I think that this is probably the truth of it. Edison's "genius" was that he assembled a team of engineers and scientists to create the first company which relied on innovation. I doubt we will ever really know exactly how much Edison himself actually contributed to the inventions his company created but I suspect that it is probably quite a bit less than we think.

Actually, and sadly, you are wrong and that is part of the reason why it may end up being replaced.

Actually even that is not true: Swan did it first, before Edison and some believe that Edison went as far to falsify evidence in the US court case to prevent him losing there. The sole reason that Edison is remembered is because he made a lot of money. Edison's contributions to light bulbs are like Bill Gates' contributions to Operating Systems: he marketed a popular early version of the invention.

Joking aside I'd estimate it as about as much experience as the GP has with particle physics i.e. close to none. Particle physics is concerned with fundamental particles not with condensed matter states that might behave consistently with a theoretical prediction of how a Majorana fermion would behave. The fact that they dress this up as particle physics is rather sad: condensed matter physics is just as interesting!

Einstein's Nobel prize was for the photo-electric effect and not for GR. Einstein could easily have received 4 Nobel prizes: for SR, GR, Photo-electric and his explanation of Brownian motion. This is why he is recognized as a genius, more so than those who actually have won multiple Nobels.

No, because of logical deduction and reasoning based on the preponderance of evidence which the universe provides (indeed the great thing about science is that you don't have to take my word for it - go out, look at the evidence and use your own intelligence). The fact that you are unable to accept this means that you clearly do not really understand logic and reasoning. Since these are large components of what most people call intelligence it calls this into question as well despite of what an IQ test may say.

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.