October 4, 2011

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The newest Nobel Laureate is also a musician!

Saul Perlmutter is one of three scientists awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics this morning. This news is exciting enough, but Perlmutter is no ordinary Nobel Laureate.

By Princess Ojiaku

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Saul Perlmutter is one of three scientists awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics this morning. This news is exciting enough, but Perlmutter is no ordinary Nobel Laureate. I learned from Eva Amsen that Perlmutter is also a violinist and teaches a course at UC Berkeley titled Physics and Music. From the course description:

Does the Campanile sound out of tune to you? What does this have to do with our understanding of the Big Bang? And how would thinking about this help me to write a better English essay, defend an innocent person accused of murder, save the world from the next plague, or at least understand why my friend can't carry a tune?

Physics and Music is a course designed to help students think about how to approach the world with the eyes, ears, and mind of a scientist. We will use the domain of music and sound to ask what we can learn about the nature of reality and the methods that we humans have developed to discover how the world works.

Glad to see a musician, educator, and scientist becoming a Nobel Laureate. Congratulations to Perlmuttter!

About Princess Ojiaku

Hey there! I'm a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin Madison in the Neuroscience and Public Policy program. I'm also a musician who played in two bands in North Carolina, one called Pink Flag and another called Deals. My personal passions are science, music, and cycling as transportation.

I got into science as a kid while tagging along and watching my mom do experiments in her lab. I found that while I loved science, I didn't want to be alone in an ivory tower, crunching data that few others would understand. I also noticed that many other people thought science was this scary and incomprehensible entity of obscurity. When I realized that there were people working to make science fun and accessible to everyone, I knew that this was exactly what I wanted to do. The two things I find the most immensely interesting and continually impressing are music and neuroscience, so these are the topics that I'll focus on in my blog. Philosophy and politics are my second loves, so I might pop in an occasional post on these topics as well. Ultimately I am here to share things that give me wonder. I hope that reading Science with Moxie gives you a bit of that wonder too.

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