cheers, Gouge.

In 2005, people in the know had told the awarders that to give Glauber a prize without rewarding Sudarshan would be unethical, but were informed that they had to give the prize to three people, rejecting the suggestion that two separate prizes could be given, one to two experimentalists and the other to theorists. This year, 2007, they forgot their scruples and gave the prize to two experimentalists for giant magnetoresistance.

The facts are all out there in black and white. Further corroboration comes from the curious absence of the PRL paper of Glauber in 1963 mentioned in the ‘Advanced Information’ page (on which rests Glauber’s priority claim) from his Nobel lecture entitled ‘One hundred years of light quanta’. The reason for this is quite straightforward - the R-representation in his 1963 PRL paper did not make any sense. In his Phys Rev paper which he mentions, he took over Sudarshan’s representation, calling it the P-representation. As mentioned in an earlier posting, the publication ‘E. C. G. Sudarshan - Selected Scientific Papers’, (ed. Ranjit Nair, Principia, New Delhi, 2006) carries a note added in proof by C. L. Mehta examining the issue in minute detail, concluding that ‘..it is incomprehensible that the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences should hand over credit for Sudarshan’s discoveries and formulations to someone else’.

The groundswell of sympathy for Sudarshan generated by this bizarre turn of events led his associates, friends and students to organize conferences to celebrate his 75th birthday last year, in a remarkable display of solidarity, in Spain, USA and India. Let us hope that even though justice has been grievously denied, it will not be delayed much longer.

The links:
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2005/phyadv05.pdf
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2005/glauber-lecture.pdf

I just got my own USB rocket launcher Awsome thing.

Plug into your computer and you got a remote controlled office missile launcher with 360 degrees horizontal and 45 degree vertival rotation with a range of more than 6 meters - which gives you a coverage of 113 square meters round your workplace.
You can get the gadget here: http://tinyurl.com/2qul3c

Check out the video they have on the page.

Cheers

Marko Fando

The part about hype is not very clear to me; but, I believe the universities (and their public relations cells), the science journalists, and to some extent the researchers themselves are to be blamed for the hype; like Doug Natelson and many science bloggers note time and again, most of the press releases are too hyped and give the impression of wilful suppresion (if not blatant lies)! Of course, some of the blame should also be placed on the funding agencies–Female Science Professor, I think, recently wrote about an NSF questionnaire which asks if the proposed work is “transformational”, which apparently has led to the scenario where most of the proposals, if not all, using the word transformational to describe their proposed research. All this reminded me of Idiot’s fugitive essays of Truesdell where he says “The seeting sun of science casts giant shadows of pigmies” or something to that effect

Sorry about the link mix-up. I have corrected it now.