U.S. Postage Stamp Will Honor the 'First Lady of Physics'
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
Therefore an American citizen who is a physicist can be recognized for her contribution to physics, but a German or French citizen cannot be.
> Other subjects may be considered if the subject had significant impact on American history, culture or environment.
What would qualify someone for that? And why would those two (Noether and Curie) not qualify?
I'd expect the qualification would be, basically, would you expect to find this person in a book of US History (and not merely as a member of a foreign power, like, say, Churchill)? I think that this is probably a reasonable "you know it when you see it" situation, but I'm sure you could find edge-cases if that was your goal.
I doubt Marie Curie would say that she had anything to do with American history.
Winston Churchill's mother is American and he is also one of 8 people in history to be granted honorary American citizenship. Therefore he is American enough that a case can be made for putting him on a US stamp.
Lafayette would, of course, qualify on his own merits because he was directly important to US history. But in addition he is another of the 8 honorary US citizens in history.
The full list of honorary citizens is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorary_citizenship_of_the_Un....
It is worth noting that Mother Theresa is also on that list and actually has a stamp. See https://about.usps.com/postal-bulletin/2010/pb22290/html/inf....
The only mention in the United States in Marie Curie's Wikipedia article is a brief tour she did of the US in her later years to raise money.
She was the first woman to win Nobel, (and won it twice)
(His other prize was for explaining super conductivity; he won for experimental work and separately for theoretical work!)
Bardeen didn’t bring his young children to the Nobel award ceremony the first time. The King asked him where they were and jokingly said Bardeen had ought to bring them next time. And so he did!
Fortunately, if immortality is what you're after (rather than just the money), there are other, surer ways to get that. Being the first experiment to verify the defining property of one of the four forces of nature will do it. It's impossible to learn about weak parity violation without learning about Madame Wu. So everyone who matters will remember her :)
According to Magdolna Hargittai, it's not clear that this is one of them. She wrote that there were actually three experimental groups that verified parity violation, with unclear priority, and none of them were eligible for the Nobel in 1957 because all published after the deadline for that year.
And so we arrive at the question at the heart of this story: was it a fair decision not to award Wu a share of the prize? After all, there was an “empty slot” – according to the statutes of the Nobel Foundation a maximum of three people can share a prize in a given category. The NBS experiment was the first to verify parity violation on 27 December and Wu had suggested and was actively involved with the experiment. But Friedman and Telegdi, who also started their experiments in the late summer of 1956 and were already doing measurements in October, may have had some preliminary results by December too. However, what really counts is publications, and in that the NBS group and the Garwin–Lederman–Weinrich group were side by side, with Garwin and Lederman actually finishing their report days before the NBS group did. Whichever way success is measured, it would have been hard to pick one particular experimentalist for the prize.
As it turns out, this discussion is superfluous for legalistic reasons. As Bárány pointed out, “The awarded work must have been published before the year of the prize, in this case before 1 January 1957.” Since all three experimental studies were published in early 1957, none of the experimentalists could have been considered for the prize that year. The Nobel Committee could have decided to wait another year to award the prize for parity violation, but with the three experiments and the large number of physicists involved, the decision would always have been a hard one. Also, the committee needed strong candidates in 1957 and it is by no means certain that they had any as strong as Lee and Yang to put forward.
> Chien-Shiung Wu, a Chinese-born American physicist, will be commemorated with a U.S. Postal Service (USPS) stamp for her significant contributions in nuclear physics during her 40-year career. More specifically, Wu’s experiment on parity violation that had a monumental impact on particle theory and floored physicists at the time, reports Adrian Cho for Science.
Completely unrelated: "The first lady of the internet" has a more colorful story behind it. I'd recommend looking it up. Depending on what sources you find, this story might not be entirely SFW. :)
In the UK, these include "First class", "Second class", "First class large" etc stamps. In the USA, there's a "Forever" stamp.
I have a few, as it's easier to stick a stamp on my grandma's birthday card than either visit a post office, or buy postage online. But I only send about two ordinary letters a year.
;-)
I refuse the tyranny of auto-pay (auto-withdraw?).
Not only does auto-pay stir up nightmarish scenarios in my mind of dying and having auto-pay continue to pay for subscriptions, but I like the brutal reminder of just how much internet, water, electricity, credit card (etc.) are costing me.
Out of sight, out of mind, out of money.
As an interesting side note: There are cases where you want to use a check in Germany as well. There’s what’s called a “Bundesbankscheck” which is a check vouched for by the Bundesbank and it’s cash-equivalent. So instead of carrying large amounts of cash you can just carry one of those. Relevant for cases which require immediate payment.
* Insurance agent gives you a check for $XXX,XXX, payable to you AND your mortgage holder. * You endorse it. * You MAIL the check to the mortgage holder. * They endorse it. * They take their cut and mail the remainder back to you as another check.
Scared me to death, putting an endorsed check for $hundreds of $thousands in the mail. But the process is evidently enshrined in law... probably not much changed from a century ago.
It's damn time these horribly unfair Nobel Prizes were grossly overhauled or scrapped altogether and replaced with something better.
Time and time again we hear of the Nobel Prize committee making both questionable and unfair decisions by failing to award deserving people and instead awarding the Prize on political grounds rather than merit, and or overlooking people who made significant contributions to a discovery such as Wu, or bypassing deserving mavericks who have upset the establishment but still deserve to be honored (Fred Hoyle for instance). The fact that Nobel Prize awards cannot be awarded posthumously is also an utter disgrace.
The Nobel Prize system is a bloody sham more reminiscent of an age of patronage than it was even suitable for the 20th Century let alone the 21st.
The way of fixing it would be for some other philanthropist to offer alternative awards based on a much fairer system. The Nobels could then be easily undermined if an alternative prize system offered much higher prize money to Nobel winners for them not to accept their prizes after they were awarded. If nothing else, the publicly alone would bring the Nobels into disrepute once the wider world knew the reasons.
I'm well aware that rules governing the Nobel Prizes are fixed in stone by Alfred Nobel's estate but if it wanted to then Sweden could easily legislate law to override this arcane unfair system.
It's a good start that at least the US Postal Service is honoring Wu.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize_controversies
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/sep/30/nobel-prize-...
https://swarajyamag.com/ideas/the-nobel-prize-why-it-is-not-...
Even the eminent science journal Nature is in on the act:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-019-0256-3/figures/
How many more references like this would you like?
Enough said.
For example, the paper announcing the first observation of the Higgs boson [1] had hundreds of authors - none of whom received a Nobel for the discovery (the Nobel, like the Nobel for weak parity violation, was awarded to the theorists alone).
But I'm not so sure about your proposed solutions. There are already many alternative rewards - Wu herself was awarded the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1978 - and none come close to the public recognition that the Nobel has.
And is it really possible for the Swedish legislature to dictate that the foundation grant awards contrary to Nobel's will?
1: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037026931...
The Wolf Prize is only $100k, do any of the alternatives exceed the Nobel's amount of approximately $1 million?
I'm not wedded to my alternative proposal, as I'm sure there are many other alternatives that would be suitable. My key point is about the sheer unfairness of the system. Your comment about the Higgs also illustrates the point.
Yes, there are other awards and prizes but usually they're only known by those who are in the fields for which the award is given - thus, unfortunately, the general public is unaware of the achievements of these people. The trouble with the Nobel Prizes is their universal notoriety, this is troubling when many of its awards seem unduly unfair.
I'll confine myself to the sciences for the moment. There's any number of great scientists that students have never heard of; they study the discovery - the physics etc. - but they haven't a clue who articulated the science or even when the discovery was made - or even the context of the discovery. This lack of context is very troubling for many reasons I've not time to go into here.
Not only do the Nobel Prizes exacerbate this problem but also they create stereotypes and cult figures at the expense of others. I firmly believe that it is not in the best interests of any field of endeavor for a prize to be given and cocontributors to not also be acknowledged.
For example, just about everyone on the planet knows the name Einstein but how many know of Hermann Minkowski? Sure, if you're a physicist you will have and also you'll be aware of how important his work was to Einstein, same with David Hilbert and Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro but their names are almost completely unknown in the wider world.
Even here with Einstein we couldn't have a better example of Nobel Prize committee incompetence - as Einstein wasn't given its gong for either Special or General Relativity. If ever there was an oversight by the Nobel mob then this has to be it!
The Nobel Prizes idealize a few at the expense of many and in today's world this is turning out not to be an especially noble endeavor.
This is a long and involved matter and thus difficult to précis here, so I'm not a bit surprised I've ruffled feathers by touching on something that in some circles has become 'sacred'. And I'm sure anyone who is a potential recipient of a Nobel wouldn't like to hear what I've had to say.
It's worth remembering that in ways Nobel wasn't the most noble of people and that his Prizes were his way of cleansing his name into perpetuity - and to date his efforts have paid off par excellence.
BTW, let me assure you beyond doubt that I've never considered myself in line for one, so my comments are not just a case of sour grapes.