Cool things science hasn't figured out yet

[Underseer]

Math/science skills correlate with art/music skills. People from highly technical professions are more likely than average to have some kind of artistic skill, while artists and musicians tend to have better than average grasp of math/science/technology stuff. It's pretty common for scientists to have some kind of creative outlet (people forget that Asimov was a biochemist), but for some reason, when physicists have a creative outlet, it is almost always music. I'm pretty sure no one has answered why that is.

Musicians have been found to have a "big picture" view of the world, often seeing correlations which are not obvious to non-musicians. Playing music actually builds stronger connections in the brain, enlarges the corpus callosum, and acts as a chick magnet. Our brains are literally 'wired' differently. It makes sense to me that a brain which intuitively groks the nature of the connectedness of everything would gravitate towards physics.

Here's a cool article with lots of neat pictures and buttloads of terms that I don't really understand.

Oooh, neato! Thanks!

 

[Kharakov]

Is there a correlation between the quality of beer and/or ale produced by a nation and the significant physicists produced per capita per century?

If you go by Nobel prizes, the country that makes Budweiser produced the most Nobel laureates in physics...

 

[fromderinside]

Is there a correlation between the quality of beer and/or ale produced by a nation and the significant physicists produced per capita per century?

If you go by Nobel prizes, the country that makes Budweiser produced the most Nobel laureates in physics...

That little factoid isn't even interesting. If one portions out Nobel prizes by population the Faroe Islands pops out 220,000 per ten million people while the US only produces around 10 per 10 million people. Sure, sure, the FI's only prize was in 1903 and it was for medicine and physiology. Still, when making comparisons are you really gong to make quantitative comparisons that gives the US a 10 per ten million while China only qualifies for 0.048 per ten million people, or a 200 to one advantage while the Faroe Islands are 2000 times better than that. Come on.

I believe to call something suitable for natural science it must be quantifiable on an interval or ratio scale.

Just taking seriously something really meant to be a hoot.

 

[Underseer]

Is there a correlation between the quality of beer and/or ale produced by a nation and the significant physicists produced per capita per century?

If you go by Nobel prizes, the country that makes Budweiser produced the most Nobel laureates in physics...

Any correlation is going to have outliers.

Hm, what if we control for a nation's relative wealth by making it beer/ale quality versus significant physicists per capita per century per GDP?

 

[fromderinside]

Hm, what if we control for a nation's relative wealth by making it beer/ale quality versus significant physicists per capita per century per GDP ....

per world war per earth moving event per pestilent per mass murder, per abortion, per culator?