Warning: the contents of this article may offend all those journalists and politicians who make their careers denigrating experts and anyone who is educated
Autumn is on us again, and pretty soon we’ll be covering the annual round of Nobel Prizes. But before we do, here’s another set of awards[1], brought to us by the pen of the excellent Linda Geddes of the Guardian. They are the Breakthrough Prizes,[2] and like the Nobels, seek to reward the very best in intellectual accomplishment. If you don’t believe us click, and discover the work of John Cardy and Alexander Zamolodchikov, whose mathematical reasoning has not only given us a new theory of matter, it might also help with Quantum Computing. Or how about the medical insights of Michel Sadelein, who has been training up T Cells to go after some of the most intractable diseases? There’s more like this in Linda’a article-so give it a click.
The world is full of well paid people like politicians and journalists who like to denigrate expertise like this. People who dispense half truths and insinuations about climate change. Or declare generally that “we have no need of experts” But you cant choose truth only when it suits you. We knew a few people who did that on the matter of cigarettes and lung cancer. We don’t know them now.
[1]https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/sep/14/breakthrough-prize-winners-2023-science
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Prize#:~:text=The%20Breakthrough%20Prizes%20are%20a%20set%20of%20international,Breakthrough%20Prize%20Board%20in%20recogniti
#science #breakthrough prize #nobel prize #climate science #quantum computing
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