T he Nobel Prizes were announced this week. They have become a fixture of my professional life. Each of the science prizes is awarded for a scientific breakthrough that changed the world. Almost always, these breakthroughs have involved some clever thinking by a scientist or two, and communicating that cleverness and the fact that it is always rooted in curiosity, rather than its practical value, has for me been a great joy. Writing about the prizes has in effect allowed me to express my own cleverness (such as it is) because there’s a lot of room and license to be creative.

The science Nobel Prizes also importantly create and hold, for three days in a year, an enormous global appetite for communicating science that would on any other day be considered too obscure. It is thus tempting to

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