Reddit reviews Losing the Nobel Prize: A Story of Cosmology, Ambition, and the Perils of Science's Highest Honor

Just gonna leave this here for you:

https://www.amazon.com/Losing-Nobel-Prize-Cosmology-Ambition/dp/1324000910

Just finished reading Losing the Nobel Prize by Prof. Brian Keating. Pretty insightful on the type of effort and money that is required to conduct modern astronomical/cosmological research. It's also a rare criticism of the science-related Nobel prizes: the usual criticism is for the Peace and Literature prizes (and the Economics prize isn't even an actual Nobel prize).

Autogenerated.

I am Brian Keating, an astronomer who lost the Nobel Prize, AMA!

I lost the Nobel Prize. I saw the perils and the pitfalls of humanity’s highest honor from the inside. Then I set out to reform it forever.

What would it have been like to witness the Big Bang? For a moment, I had that experience. I’d been working on a telescope at the bottom of the world, the South Pole in Antarctica, for more than a decade. If we saw the cosmic signals predicted by cosmic luminaries like Stephen Hawking and Alan Guth, we’d book a sure ticket to Stockholm.

Suddenly, on March 17, 2014 we saw what we, and the whole scientific community, wanted to see. The world went crazy. We were on the front pages of the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the LA Times... and soon a well-produced viral video appeared on YouTube. Made by Stanford University, it explained our discovery’s significance and quickly garnered 2 million hits.

In between creating the telescope and the announcement of the Nobel-worthy discovery, I’d been edged out of the leadership of this experiment, called BICEP2. The competition in science is even more high-stakes than in the business world. For there are many billion dollar companies, but there is only one Nobel Prize.

Suddenly, just as the fanfare subsided, our Nobel dreams turned to dust. My new book, Losing the Nobel Prize tells the first-person inside scoop on what it was like to experience the ecstasy of a historic scientific first, only to see it disappear into disaster.

But the story didn’t end there. The very next year I was asked to nominate the winners of the next Nobel Prize. When I researched Alfred Nobel’s desires and compared them with what I was asked to do by the Swedish Royal Academy of Science I came to the shocking conclusion that the Nobel Prize had become irrevocably distorted from what Nobel had wished. My book explores the dual themes of love and loss in science as well as a dissection of the world’s most sacred cow, the Nobel Prize, all in the hopes that it can be restored to its former luster.

My book was selected as one of Amazon’s Ten Best Books of the Month and Nature Magazine’s Best Six Books of the Season, all of which was very flattering and surprising since this is my first non-academic publication.

Say hi to me anytime via Twitter, and follow my book announcements on Twitter, Facebook, or via my mailing list on my website.

Proof: https://imgur.com/SQUYlEs


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