Word: nobelity
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...target came as the chief recommendation in the report of the oft-touted Greenhouse Gas Task Force, which Faust convened last winter. Gore grabbed the national spotlight with his Oscar award-winning documentary on global warming—An Inconvenient Truth—and went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to increase awareness about the impact of climate change. The University-wide target follows a series of recent, more local pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at Harvard. Last December, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences announced it would seek to reduce its emissions...
Amartya Sen, the Nobel Prize-winning Harvard professor of economics and philosophy, argued against what he called the mainstream theory of social justice in a talk at Harvard Law School’s Pound Hall yesterday. Sen argued that the transcendental theory of justice, which he attributed to philosophers John Rawls and Robert Nozick, overlooks important aspects of justice by concentrating narrowly on what it would take to have a perfectly just society, rather than on improving existing, imperfect social structures. “Justice-enhancing changes demand comparative assessment, not any immaculate identification of the just society...
...physicist Lene Hau, 2001), mapping the human genome (geneticist Eric Lander, 1987), penning acclaimed novels (Cormac McCarthy, 1981; the recently deceased David Foster Wallace, 1997), scheming to save our threatened fisheries (lobsterman Ted Ames, 2005) and solving Fermat's Last Theorem (mathematician Andrew Wiles, 1997). Seven have nabbed the Nobel Prize, including geneticist Barbara McClintock (1981) and former U.S. poet laureate Joseph Brodsky (1981). Others have won Pulitzers, Fields Medals -the math world's top honor - and National Book Awards. The chosen few are informed by an "out-of-the-blue" phone call, which can prompt shrieks, stunned silence...
CERN's clerisy of PhDs and Nobel Prize-winners tire pretty quickly of the public's near-erotic obsession with the destructive power of a machine they consider a harmless tool. But, there's no underestimating the thrill of the risk. Earlier this year, when I visited CERN, my tour group included a father and his slouching, intensely apathetic teenage son. It wasn't until the tour guide mentioned that a helium leak could fell a man on the spot that the youngster's eyes lit up, practically dancing with visions of white-coated scientists crumpling to the floor like...
...Rather, my vexation is with the vast majority of Harvard students who do not even take the time to peruse the MIT course catalog and do not pursue academic interests beyond the gates of Harvard. For science and engineering concentrators this is all but unforgivable. Nobel laureates, inventors, scientists and engineers of all stripes are actively disseminating cutting-edge knowledge to all who will listen just blocks away, and almost everyone here seems to ignore it. Maybe Harvard’s future scientists could use a little more of the pre-professional attitude shared by their financially oriented peers...