Nobel 2014 1: Yeah...so THAT happened...

Guess what?  Trust me - you'll never guess...

Intro written in 2019:  A note about what you are about to read.  Most of this was written in 2014, and then set aside, unfinished and unblogged.  Only recently (2019) did I unearth my notes – how they got “earthed” in the first place shall remain a mystery – and try to put them together in a semi-coherent narrative.  So any facts and figures you may read below were current as of 2014.

The first few selections from the menu (originally written before we flew to Sweden) lead to pages where the text consists of several entries that were conceived as individual blog posts, with divider lines indicating where each post would have ended.  The later menu selections- most of which were written while we were in Sweden - have a bit more narrative structure.

Apologies for the semi-random shift between present and past tense.  I’m basically too lazy to go back and make it consistent.

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Google the phrase “travel blog” and you’ll get over 12,500,000 matches.
Google the phrase “food blog” and you’ll get over 4,200,000 matches.
Hell, google “Barbie blog” and even there you’ll get over 70,000 matches.

Clearly, the world doesn’t need any more travel, food, or Barbie blogs.

But google the phrase “What Was It Like When Your Brother-In-Law Won the 2014 Noble Prize in Chemistry And You Got To Go To Stockholm For the Awards Ceremony Blog” and you get a big fat goose egg.  Amazing.  Almost impossible to believe that there aren’t at least 5,000 matches for this.  And yet.

Thus was born this blog, which hopefully can serve as a way for friends, family, and others to learn about something that is likely out of reach for most of us, but is so unusual that one can’t help but be fascinated by the details.  Think of this as “Us Magazine” for the nerdy set.  Fewer pictures of starlets, more words like “nanomicroscopy” and “lutefisk”.  (Microsoft Word just underlined nanomicroscopy as a word it doesn’t know about.  C’mon, Microsoft – get with the program.)

Disclaimer: The interpretation of events herein reflect MY understanding of reality.  Some of the facts may be wrong, but they are honest reflections of what I think is/was true.  And I have no doubt there will be shifts between pure factual reporting and pure fancy.  If you don’t like that go write your own blog.  But you have to find your own Nobel Prize winner.  This one is taken.

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In 2010, a group of four experts set up a betting pool to predict the winners of that year’s Nobel Prizes.  Although they didn’t get any of the winners correct for 2010, they DID manage to name three future winners, with one of the experts correctly naming both Weo and the person who would eventually win the Economics prize in 2016.  That brilliant prognosticator was none other than Milhouse van Houten, who bested Database (who did prematurely predict the 2016 winner in Chemistry), Martin Prince, and Lisa Simpson.

Everything's coming up Milhouse!
Anyone who doesn’t know what I’m referring to can, to be blunt, eat my shorts!

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Obviously, I didn’t win anything.  The Boy Wonder and hero of this story is, of course, W.E. (Weo) Moerner, aka the guy who married my sister a long time ago.  He has spent the better part of 25 years (as of 2014) doing incomprehensible things with lasers that have nothing to do with light sabers or Pink Floyd music at the planetarium at midnight.  Of course, George Lucas popularized the idea of a light saber, which goes to show how trivially comprehensible the light saber is.  See, some guy from Hollywood thought it up and had someone else shape some Styrofoam and plastic and discarded chewing gum into something tangible and – viola! – light saber.

What Weo did with HIS laser, however, was (spoiler alert) be the first person ever – EVER! - to take a picture of a single molecule.  No special effects here – just extremely good, extremely hard science.  Oh, and taking a picture of something that small?  It wasn’t just that it’s hard to do – which it is.  The amazing thing about this is that for a couple hundred years it has been considered an immutable law of the universe that it was IMPOSSIBLE to do this.  There’s even a mathematical formula that “proved” it was impossible.  So he was the FIRST PERSON EVER TO DO SOMETHING THAT WAS IMPOSSIBLE TO DO.  They should probably have a prize to recognize people who do something like that.  Seems like a big deal.

Makes that time you mastered burping the alphabet in one breath seem a bit less momentous now, doesn’t it?

Over time, Weo (and others, including co-winner Eric Betzig) improved on the techniques for photographing those single molecules and invented a new kind of microscope – one that has such super-duper resolution that it can actually see chemical reactions happening at the molecular-level in real time.  The other co-winner (Stephan Heil) took a different path so was recognized for a different, but related achievement.

So what all these guys did is to open up entirely new ways for OTHER scientists, like biologists, biochemists, and engineers to study things in their areas of interest.  So this discovery isn’t just a stand-alone achievement.  It going to have cascade effects in TONS of other areas in the coming decades.

And just to clear up some conceptual confusion: a “photograph” in this context has nothing to do with Kodak cameras and film.  For you Millennials out there, Kodak cameras are what us dinosaurs used before cell phones to take pictures.  You didn’t take selfies in our day because film was EXPENSIVE and you didn’t waste it on pictures of yourself….or food….and certainly not on porn, since someone else had to develop the film and would see exactly what you were doing you nasty pervert!  No, in this context a photograph involves lots of lasers and (believe it or not) jellyfish goo, and lots of computers to crunch information before you end up with a picture.  There’s probably a lot of math, too.  I don’t know.  Like I said at the start, I didn’t win the Nobel Prize for this stuff – Weo did.

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BTW: Just who is this “William E. Moerner” who the Nobel people said won the award?  

Personally, I don’t know such a person.  I do know about “W.E. Moerner” who has published a ton of papers read by people who are frankly a lot smarter than me.

And I know of “Dub-ya-ee”, as friends and family from San Antonio call the guy who married my oldest sister Sharon.

I personally know “Weo”, which is the nickname he received in college from a friend, who said “I’m NOT calling you Dub-ya-ee”.  Fortunately for the world, the local grocery store chain at the time was running an ad campaign with the catchy (NOT) tagline of “Where Economy Originates”.  In a display of both ingenuity and cruelty that only good friends can get away with, he dubbed his friend “Weo” and that’s how we all know him.

So who is “William E. Moerner”?  Well, it seems that the Nobel Committee simply can’t accept that someone worthy of their recognition is really, truly, known professionally as “W.E. Moerner”.  They are insistent that he be commemorated as “William E. Moerner”, and this is final.

Coincidentally, this is the same fate that befell both “Big Al” Einstein and Mumbles Mandela.

What happens next?  Tune into the next episode by selecting another page from the "2014 Nobel" menu, above.  These instructions cheerfully supplied as a public service for those who haven't won a Nobel Prize.  

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