Hysterical celebrations of the hypernationalistic commentators in the USA heaping spite upon the feeble intellects of the rest of the planet, in light of the attributions of Nobel Prizes mostly to Americans. “Nobels and National Greatness Anyone who thinks America’s best days are behind it should take a close look at the latest Nobel haul,” crows Mr. Stephens in the WSJ.
It does not dawn on the naïve Mr. Stephens, that the Nobel prize may be an indication of bias, not excellence. A mark of propaganda, thus weakness, not a proof of superiority.
All The Pie To US Plutocrats, Glorious We Are.
The Nobel prize ought to be renamed the “American prize”. Main qualification: being an “American”, preferably from Chicago, and preach Americanization (also known as plutocratization). Look at the Nobel in economics: two of them, although charming fellows, got the prize for repeating notions that were well known more than four centuries ago, in the Netherlands (tulip mania!) or Japan (rice commodity market).
In other words, the Nobel is, at least plenty of times, given for trivial reasons.
Two of the Nobels are, of course, from the temple of plutocratic economics, the University of Chicago. Obama taught at that “private” university. As befits an organization smelling of sulfur, it sits in the middle of a ghetto, an oasis of privilege in the desert of the underclass, with a police call box every fifty meters, or so (when I was there, for a few weeks, I was shocked by the brutality of this apartheid world, with privilege 100 meters from people with no health care, no job, not even an ounce of rebellion in them).
Renaming the Nobel the “American prize” would be honest and revealing, thus completely inacceptable, as with plutocracy dissimulation and invisibility is of the essence.
The Chinese born ranking of universities is riddled with tricks to make universities of the USA look good, relatively speaking. For example French Nobels are counted… half for the universities they work for (the reasons invoked are devious, such as how French research is financed).
Why? Well the same reason that China holds 1.3 trillion dollars of USA bonds: another bond binding within the plutocratic system. If socialist France looks stupid, and the plutocratic USA look good, that’s excellent for the Chinese plutocracy, whose fortunes are determined in Washington, ever since Nixon and Kissinger saw to it.
Another example: Switzerland has 22 Nobels in science. France, with ten times the population, only 35. However, Switzerland is not, historically speaking, the author of major breakthroughs in science and technology. By “major” I mean really major, such as pasteurization, E = mcc, or the invention of the transistor. Suisse seemed not to have been the author of ANY technological breakthrough. France is.
(OK, I am unfair: a Swiss invented the first internal explosion engine, using hydrogen, in the early 19C! It’s the French Papin who invented the first steam engine and steam boat, in the 17C; see “Philosophy Feeds Engineering”)
So what is taught, and impressed upon, is lots of lies, and false truths. Take aviation: France dominated it by 1910, even with the first helicopter. But were not the Wright brothers Americans? Sure, and the Wrights invented a number of useful devices. However, the first motorized flights were made 13 years earlier, using a light weight steam engine, in a French military program (Clement Ader). Some said: oh, they were not that high, etc. However that proof of principle incited full-on progress.
If nobody talks about who invented movies, that’s because the Lumière brothers showed the first movies in 1895. The world’s oldest movie theater, in the French Riviera city of La Ciotat, was just reopened.
The transistor was invented in Germany in the 1930s (using… Germanium, not silicon).
Some will object: ah, but Switzerland had Albert Einstein (more or less refugee from Germany), and he invented E = mcc, it’s well known. While in Bern, working at the Patent Office (thanks to the father of a friend of his).
My point entirely. Well known, Einstein’s E = mcc, but somewhat of a cheat: as far as I, me, can see, Einstein actually stole both the formula and the proof from the E = mc^2 work published by Poincare’ in 1900, five years earlier.
Poincare’ proved E = mcc, not in an obscure blog, but as a peer reviewed article, in the most well known Dutch Physics Journal (Lorentz, a Dutch who wrote the space-time transformation law was from there, Poincare’ got him the Nobel by 1904, and this explained why Poincare’ published in a Dutch journal).
So why is E = mcc Einstein’s formula and not Poincare”s? Because reality in the dominant Anglo-Saxon-Germanoid culture has a well known anti-French bias. Much better to have a German Jew the author of E= mc^2 than some super genius Frenchman. Nobody fears German Jews (they had some problems, except for the likes of Kissinger). But the French republic is a different matter entirely. It’s still out there, squat and ferocious, always spastic with chronic plutophobia.
A rough and tough idea, but something to munch on.
To admit that a Frenchman found the most famous formula in physics would threaten the established order of thoughts and moods. By changing how frogs are considered, it may endanger Wall Street, New York, Washington, Americanization, even plutocratization itself…
If a Frenchman has had colossal brains, it would tell us, that, if there is one super genius Frenchman, there might be more, and thus a Financial Transaction Tax may not be such a bad idea. France has a FTT. Or maybe a Carbon Tax would be a good idea. France has such a tax.
And France of course invented the Added Value Tax, now replicated in dozens of countries, even Japan, and much disliked by the Mafia and the like. Imagine American plutocrats having to pay tax, automatically: a world would shatter.
Or maybe default, as the USA practiced in 1933, followed by a variety of countries using similar unsavory means of re-establishing their finances, would not look as such a great idea anymore (alone among super powers, France did not devalue and default in the 1930s; Germany went further, stealing all the German Jews… France playing honest was, of course, a tremendous disadvantage, she ended poor, and soon beaten up, with no help from the resentful president Roosevelt, except late enough so that France would have been thoroughly beaten up first).
By depriving the French of intellectual honors due to them, the official plutocratic propaganda can insist that French frogs have no brains, and never bathe. Thus Obamacare is much superior to French style Medicare For All (which is what France’s Assurance Maladie is).
And bias does not stop at France.
Bose, a young Indian genius, who got the idea of bosons, the force particles, with their weird statistics, never got the Nobel in physics: because British imperialists objected to Bose’s opinions in matters political.
So what do we see? Lots of Nobels in the USA’s “private” universities (actually not really private, but financed deviously through the entangled plutocratic and state systems). Does that mean those people got the most fundamental ideas? Not so sure.
When Eric Kandel went to Paris, he spent a year learning to work with Aplysia, and later got the Nobel for his remarkable work on learning… Learning of Aplysia. However, did the Paris teachers got the Nobel? No. Who started that flow of research and originated the basic ideas? Not necessarily Kandel.
And so on. In many fields, most people sitting in the Nobel committee are American, and colossal amounts of money are involved, so maybe the Nobel ought to be called the “American prize”, a bit like the “Academy Awards”.
It would be most profitable, in the realm of ideas, to determine who and how the best and deepest ideas arose. Start by attributing the discovery of the First Law of Newton, the law of inertia, to Buridan, who discovered and advertized it, three centuries before Newton was born. Buridan was the rector of the university of Paris, adviser to kings (among others), contradictor of Aristotle, and discovered Copernicus’s work 170 years before it was taught to Copernicus at the university of Cracow, where Copernicus was a student.
What truly count, for intellectual superiority, is, who got the big idea first, and how deep. A whole science of creativity could rise from finding how great ideas arise. The rest is propaganda at best, and outright thievery, racism and hatred, at worst.
How did the Nobel arise?
Nobel was heir to a plutocratic family wealthy from ammunitions. Nobel had established 90 armaments factories by the time of his death. Yes, ninety. A terrible explosion at one of these killed a younger brother. Still another brother died in 1888.
A French newspaper clamored “Le marchand de la mort est mort” (“The merchant of death is dead”)… Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday.”
Alfred, who was long a resident of France, and in Cannes at the time, was mortified. Was it all what he was? A death merchant? Nobel got very depressed, and laid lonely and supine with his dark thoughts. How could he make his life worthy?
On 27 November 1895, at the Swedish-Norwegian Club in Paris, Nobel signed his last will and testament. He set aside the bulk of his estate to establish the Nobel Prizes, to be awarded annually without distinction of nationality.
However, there is clearly a national bias now, as Shelling, one of this year’s Nobels, would be the first to admit. Worse than that: it’s a plutocratic bias, exactly what Nobel, nobly, did not want to leave behind.
Remedy? The way the Nobel laureates are selected now guarantees a plutocratic bias (the richest universities are over-represented in the advisory committees).
The Nobel committees should thus explain much more their little reasonings in attributing the prizes, by writing vey long essays justifying their decisions, and who, exactly originated the ideas.
A timid step in that direction was made this year with the Physics prize (the contribution of the late Robert Brout was acknowledged). Also the prize ought to be attributed for as many people as necessary for one given idea, and attributed posthumously (at least in a honorific way; once again mentioning Brout was good, but not enough: he published the “Higgs” mechanism a full month before Higgs).
The Nobel is a carrot. One would instruct the world better by explaining why that carrot is exactly deserved, all the way back. And not just give it to the richest and most powerful. After all, his name is Pluto, and He lays down the abyss.
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Patrice Ayme
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 