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A review by bookkate
Losing the Nobel Prize: A Story of Cosmology, Ambition, and the Perils of Science's Highest Honor by Brian Keating
2.0
This book was all over the place - I still don’t know what he was trying to write - a text for beginners in astronomy? A text of the history of astronomy? An autobiography? A tell-all of why he deserves the Nobel prize? A critique of the Nobel prize’s rules? A means to show off how many clever sub-titles he can come up with? And there’s a bit of religion, philosophy & even poetry thrown in.
There is certainly a lot of astronomical knowledge imparted - my favourite part was probably learning a little bit about some of the forgotten female astronomers.
Many of his gripes about the prize sound like a child learning that life is unfair. P. 221 ‘If the nobel Prize is a true meritocracy..’. Well, it’s not, is it? It’s a set of arbitrary rules made by a guy who died long ago & subjectively applied by a committee today.
It seems that his problems with this prize are also actually just symptoms of bigger, broader problems - why is the Nobel prize so sought after - the money, the prestige, the jobs, the grants the ability to run long term projects on your research interests forever after? Perhaps it is actually the scientific research system that is broken - why are so many good scientists forced to compete for such a small pool of funding? Why is the mode of demonstrating accomplishment ‘publish or perish’? Why are these projects in such fierce competition, when they would probably make much more progress, more efficiently and economically, if they collaborated -at least sometimes. Why isn’t there more funding for science? What models would support greater scientific research & advances? These are more interesting questions, I think. He does just barely touch on a few of these ideas, towards the end, and I particularly like how a collaboration forms between former competitors near the end - but it took the suggestion of their big potential bankroller to do it...
You end up almost feeling sorry for him - not for not winning a Nobel Prize (which he clearly was desperate for), but for being so obsessed with it. He seems baffled by other scientists who don’t appear fazed when they are passed over or missed out. I know it’s a big deal, and some of these scientific fields can be incredibly intense. But despite being someone who looks at the immensity of the universe for a living, he seems to miss the big picture - that prizes, even this big, are the icing, not the cake.
There is certainly a lot of astronomical knowledge imparted - my favourite part was probably learning a little bit about some of the forgotten female astronomers.
Many of his gripes about the prize sound like a child learning that life is unfair. P. 221 ‘If the nobel Prize is a true meritocracy..’. Well, it’s not, is it? It’s a set of arbitrary rules made by a guy who died long ago & subjectively applied by a committee today.
It seems that his problems with this prize are also actually just symptoms of bigger, broader problems - why is the Nobel prize so sought after - the money, the prestige, the jobs, the grants the ability to run long term projects on your research interests forever after? Perhaps it is actually the scientific research system that is broken - why are so many good scientists forced to compete for such a small pool of funding? Why is the mode of demonstrating accomplishment ‘publish or perish’? Why are these projects in such fierce competition, when they would probably make much more progress, more efficiently and economically, if they collaborated -at least sometimes. Why isn’t there more funding for science? What models would support greater scientific research & advances? These are more interesting questions, I think. He does just barely touch on a few of these ideas, towards the end, and I particularly like how a collaboration forms between former competitors near the end - but it took the suggestion of their big potential bankroller to do it...
You end up almost feeling sorry for him - not for not winning a Nobel Prize (which he clearly was desperate for), but for being so obsessed with it. He seems baffled by other scientists who don’t appear fazed when they are passed over or missed out. I know it’s a big deal, and some of these scientific fields can be incredibly intense. But despite being someone who looks at the immensity of the universe for a living, he seems to miss the big picture - that prizes, even this big, are the icing, not the cake.