Thursday, May 18, 2006

Collecting Nobels

Harvard is a pretty amazing place to be around. Tonight I went to the CfA Monthly Observatory Night. Professor Avi Loeb gave a lecture on "How the Universe Began, and How It Will End". Though it lost me a few times it was still very interesting.

When talking about the cosmic background radition left over from the big bang, he pointed out that the first person to hear it was sitting in the front row and that he got a Nobel Prize for hearing it. It was Robert Wilson and this is the 3rd time I've been at a lecture with a Nobel laureate in the audience (that I know of). I might start a collection.

I've also "met" Charles Townes who invented the Maser and Linda Buck who won the prize in medicine in 2004 for "for their discoveries of odorant receptors and the organization of the olfactory system", basically how smell works.

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