Nobel Prize: Blessing or Curse?

SETI Talks

Tags: SETI Talks, Outreach, Astronomy

Time: Tuesday, Sep 10, 2019 -

Location: SRI International, 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025

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Scientists can spend their entire career on a single idea or elaborate experiment and never find anything new. But if they make a significant breakthrough and discover what they have been looking for, they can win the ultimate prize: the Nobel Prize.

Is the Nobel Prize, and any other high-profile recognition, a valid indicator of being an excellent scientist? In their ambition to pursue the Nobel gold, are scientists deceived by galactic mirages? Does the Nobel Prize hamper scientific progress by encouraging speed and competition while punishing inclusivity, collaboration, and innovation?

To discuss these provocative ideas, we invited two astronomers whose life and career have been closely connected with the Nobel Prize. Brian Keating, Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of California, San Diego, was a member of the BICEP2, a cosmology telescope that was thought to have witnessed the Big Bang in 2014. In his book, “Losing the Nobel Prize,” Brian tells the inside story of the BICEP2's detection and the ensuing scientific drama. Alex Filippenko, Professor of Astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, was the only person to have been a member of both teams that revealed the accelerating expansion of the Universe.  This groundbreaking discovery led to the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for the teams’ leaders. 

Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer at the SETI Institute, will moderate this discussion. The scientists will describe their experiences in the fast-paced field of cosmology and whether the idea that their research could lead to a Nobel Prize influenced their work. They’ll also share their thoughts on the pursuit of fame and the question of ethics in modern science.

Alex Filippenko giving a lecture

Alex Filippenko (B.A. physics, 1979, U.C. Santa Barbara; Ph.D. astronomy, 1984, Caltech) is a Professor of Astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also a Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor in the Physical Sciences and a Miller Senior Fellow in the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science. An elected member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, he is one of the world's most highly cited astronomers and the recipient of numerous prizes for his scientific research. He was the only person to have been a member of both teams that revealed the accelerating expansion of the Universe. As a result of this breakthrough  discovery, all team members earned the 2007 Gruber Cosmology Prize and the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. The team leaders also received the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics. Winner of the most prestigious teaching awards at UC Berkeley and voted the “Best Professor” on campus a record nine times, in 2006 he was named the Carnegie/CASE National Professor of the Year among doctoral institutions. He received the Astronomical Society of the Pacific’s 2010 Richard H. Emmons Award for undergraduate teaching. Filippenko has produced five astronomy video courses with The Great Courses, coauthored an award-winning college astronomy textbook (5 editions), and appears in more than 120 television documentaries. He was awarded the 2004 Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization, and selected as one of only two recipients of the 2017 Caltech Distinguished Alumni Award. An avid tennis player, hiker, skier, whitewater rafter, snorkeler, and scuba diver, he enjoys world travel and spending time with his family. One of his passions is observing total solar eclipses, having experienced 17 of them so far.

Brian G. Keating

Brian G. Keating is a Distinguished Professor of Physics at the Center for Astrophysics & Space Sciences in the Department of Physics at the University of California, San Diego. He received his B.S. from Case Western Reserve University, M.S. from Brown University in 1995, and Ph.D. from Brown in 2000. He was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford and a postdoctoral fellow at Caltech. Keating's research area is the study of the cosmic microwave background and its relationship to the origin and evolution of the Universe. In 2001 Keating conceived the first Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) B-mode observing campaign, called BICEP (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization), located at the South Pole. In 2014 the BICEP2 successor project announced that it had found evidence of B-modes. The BICEP2 experiment team received the 2010 NASA Group Achievement Award. Keating is Co-Principal Investigator of the Simons Array, a Cosmic Microwave Background polarimetry experiment. The project consists of three POLARBEAR-2 type receivers at the James Ax Observatory in the Atacama Desert in Chile. These are a successor to the original POLARBEAR experiment which measured B-modes in 2014. In 2016, Keating became Director of the Simons Observatory, Cosmic Microwave Background experiment co-located near the Simons Array and ACT telescopes in northern Chile. Groundbreaking for the Simons Observatory occurred on June 30, 2019, at its site in Chile. The Simons Foundation and the  Heising-Simons Foundation have awarded a total of $80 million to the Simons Observatory, including $20 million for its operation phase beginning in 2022. The project includes over 250 collaborators from over 30 institutions around the world. Keating published the book “Losing the Nobel Prize,” in 2018. It describes the BICEP and BICEP2 experiments, devised to detect and map the polarization of the cosmic microwave background radiation left over from the big bang. In the book, Keating argues that the Nobel Prizes in science have strayed from their original intent of Alfred Nobel's will. As a result, it’s possible that scientific progress is hindered by fostering unnecessary, and sometimes destructive, competition by limiting credit to only three living individuals per prize.