{"id":25531,"date":"2019-12-31T12:13:00","date_gmt":"2019-12-31T17:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/?p=25531"},"modified":"2019-12-29T11:32:01","modified_gmt":"2019-12-29T16:32:01","slug":"who-earned-an-old-style-nobel-prize-in-2019","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2019\/12\/31\/who-earned-an-old-style-nobel-prize-in-2019\/","title":{"rendered":"Who earned an old-style Nobel Prize in 2019?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

One of the (many) interesting angles in Brian Keating’s Losing the Nobel Prize<\/a><\/em> (see previous post 1<\/a>; also previous post 2<\/a>) was that the Nobel in Physics was previously awarded for recently-developed stuff that had obvious near-term practical value for humans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Marconi and Braun won in 1909<\/a> for the prize in “Physics” for their work in radio, which I think today we would call “engineering.” Nils Gustaf Dal\u00e9n won in 1912<\/a> for improving lighthouses with a gas regulator.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What if the Nobel prize system still worked this way? They couldn’t reach back five decades, as they did with the Higgs boson<\/a> (postulated 1964; confirmed 2012; Nobel Prize 2013). Who would have earned the prize for an advancement made in 2019?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My nomination: the team behind Garmin Autoland<\/a>. It seems doubtful that the headline use will be common, but the technology could be adapted to yield huge safety improvements even for healthy two-pilot crews. The weather-avoidance system, for example, could suggest to pilots “Are you sure that you don’t want to adopt the following flight path?” The flap and gear extension systems could say “Would you like to add flaps and gear now that you’re lined up on final?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why it is important for humanity: a lot of people ride as passengers in airplanes. It is upsetting when airplanes crash (but, to judge by relative media coverage, hardly anyone cares about automobile crashes).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reader: What are your picks? I guess you could also go back a couple of years (but not 49!) to things that proved themselves useful in 2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Related<\/p>\n\n\n\n