Check out the full list here: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/favorite-top-science-books-2018-yir

This came upon the heels of Science Friday selecting it as one of their Best Science Books of 2018….what a weekend!

These honors blow me away and mark more major “wins” for a work which is ironic for a book about loss!

I’m in good company with some great authors on all of these lists. including Stephen Hawking’s “Brief Answers to Big Questions”, his final book and Sabine Hossenfelder’s Lost In Math, How Beauty Leads Physics Astray.  I touch on this last topic in my lecture at Microsoft to the SETI Institute how three kinds of errors can cause scientists to err: systematic errors, statistical errors and blunders.

December 10th is Nobel Prize Day!

On Nobel Prize award ceremony day, December 10^th at 7PM, I’ll be at the Fleet Science Center in San Diego’s historic Balboa Park for a special event: The Nobel Prize: A Problematic Quest to Recognize Scientific Discovery. We’ll be discussing this year’s awards and the Nobel Prize in general. Get you tickets early. A $5 bargain! You can also check the official Nobel Prize site and Youtube Channel to view the ceremony online.

Who Won The Nobel Prizes This Year?

As I noted in Losing The Nobel Prize, up until this year, only two women have ever been awarded the prize in Physics, Marie Curie, who won in 1903, and Maria Goeppert-Mayer, who was awarded the prize in 1963 while she was a Professor at UCSD. This year Donna Strickland, from Canada, became the third woman winner sharing the prize with Arthur Ashkin, from the US, and Gerard Mourou, from France. It recognizes their discoveries in the field of laser physics. Dr Ashkin developed a laser technique described as optical tweezers, which is used to study biological systems. Drs. Mourou and Strickland paved the way for the shortest and most intense laser pulses ever created, developing a technique called ‘Chirped Pulse Amplification’ (CPA). It has found uses in laser therapy targeting cancer and in the millions of corrective laser eye surgeries which are performed each year.