Belated award

[supergee]

Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered radio pulsars but did not get a Nobel Prize for it because everybody knows gurlz can’t do science. 44 years later the scientific establishment had a collective rush of brains to the head and awarded her the Breakthrough Prize, which brings with it $3 million. Apparently, she was not awarded a phallic object with which to express her feelings about the original judges, but she’s doing something even better: donating the prize to science scholarships for women and minorities, which I am in favor of less on social justice grounds than because we need all the science we can get. [LiveScience]

Thanx to Metafilter

Comments

[mrissa]

...that's what social justice is for, Arthur. More good stuff for everybody, whether it's science or art or babies who don't have lead poisoning. That is literally what social justice grounds are. You don't have to disavow social justice because we need all the science we can get, because the two go together, and also "less on social justice grounds" is the new "I am not a feminist but."

It doesn't work that way

[nojay]

Discovering "stuff" doesn't earn you a science Nobel Prize. Explaining how things work gets Nobel prizes. Professor Higgs didn't discover the Higgs boson, he and his colleagues[1] predicted it from other results and figured out what it should be like and when it was actually "discovered" i.e. proved to exist by the nice folks at CERN he got the Nobel Prize then.


[1]There were three winners of the Nobel for the Higgs boson work, the original paper had, I think, 23 names but the three winners were the leads who got the glory. Prof. Higgs got his name on the numberplate.

Re: It doesn't work that way

[violsva]

From Nobel's will: "the person who shall have made the most important discovery or invention within the field of physics."

[marahmarie]

"in favor of less on social justice grounds"

What does that even mean? Is social justice bad/science good (if so, I disagree).

"than because we need all the science we can get"

It's not an either/or proposition. We can be cool to each other *and* have more science!

And women are under-represented in STEM fields so to *not* want it on social justice grounds says something I think you might not have meant to say, which is why I'm asking...