Nobel Prize Recap

Brandon Burke, Staff Writer

In December, the Nobel Prizes will be given to their respective winners in Stockholm, Sweden(except for the peace prize which is awarded in Oslo, Norway). From Monday, October 3rd to Thursday, October 13th, the Nobel prize winners were announced in Norway and Sweden. The first prize announced was the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. On October 3rd, Yoshinori Ohsumi won this award for his discoveries of mechanisms for autophagy. The Nobel Prize in Physics was announced on October 4th. This year three men won this Nobel Prize, David J. Thouless, F. Duncan M. Haldane, and J. Michael Kosterlitz for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions of matter. I don’t know what that is, but I know I probably won’t win any prize in that field of study. On October 5th, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to three different people,  Jean-Pierre Sauvage, Sir J. Fraser Stoddart, and Bernard L. Feringa. Sauvage, Stoddart, and Feringa won this award for their design and synthesis of molecular machines. In Honors Chemistry, we have definitely not approached this topic of study yet. The Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences was won by Oliver Hart and Bengt Holmström for their contributions to contract theory. The Nobel Peace Prize, arguably the most notable prize worldwide, was won by Juan Manuel Santos from Colombia. He has desperately given all he has to try to put the civil war in Colombia (now lasting over 50 years) to an end. 

The Nobel Prize in Literature was given to Bob Dylan, songwriter and singer from the United States. This was a somewhat controversial choice. Bob Dylan has had influence in the music industry for over 50 years. He began to write and sing in the 1960s, and still continues to release albums and tour to this day. The Nobel Prize Committee awarded Dylan the prize for “having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” Dylan is one of the most well-known music artists and the first music artist to win the Nobel Prize. Bob Dylan’s music is a combination between folk and rock music. Dylan has been labeled as “a modern-day Homer or Vergil” by the Harvard professor Richard Thomas, who teaches a class called "Bob Dylan". Dr. Thomas who has a PhD in classics is one of the experts on Vergil today. Casady parent Jay Davis father of Jackson Davis(11) and Quinn Davis(7), and local Bob Dylan sage said “He deserves it on many levels. But the debate on whether a person uses song as a way to present his words is somewhat, in my opinion, out of place. Centuries ago poetry was delivered orally. So is Dylan's. But his words have always been front and center. He is a true poet in that he observes. And he asks us to think, without necessarily telling us what to think. He comments...and moves on, leaving us to think for ourselves. His words have a grace, they aren't given in any way to conventionalism, nor cliched in any way. They are original, they flow, and there is elegance, majesty, and mystery in virtually every line. And he has been doing this prolifically for over a half of a century. And the bar he sets remains at a level none of his contemporaries have ever achieved. A level virtually no one before him has. A true thing. The real thing.” This action opens the gateway for more songwriters and singers to have the opportunity to win a Nobel Prize. Overall, many great men won a Nobel Prize in their respective fields, and Bob Dylan was just one of them.