Got this book from the Jeffco Whale of a Used Book Sale a couple of years ago.
Brian Keating is an astrophysicist/cosmologist. He had dreams and desires of winning the Nobel Prize in physics, but there was an issue with the results of the BICEP2 project. But, he was prominent enough to be able to nominate candidates to the prize for a year or two.
He certainly does have some good ideas for ways to improve the award. Pages 272 to 274 give his main recommendations.
- Add prizes in new and emerging disciplines
- Award the physics prize to groups of any size
- Give retroactive awards
- Allow for posthumous awards
- Recognize that true discovery is serendipitous In other words, he would like to see more prizes given to people who make unexpected discoveries, not just confirmation of previous theories
Other things of note:
Pages 174-175. “There is a fierce competition that begins the day you declare yourself a physics major. First, among your fellow undergraduates, you spar for top ranking in your class. This leads to the next battle: becoming a graduate student at a top school. Then, you toil for six to eight years to earn a postdoc job at another top school. And finally, you hope, comes a coveted faculty job, which can become permanent if you are privileged enough to get tenure. Along the way, the number of peers in your group diminishes by a factor of ten at each stage, from hundreds of undergraduates to just one faculty job becoming available every few years in your field.” Brian Keating, Losing the Nobel Prize: A Story of Cosmology, Ambition, and the Perils of Science’s Highest Honor
Yeah? Um, no. I don’t think so. I was a physics major, and I had NO interest in sparing for top ranking in my class.
Page 228. He also had the idea that the nominated people or groups should also be publicized, just like how people know who is up for Academy Awards. It can be an honor just to have been nominated.
Page 244. He mentions Planck data as showing that what BICEP2 found, was simply polarized light from dust grains in the Milky Way, it was not primordial polarized light from the time of the Big Bang.
After reading that he likes to hang with the likes of Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, Lex Fridman, and Jordan Peterson, my opinion of him drops waaaayyy down considerably.
He is turning into a physics YouTuber chasing clout. I am going to stay away from him.