MovieChat Forums > Nobel Son (2008) Discussion > Apparently Never Met a Nobel Prize Winne...

Apparently Never Met a Nobel Prize Winner...


lulz....


you do NOT emphasize that a nobel prize winner is a great scientist by showing him teaching classes.

you show him sitting in his office, teaching group meeting, talking at seminars, etc.

nobel prize winners RARELY teach. IN FACT by the time they receive their nobel prize, they are so old that they are emeritus.

despite what people think, there will never be a day when developments in chemistry or physics can be explained to a layman. we are already beyond the days of simple ideas, simple explanations, and simple models.

you could never TRULY explain to someone what MALDI is... what conjugated polymers are... what surface mediated catalysis is.... hell, what a zeolite is and why it is so important....

in the same way you can never characterize a scientist unless you are a scientist. you will never understand what makes them tick, how they think, how they feel, and what motivates them...


furthermore, you can never imitate a scientist...


no actor knows of being professionally schooled for 10 years, and then 20 years of research....


there will never be a time when hollywood can touch the mind of a scientist...

it will always be unattainable and impossible...

in the same way the geniuses are special because they are able to make intellectual leaps that are impossible with normal brain function (like the first ape using a tool)...

trying to imitate the mind of a scientist is impossible because information and experience exists in that mind that cannot be "imagined" and cannot be "simulated" without prior personal knowledge.

have fun trying... but I know it will be an inevitable failure.

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My father was a Caltech professor, I grew up in academics... My father was on the short list for the Nobel twice... He was in his 50's... The current Nobel prize winner, Martin Chalfie saw the film and did like the film... And interestingly enough thought that Femtosecond Chemist (which is what Alan Rickman's character is in the film) would indeed soon win the Nobel... Well pretty much shoots holes in you... I am the writer and director of the film. I'm sorry but you're dead wrong on this one, you saw a trailer, not a film.

Please check out the following NY Times piece

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/28/nyregion/28nyc.html

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That NY Times article is a very interesting read. I've reproduced it here since a lot of people don't have subscriptions. Nice to know a real Nobel laureate liked the movie!

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Tickling Worms Leads to Discoveries, and a Measure of Fame
By CLYDE HABERMAN
On Wednesday, if all goes as planned, Martin Chalfie will fly to Stockholm for a batch of celebrations leading up to a ceremony on Dec. 10. That is when he will accept the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. It should be exciting. But he will miss the scheduled opening of a new film back home in New York.

In the scheme of things, that may seem like an exceedingly minor concern. But this movie happens to be about a scientist who wins the chemistry prize.

Dr. Chalfie, a biology professor at Columbia University, said that his teenage daughter Sarah had “gotten me somewhat addicted to going online and looking at movie trailers.” While on the Web a couple of weeks ago, he discovered this film, “Nobel Son.” He wanted to see it. But it opens next Friday, when he will be away.

“In something I don’t think I would have done in any other circumstance, I contacted the publicist for the movie,” he said. “When she found out I was one of the winners this year of the chemistry prize, she said, ‘Oh, come to the showing we’re going to have.’ ” So he did, and he loved it, especially the fact that the film’s Nobelist, played by Alan Rickman, is “a completely despicable person.”

Winning one of the world’s most prestigious prizes does come with perks, as Dr. Chalfie keeps learning since the Oct. 8 announcement that he had won the prize with two other scientists, Drs. Osamu Shimomura and Roger Y. Tsien.

They were honored for their work in green fluorescent protein, which is used in molecular biology to observe and track living cells and their proteins. One hope for this fluorescence is to enhance research in a range of diseases, including Alzheimer’s and cancer.

The “funny thing” about winning the chemistry prize, “is that I’m a biologist,” the Harvard-educated Dr. Chalfie said in his spare office at Columbia. His principal research involves a transparent roundworm, Caenorhabditis elegans, for insights into the sense of touch. “I basically tickle worms,” he said.

Being in no danger of ever receiving a Nobel ourselves, we called on Dr. Chalfie out of curiosity about how life might change after winning the prize. “You rapidly learn that fundamentally you don’t change,” said Dr. Chalfie, who is 61. “But things around you do, to some extent.”

Some past prize winners have cautioned him that the next year will be “pretty intense.”

“You get invited to places that you never expected to be invited to,” he said. “People want to be associated with it,” including some who have reached out to him after years without contact. One woman from his high school days in Skokie, Ill., told him, “You know, several of my friends had crushes on you.”

“I wrote her back,” Dr. Chalfie said, “to say, ‘Why are telling me this now? Back then, it would have been a very useful piece of information.’ ”

The true Nobel perk, though, could not be more serious. “If there are things that you feel deeply about,” he said, “you can get an opportunity to say something, and at least some people will listen.”

In this regard, one of the first things he did was add his name to a letter already signed by 61 Nobel-winning scientists who supported Barack Obama for president. “One gets the impression that there is a respect for learning and knowledge in the Obama campaign that was not there in the others,” Dr. Chalfie said.

Like many scientists, he is dismayed by how the Bush administration has pushed science to a back burner so distant that it is barely on the stove. Budgets for research have shrunk. “Ideology,” he said, “plays a role instead of scientific information.” Though he feels that Senator John McCain is better than President Bush in this regard, he also finds Mr. McCain overly eager to bash science.

Take the campaign attacks on Mr. Obama’s attempt to get $3 million in federal funds for “an overhead projector,” as Mr. McCain called it, for a Chicago planetarium. You’d have thought from his stump speech that this was a projector for showing home movies.

“To me this was a prime example of belittling science and particularly science education,” Dr. Chalfie said. A planetarium projector is complex and, naturally, expensive. “It’s to learn about astronomy,” he said. “It was a tool for the support of science education, and a very important one.”

Politics aside, there is in general “a bit of an assumption that we have learned enough, that we actually know all the basic bits and so now what we should do is apply that basic information,” Dr. Chalfie said. Not so. In his own field, “the truth is that we are woefully ignorant about the basic building blocks of our bodies and how these all work together,” he said. “There’s a vast amount of basic research to be done.”

And that is the significance of the Nobel for him. Sure, movie invitations are fun. But profound issues are at stake. “It’s really a prize about basic research,” he said.

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My faculty adviser in grad school (I went for biology) has not won a Nobel prize, but he is THE top authority in his field and gets lots of invites to talks, conferences, meetings, and gives frequent interviews to the various media outlets. And he's an AWESOME classroom teacher. His mammalian reproduction class was probably my favorite class in undergrad. I'm now in vet med school now and we have one of the top orthopaedic surgeons in the country. He's faculty both at the vet med school and the med school, runs the comparative orthopaedic laboratory, does tons of research and has numerous patents, and was actually voted the number one veterinary doctor in the nation, but he's likewise an excellent teacher. Just because you excel in your field of research doesn't make you a poor teacher or excuse you from teaching. I notice that often the best at their research are excellent teachers as well. To teach is to understand.

And besides, that kind of arrogance in science is precisely why the public has such strong fear and misunderstanding about the scientific method. The more convoluted and complicated the model, kinda makes one wonder how accurate or applicable it really is. Nature can be amazingly simple and usually is, after all.

***
Last seen in theaters: Quantum of Solace 6.5/10
Last rented: The Simpsons Movie 6/10

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Bump!

Everyone should read this thread, and possibly dicuss....

Also, I think the original poster *beep* or whatever is a failed or failing scientist, perhaps out of his league in his studies.....
He sounds angry and frustrated....

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This argument could be used on portraying almost any profession or lifestyle. You could easily make the case that one can never truly understand the life of a single mother, or a long-haul truck driver, or what it would be like as a small town dentist. Film, and literature in general, strives to create the 'illusion' that you have gained some insight on a different life. And, NOBEL SON pulls this off.
Excuse My Dust...

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Let's not forget the fact that Eli Michaelson truly didn't win the Nobel Prize.

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despite what people think, there will never be a day when developments in chemistry or physics can be explained to a layman. we are already beyond the days of simple ideas, simple explanations, and simple models.

you could never TRULY explain to someone what MALDI is... what conjugated polymers are... what surface mediated catalysis is.... hell, what a zeolite is and why it is so important....


MALDI: A clean lihtbeam frees charges off and lifts a heavy and flimsy molecule with help of a lampshade.

conjugated polymer: A string of atoms whose outside charges ride in a bond of three loops (pi bond of two p orbitals) on one side and a bond of one loop (sigma bond of two s orbitals) on another, where this set is free for other atoms to share.

surface mediated catalysis: Helpth or hinderth of a reaction when another material has a bed of charges to trade bonds with—a kemical money changer.

zeolite: A claylike mineral in mesh-build rather than sheet-build, whose hollow blocks can sieve salts of a wonted size by wash.

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Yes, by all means, let's take a lesson from the man who's handle is the cool "n-word as used by rappers" followed by the number for smoking pot on how pathetic the layman is on being unable to reach such lofty academic levels.

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he uses more ellipses than barbara cartland.

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Just wanted to mention the university I went to had a few Nobel Laureates teaching. That is one aspects that attract students to certain schools.

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wasn't John Nash teaching at Princeton?

Can you explain that to me on a fifth grade level, so everybody else will get it?.

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