Scientist Robbed of Nobel in 1974 Finally Wins $3 Million Physics Prize — And Gives It Away
I looked up the conventional h index of Jocelyn Bell Burnell. It is very low so this Milner award is politics as usual. Fifty years after the discovery this seems to have been the result of wildly irrational political pressure based on crude historical distortion by the media. It is not based on any objective criterion. The original paper announcing the discovery of pulsars consisted of about five authors, Hewish et alii, and Bell herself did not want the Nobel Prize because Hewish was the supervisor and she was the Ph. D. student. She said that Ph. D. students should not be awarded Nobel Prizes. I do not agree with that at all, but this shows that she did not expect to win a Nobel Prize. The media built up the myth about her being cheated out of a Nobel Prize. In my opinion a Nobel Prize is vastly overblown in importance. I remember the discovery of pulsars in the sixties when I was at Pontardawe Grammar School. The objective criteria of impact are hits, page views, distinct visits, visits, gigabytes downloaded and so on, combined with h and g indices and combined with total output of an author, combined with the quality of readership of the work,and above all, Baconian correctness and the elimination of anthropomorphism. In that case the AIAS / UPTEC group blows all opposition away so a Milner prize should be awarded to the AIAS / UPITEC group or if that is not allowed by petty rules, to individual members. In my time, the seventies, a Ph. D. student would not normally be allowed to publish on his or her own, but I was allowed to publish before I earned my Ph. D., being one of the best graduate students in chemistry in Britain. Even at that time my work was regarded as being worthy of an F. R.S. and Nobel Prize. If a Nobel Prize had been awarded I would have been more than happy to share it with my Ph. D. supervisor Mansel Davies and later with my group experimentalist Gareth Evans. We were all Baptists with a healthy scepticism of the Nobel Prize system, or any royalist system. MMD described the Nobel prize system as a club like any other and was a Nobel Prize advisor in chemistry, a friend of Linus Pauling. He remained a friend after Pauling was booted out of Stanford in a McCarthyist purge. Jocelyn Bell as born in Lurgan, Nothern Ireland and failed her eleven plus so went to a Quaker school in York. In my time women students had exactly the same opportunity as men, I was the top first, the second and third in line who graduated with a first class degree were women from the South Wales valleys who did not want to stay at the EDCL. During my Ph. D. I won three prestigious post doctoral fellowships in open competition: SRC; ICI European and an NRCC Fellowship to work with the Nobel Laureate Herzberg in Canada. I should have been appointed a research associate with tenure straight from Ph. D. but the EDCL system was terminally corrupt and the EDCL was later closed. I was forced to keep competing for prestigious Fellowships until I ran up a world record of them. I was not given tenure because I had exposed corruption at Swansea (Autobiograohy VolumeTwo) My autobiography shows that the system at EDCL and at Swansea was so corrupt and vindictive and petty minded that it would not recognize merit if it were stuffed up its nostrils, and no one would put right the corruption. I found that to be terminally disgusting – to refuse to recognize home grown talent in a young student, a sow eating her piglets. The disgust and contempt comes out very strongly in my poetry. I have a contempt for anything that corrupts the Baconian ideal with anthropomorphism,any individual, any group, any politician.
I think that the AIAS / UPITEC group could be nominated for a Breakthrough Prize for many contributions making a profound impact on science, if the rules allow. If not, nominations could go in for members of the group, for Nobel prizes and Breakthrough Prizes. In order for this to happen there must be assessors who really know the work. I was nominated by Royal Swedish Academician Bo Lehnert, perhaps others, for a physics prize, probably more than once, for the discovery of B(3) at Cornell in 1991. A book by Lehnert and Roy appears in my "Contermporary Chemical Physics " series. Jean Pierre Vigier recognized that B(3) means finite photon mass, thus overturning standard physics. Since then almost a thousand papers and books have sprung from that discovery of B(3), and the first successful unified field theory based in a rigorously objective way on Cartan geometry. Lehnert was attacked by a harasser called Bruhn, who posted a letter to Lehnert interfering in the Nobel Prize process. Bruhn made attempts to distort Cartan geometry, but failed. Cartan geometry has remained unchanged so Bruhn has been ignored. Distortions of Cartan geometry subsequently appeared in a commandered Wikipedia article. Bruhn was refuted many times and disappeared in 2008.
Scientist Robbed of Nobel in 1974 Finally Wins $3 Million Physics Prize — And Gives It Away
Scientist Robbed of Nobel in 1974 Finally Wins $3 Million Physics Prize — And Gives It Away
|