The term you are looking for is 'interval' - at least that's what we call it in physics when dealing with 4-position which is technically what we are discussing. It also happens to be the correct english world for a "distance" in time.

This is probably not the point you want to make while arguing that IQ tests are accurate....and the fact that you did make it only compounds the irony.

Apparently it still doesn't matter. A few years ago they awarded the prize to Kobayashi and Maskawa for the 3x3 quark mixing matrix and yet ignored Cabibbo who did the groundbreaking work to show that quarks mixed for the first time. The extension to 3 generations was a direct extension of that work and the matrix is even called the 'CKM' matrix after all three of them...but no Nobel for Cabibbo.

While questionable decisions are always part of any award process the Nobel prize is running into some real issues with modern physics. For a start it is almost impossible to award a prize for any recent experimental particle physics result (the recent Higgs prize was for the theory, not the experimental discovery) simply because we work in large groups and you generally can not point to three, or fewer, people and say that they did it. The only exception I can think of to this would be the SNO solar neutrino result.

However it is not just particle physics: 'Big Science' is spreading to other areas as well with the addition of accelerator-based light sources for some condensed matter physics, large scale plasma and fusion experiments etc. The part of the experimental field to which a Nobel prize can be awarded in physics is continuously shrinking making the prize less and less relevant...although it still has a long way to go before it gets knocked off its perch!

Hmmm... so I suppose all those physicists going around in the early 20th century studying the atom and the nucleus and developing quantum mechanics were just wasting their time as well. Those discoveries "pretty nicely define 'irrelevance' to the everyday lives of humans" at the time....and yet with hindsight they appear slightly more relevant perhaps? Certainly not "economically useless"?

The problem I am still having is that your description sounds far more like engineering than physics and indeed at least two of the winners are engineers and not physicists. I completely understand that it is a big breakthrough and that they have made a major contribution to electronic engineering. Still the Nobel committee have a dodgy record when it comes to identifying subject areas: Rutherford was awarded the Nobel prize in chemistry for discovering the nucleus and was reputedly so upset that he almost turned it down!

Really? A lot of my postdoctoral colleagues from Fermilab were actively recruited by Lucent and several also went into finance. At least one of the latter made quite a bit of money judging from the car he drove back to visit us! Mind you this is physics not biomedical although the article says this is a "crisis in science" which is suggesting it applies to more areas.

...and if you go further back to the ancient greeks you didn't even need a degree just a school education was enough. This is not surprising. If I look I my own field of physics by the end of my second year undergrad we had pretty much covered state of the art for the 19th century and even covered basic quantum and special relativity from the 20th century.

The point of a PhD and postdoc work is not purely to train people for academic positions. Industry also needs these people. Many of my peers when I was at Fermilab went off to work for Lucent or into finance. Indeed analyzing financial data using the latest techniques from particle physics turned out to be quite lucrative for some of them!

Having been a postdoc and also having been lucky enough to land a faculty position I don't see that this is a new problem at all. There have always been far more postdocs than academic positions available for them to fill. While it was always my hope that I would get an academic job I was fully prepared for the reality that I might end up in industry and had even started putting out feelers in that direction.

If postdocs are entering the position thinking that they will all end up in an academic job then either they are not doing their homework or someone is feeding them unrealistic expectations. The maths is simple: faculty positions are for life while postdoc positions are for ~3 years at a time. If every postdoc were to land a permanent academic job faculty would have no more than one postdoc over their thirty year career i.e. faculty would outnumber postdocs by a factor of 10 to 1.

You can increase this to allow growth in the number of faculty positions but ultimately if you want to have a reasonable number of postdocs a large fraction will have to move into industry. There is no doubt that the uncertainty of being a postdoc is hard (it was for me) but I knew full well going into it that there was a chance I would not end up as a faculty member. Having a cadre of highly qualified researchers entering industry is a very good thing since they bring the latest discoveries and techniques with them...plus they will likely end up earning far more than they would as a faculty member so it's not all bad!

I never argued that it had to be fundamental (the graphene prize several years ago was a great example) but it does say "within the field of physics". I would argue that this invention is within the field of engineering, not physics.

This article would suggest the Queen Elizabeth prize for Engineering.

There is no doubt that the blue LED is a great engineering achievement but I'm struggling to see how this really advances the science of physics.

Actually the problem they are wrestling with here is one that has science has had to deal with for a long time: the uncertainty on a measurement. The star ratings are a measure of the popularity of a game so what you are really asking is "given the ratings it received which game is best?".

Unfortunately with a finite statistical sample you always have some degree of uncertainty and, within this uncertainty your data does not provide any ranking at all: you simply do not know which game is best to any sensible degree of certainty. However while correct this would lead to really confusing rankings since to be fair you would need to randomize the order within the uncertainty of each game's score. This would be complex and confusing to users!

Instead what they suggest is using a confidence level limit: what score can I be confident that 95% of people would rate the game higher than? We do this all the time in particle physics when we put limits on some new physics which we looked for an did not see. For example the precursor to the LHC, LEP had a result that it was 95% confident that the Higgs boson had a mass higher than 116 GeV/c2 (IIRC). There are better ways to do this than the method they quote but since this is just a game rating and not science it's a fine method to use.

You use your own creativity and make something up!

This might be true for subjective subjects like the arts but is not at all true for the sciences. It is easy to test creativity in an objective way: confront the student with a situation they have never seen before but which they can solve with the science they have studied. This used to be a common type of question towards the end of the old UK A' level exams. If US school exams do not test this creative component of science then the solution is to fix the school exams and NOT the university admission process.

There are lots of experiences that can be good for you as a person if you have the right personality and mindset. Serving in the military can teach you a lot about discipline, sacrifice, teamwork etc. but I would have been hopeless unsuited for such an experience. Similarly there are some people who are completely unsuited to benefit from higher education. Society needs to get out of the mindset that everyone needs to go to university. It is damaging the universities for those who do benefit from higher ed and it is saddling many with a crippling student debt. There are many different routes to become a valuable and respected member of society and many of them do not lie through university....and lest you think I am biased against universities I am a university prof!

Not that this excuses their illegal behaviour but if you are giving a talk that important and you do not have at least one local copy of the talk without then your reputation deserves to take a battering. I'd be astounded if such a thing seriously affected someone's tenure though - it certainly would not where I work.