide array of fields is so very important to the advancement of science.

And, let's be clear... I am TOTALLY biased on this matter. I have been a science geek my entire life, along with being a gamer geek, writer geek, fantasy geek, and more. Science is my religion. I worship at the temple of reasoning and critical thinking (and occasionally make a blood sacrifice to Cthulhu.) The pursuit of knowledge extends to mankind an aspect of nobility which nearly excuses its many less savory features.

Of course, it is often difficult to fully understand what the award recipients have accomplished. The subjects of the research are frequently quite detailed and specific, and their implications and impact can be obfuscated by technical jargon, at least for us laypeople. Therein lies the beauty of the award, and the justified admiration for the committees who put so much effort into identifying worthy recipients.  Committee researchers must not only have a reasonable understanding of what has been accomplished, but must also be able to measure or extrapolate the potential impact of the research.

As an example, the three gentlemen who received the prize in physics actually completed the majority of the work being recognized in the 1970's and 1980's. Their work with exotic states of matter opened up an entire field of science which has led to many discoveries about how matter works at the quantum level. The prize for chemistry has a similar story, with the majority of the work completed 15-20 years ago, but significantly impacting the generations of researchers which followed. 

 While every one of us contributes to society in some way, the advancement of our understanding of the world is critical to any coherent sense of progress. Political philosophies will wrestle with each other for millennia, and continue to fail in so many ways. Religion will distract us from the world around us with promises of joy and threats of punishment. Business will manipulate us, steal from us and make the scoundrels rich. But science, science will cure diseases, send us to distant worlds, increase our capacity to understand our place in the world, and inspire us to greater and greater heights... 6:54 am...