they guys ah wicked smaht

One of the big things that Stockholm is known for is that it is the home of the Noble Prize (not the Peace Prize, for some reason Oslo has that…).  It’s a pretty big deal here – it was water cooler (coffee machine) talk the week they announced the winners, and the banquet (held at City Hall) is the hottest ticket of the year. 

Wanting to get into all things Stockholm, I was kind of geekily-excited when I researched and found out that they had scheduled a series of talks by all the Nobel Laureates that would be open to the public.  The odds of me understanding any of the talks was low, but at least I could soak up the genius.

So after scouting it out, I found that the talks would start Saturday morning at 9am, and go till about 3pm (physics from 9-1030, then chemistry from 11- 1230 and economics bringing it home).  That would have been a little too much Nobel for my first time, but that first session would allow me to check the “attend a nobel lecture” off of my bucket list.  (Yes, I have found that I am now retroactively adding cool things we do to my bucket list).

Heading in to the morning, I was looking forward to seeing what type of crowd it would be, what the speeches would be like and how much “pomp and circumstance” there would be.

With Lis out of town, I had some overly-willing volunteers to take care of the future laureate in our lives, so I was able to move pretty quickly and got off the train right on schedule.  While I wasn’t sure where to go once I got off the train, I figured that following the huge stream of people would be a good start.  There were way more people than I had expected.  Not quite a “taking the train to a football game” type of crowd, but definitely bigger than a normal commuting crowd.  

Walking in to the lecture hall, there was a 10-15 minute line to get materials – fun posters and printouts that explained the laureates work.  They said we could skip the line (no tickets to buy) and go directly in if we didn’t want the material, but I wanted as many souvenirs as I could get.  So I waited for those (and evidently grabbed some that were only in Swedish – probably not the easiest way for me to learn the language) before heading in to grab a seat.  

The auditorium was really large – and packed.  I was there 10 minutes before it began and had to get a seat almost at the very top. The crowd was mostly students and academic-looking older folks, but there were a good amount of “fans”, who didn’t have an obvious association with the topic and were there to soak it all in.

The talks themselves were kind of interesting.  For one thing, I had thought that when they announced multiple winners, it was because two folks from different universities had worked together on a project, but that didn’t seem to be the case.  Instead, it seems like the committee decided that “quantum physics” would win this year (for example), and these two guys have done good work in quantum physics, so give them both the prize.  ALSO, its not like Oscars style where it needed to be published by January 1^st or something to make the cut – both guys were awarded the prize for work they had done in the mid 90’s!!!  Evidently they want to make sure that the research has since led to additional research, and is now “textbook” material.  ALSO, I’m not sure if it’s an old-boys club, or just the way science works, but both of the winners had worked with previous Noble Prize winners.  Again, this could be that once you get a Nobel, you can pick the best young researchers, or it could be that quantum physics is a small world.  I didn’t get to ask them in the Q&A session unfortunately….

The speeches were good, more what I would expect from a Hall of Fame speech in sports than an Oscars speech though.  They constantly referenced all the people whose work THEY had used – both to give credit to folks in the audience (sounded like every top physics dude was in the theater with me) and to place their work in historical context I think.  They are both huge fans of Schrödinger and his cat.  Between the name dropping and the pictures of them at their labs, it seemed like they were summarizing their careers, which makes sense – you probably won’t get a second chance to give a Nobel prize speech.

Overall I was able to pay attention for a solid 45 minutes before checking my phone.  Considering how little I paid attention in my physics classes, I figured that was a big win for me.  I also felt infinitely smarter.  I think a new goal for me, actually on the bucket list now, is to go to the Nobel Awards Banquet.  That is a white-tie affair attended by royalty and smart folks. I need that in my life….but there’s always next year.