What about chemists on US postage stamps?

In my last post, I mentioned I couldn't think of any chemists on US postage stamps at the time, though I mentioned discovering a stamp for Harvey Washington Wiley.  This was due to ignorance on my part.  To set the record straight, in addition to Wiley:

• In 1940, Charles W. Eliot appeared on a 3 cent stamp in the Famous Americans series. 
• In 1947, Thomas A. Edison appeared on a 3 cent stamp, on the 100th anniversary of his birth.  (His first lamp had been celebrated earlier, on a 2 cent stamp in 1929.) 
• In 1948, George Washington Carver appeared on a 3 cent stamp, in the same format as the 1940 Famous American Scientists issue (which originally featured no physicists, astronomers, chemists, or mathematicians).  He later appeared on a 32 cent stamp issued in 1998, part of the Celebrate the Century - 1910s series.  I believe this gives him the honor of being the only chemist to have appeared on 2 different US postage stamps.
• In 1954, George Eastman appeared on a 3 cent stamp, celebrating his 100th birthday. 
• In 1983, Joseph Priestley appeared on a 20 cent stamp, celebrating his 250th birthday.
• In 1993, Percy Lavon Julian appeared on a 29 cent stamp, in the Black Heritage series. 
• In 2009, Linus Pauling (Nobel laureate in both chemistry and peace) and biochemist Gerti Cori (Nobel laureate in physiology/medicine) both appeared on 41 cent stamps in the American Scientists issue of that year, its second such issue.
• In 2011, Melvin Calvin and biochemist Severo Ochoa, both Nobel laureates (in chemistry and medicine/phyisology, respectively), appeared on Forever stamps in the third and final American Scientists issue. 

Finally, in 1988 a physicist associated with Xerox, Chester Carlson, appeared on a 21 cent stamp in the Great Americans series. I should have mentioned him earlier.

Once again, I'm grateful to the website of the Mystic Stamp Company, as well as stampworld.com, and finally this article:

L. R. Caswell, 1990:  American chemists and physicists on postage stamps.  Journal of Chemical Education, 67 (10):  842-847.

 

 

The 2024 Nobel Prizes in science

DTLR cannot resist opining on this year's Nobel science prizes laureates, especially when several of the non-physics laureates have physics connections, while one of the physics laureates does not.

One of the two laureates for physiology or medicine is Gary Ruvkun, whose bachelor's and Ph.D. degrees are in biophysics.  One of the three laureates for chemistry, David Baker, had done a postdoc in biophysics.  He currently has an adjunct appointment in the physics department at his university, along with four other departments aside from his home department.  A second chemistry laureate, John Jumper, had done a bachelor's degree in physics and math, and a master's in theoretical condensed matter physics, before earning a second master's and a Ph.D. both in theoretical chemistry.

It is perhaps also notable that David Baker's father was a physicist and his mother was a geophysicist.  One of the physics laureates, John Hopfield, also had two physicist parents.  

Artificial intelligence was the center of this year's physics and chemistry awards.  Two of the three chemistry laureates were awarded for AI-based protein structure prediction, for their work with AlphaFold, which is owned by Google's parent company, Alphabet.  There is little doubt that this achievement belongs to biological chemistry.  I was pleased to see a share of the award go to employees of a private sector company instead of a university, not something that happens often nowadays.

The physics prize, however, has been extremely controversial, in many cases sparking outrage and cynicism, among both physicists and non-physicists.

Let's start with the laureates themselves before discussing their achievements.  A number of commentators, including some who should know better (e.g., Sabine Hossenfelder) falsely claim that the award was not given to physicists, but to computer scientists.  This is only half true.  One of the laureates, Geoffrey Hinton, is not a physicist, by either education or employment.  He is a cognitive scientist and computer scientist.  (Apparently he is also a direct descendent of George Boole!)  The other, John Hopfield, has superb physics bona fides.  His education was in physics, he was a Buckley Prize winner for his contributions to condensed matter physics, and he is probably the greatest living biological physicist today.  It is true that he is also considered a neuroscientist and a molecular biologist.  In fact, his last academic position before retirement was on the Princeton University molecular biology faculty.  He is a titan of both physics and interdisciplinary science, though the Nobel committee focused on his work on Hopfield Networks, a model of associative memory based on statistical physics (specifically, spin glasses).  He has served as President of the APS.

Unlike many, I celebrate Hopfield's Nobel award.  Geoffrey Hinton is really the puzzle here.  The Nobel committee zeroed in on his stochastic versions of Hopfield Networks, which are called Boltzmann machines.  However, his contributions to neural networks go well beyond that:  he introduced the backpropagation algorithm and later was one of the founders of deep learning methodology.  He is just as much a titan in the neural net community as Hopfield is in the biological physics community.

The history of neural networks is long, and boasts key contributions by a number of individuals.  While Hinton in undoubtedly a key figure in this history, others have also been recognized (including by the Turing award).  Perhaps the key point for the Nobel committee was Hinton's use of statistical physics ideas for the Boltzmann machine. 

There is no doubt that neural networks are used in physics, as in so many other fields of science and engineering.  There is also no doubt that ideas from physics have influenced neural network technology, and machine learning more generally.  But are Hopfield Networks and Boltzmann machines worthy of a Nobel Prize in physics?  This is a question that was hotly debated in the days after the awards were announced.  It seems though, the debate has been lopsided, at least in the sources I've read, with few commentators being willing to defend the Nobel commitee's choice this year.  This award was a huge surprise to nearly everyone who follows the Nobel Prize news every October, including me.  I was even more shocked when the host of the Physics World podcast admitted he had never heard of John Hopfield until the announcement of the prize.

The American Physical Society, in its official new release, decided to get behind the award, but notably emphasized Hopfield as a longtime member of the APS community.  This could be read as a veiled critique of Hinton's award; as far as I know, Hinton's one contribution to the physics literature is a co-authored paper that was published in a physics conference proceedings.

In principle there are several APS units that might choose to celebrate the award to either Hopfield or both Hopfield and Hinton:  the Division of Biological Physics, the Division on Computational Physics, the Topical Group on Statistical and Nonlinear Physics, the Topical Group on Data Science, and the Forum on Industrial and Applied Physics.  However, I have seen and heard of few who have actually embraced this year's award.

This is regrettable.  I think Hopfield is deserving of the honor in the sense that James Peebles was in 2019 - a kind of lifetime career recognition.  I'm not ready to render an opinion on Geoffrey Hinton's Nobel Prize in Physics.  We need to take a step back from the knee-jerk, immediate, and highly emotional reactions.  I'm hoping some thoughtful commentators will, in the coming year, weigh in with well considered opinions.  As a physicist who has worked in machine learning (there are now many, many of us), I may choose to view this award as recognition of those working in this interdisciplinary space who actually use physics ideas, regardless of our formal education or employment in physics.

Gordon Moore (1929-2023)

DTLR joins the physics, chemistry, engineering, and computer science communities in mourning Dr. Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, who sadly passed on March 24, just a few days ago.  While I did not work in the areas that he did, his contributions to our civilization have affected all of mankind.

The 2022 Nobel Laureates in Science

The first week of October has been an exciting one, as usual, with the announcements of the Nobel Prizes, especially those in science.  DTLR readers know that I have a particular interest in connections between Nobel Laureates and fluid mechanics research, even though the prizes have rarely been awarded for work in classical hydrodynamics.  This year is no different, but at least two of the science laureates have familial connections to hydrodynamicists!

One of this year's physics laureates, John F. Clauser, stated in an oral history interview conducted 20 years ago with Joan Bromberg, that his father was a grad student of Theodore Von Karman's, and later became chair of the aeronautics department at Johns Hopkins.  Clauser states that "But all along the way, he always was trying to understand physics, and there were very strong similarities between the mathematics of fluid flow and the mathematics of quantum mechanics, and he didn't understand quantum mechanics. And he kind of pre-programmed me as the guy who might help try to solve the problem that he couldn't solve."  This appears in the very first paragraph of the transcript!  Further down in the transcript, Clauser returns to fluid mechanics, revealing that he himself is quite knowledgeable about it, discussing solitons, compressible flow, the subsonic-supersonic transition, and shock waves.

One of this year's chemistry laurates, Carolyn Bertozzi, has an older sister Andrea, who is a distinguished math professor at UCLA and works in fluid mechanics.  Andrea Bertozzi is co-author (with her doctoral advisor, Andrew Majda) of Vorticity and Incompressible Flow (Cambridge University Press, 2002). Incidentally, their father was an MIT physics professor.

Congratulations to all the 2022 Nobel Laureates in physiology/medicine, physics, and chemistry!

 

That famous painting of Lavoisier

Any scientist who visits the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City is brought to a halt by Jacque-Louis David's portrait of Antoine and Marie-Anne Lavoisier.  Chemistryworld has a post by Philip Ball this month about the discovery of what had been originally painted (and covered up).  Antoine Lavoisier was arguably the most pivotal figure in the history of chemistry.  Ball speculates that the painting was altered due to worries about Lavoisier's portrayal in light of the forthcoming French Revolution.  If so, the alterations were not sufficient to save Lavoisier's life--he was executed during the Revolution--though his wife did survive.  Check out Philip Ball's account.

The Nobel Prizes 2014-2020

In its first year, this blog commented here and here on the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics; however I failed to comment on any of the prizes in following years.  As we are now wrapping up Nobel week 2020, let me offer a few observations on the prizes in physics and chemistry in the years since 2013.  Before I do that, I want to also note last year's Economics Prize for work applying randomized trials to social science.  Such a worthy achievement reflects well on two earlier advocates of randomized trials, statisticians Ronald A. Fisher and Austin Bradford Hill, who pioneered their use in agriculture and medicine, respectively.

Physics

 

I am especially pleased to see two of the subsequent prizes in physics were awarded for technological innovations, namely 2014 (blue LEDs) and 2018 (inventions in laser physics).  It is my view that applied physics is part of physics proper, and should be recognized as such at the highest levels.  Other recent prizes in this vein include 2009 (fiber optics and CCD sensors), half of the 2005 prize (optical frequency comb), and 2000 (the integrated circuit, and semiconductor heterostructures).

 

The 2017 prize to the prime movers of the LIGO collaboration for discovering gravitational waves was arguably premature at the time, as I had misgivings about certain methodological details of the original discovery.  However I think the evidence base accumulated since then, and the methodological improvements, have been both impressive and convincing.  I am prepared to join other voices proclaiming that we are living in the era of gravitational wave astronomy.

The 2019 and 2020 prizes are unusual in that they have gone for two years in a row to achievements in astrophysics and astronomy.  Following the same pattern, each year one theoretical astrophysicist and two observational astronomers shared the prize.  In 2019, the theorist James Peebles essentially received a lifetime achievement award for his contributions to the standard model of cosmology, while Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz were honored for the first discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a solar-like star.  This year, Roger Penrose was honored for his theoretical work on black holes.  Laureates Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez are the heads of two competing groups making observations at Sagittarius A*, who determined that the center of the Milky Way galazy is occupied by a "supermassive compact object".  This last is carefully worded; the obvious implication is that this object is a Black Hole, but the Nobel Committee chose not to use those words.  I am pleased that the leads of these fiercely competitive groups were honored together.

Finally, it is notable that though the third year of the Nobel Prize in Physics included its first female laureate (Marie Curie, 1903), a 60 year gap occurred before the second (Maria Goeppert Mayer, 1963), and a 55-year gap occured before the third (Donna Strickland, 2018).  Only a two-year gap separated the third and fourth women laureates.  I started the study of physics 28 years ago and saw year after year pass with no female laureates, while several possible female candidates passed away, like Deborah Jin who died at age 47.  It's therefore breathtaking to see two female laureates in just the last two years!  Hopefully this is not simply a 'market correction' but rather a 'new normal' (apologies for the cliche'd analogy).

 

Chemistry

 

First I can't resist bragging that the 2014 prize was awarded to physicists.  Most of the recent prizes have been for technological innovations like theirs, with many being specific to the life sciences.  This is befitting chemistry's status as the "central science", overlapping on one end with physics and at the other with biology and medicine.  Finally, it is notable that 4 of the 7 ever female laureates were awarded in the last 11 years (Ada Yonath, 2009; Frances Arnold, 2018; and this year's laureates Emannuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna).

Before this year, each woman laureate in physics or chemistry had died before the next one was awarded in her field; most tragically, Irene Joliot-Curie winning the year after her mother died.  The exception was Frances Arnold's 2018 award while Ada Yonath was still alive.  However now there are four living female laureates in chemistry and two in physics, an unprecedented occurrence, but let us hope these numbers will only increase moving forward.  

 

(By my count, there are currently 7 living female laureates in physiology and medicine; 10 in peace; 6 in literature; and only 1 in economics, though that prize has a shorter history than the others.)