Showing posts with label Nobel Prizes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nobel Prizes. Show all posts

Friday, 7 October 2011

Dynamite Money

Housing Genius: the Nobel Museum, Stockholm
#1: The Growling Bear

Since this week happens to be the time of year when small bands of elite academics (and sometimes spurious accessories, like Barack Obama) are ushered into the scholarly Hall of Fame, this seems the perfect time to start a new column here on Sifting The Evidence: I'll aim to profile the life and graft of one Nobel Prize winner every month. 


This will span three of the five categories, so anyone from physics, chemistry or physiology/medicine is eligible, but I won’t feature winners of the literature or peace prizes (for, in the eyes of this blog, these are domains of beatniks). And economics also squeaks in, despite its unofficial status. The prizes have been awarded for a diverse array of amazing theories, discoveries and innovations, from radioactivity to IVF, and are given to personalities of every shade, from the outspoken to (perhaps predictably) the somewhat autistic. But first, we’ll start with the Growling Bear himself: Alfred Nobel.