NASA: New SMD director looks to Horizon

Good for APL. Not directly good for JPL. APL is already winning contracts which they are unable to execute.

On the other hand, Alan Stern is a good researcher, writer, and speaker.

Mary Cleave made the mistake of killing science missions -- by the wrong procedures. She had to, de facto, apologize to Congress, and then start to kill science missions by the right procedures.

Caltech administers JPL. Caltech does actual science. More Nobel prizes than any other institution, right?

When a Caltech professor runs NASA, then I'll be more optmistic.

Still, Pluto. Kuiper belt. Cool!

If Alan Stern can convince Emperor Bush II that there is oil or Weapons of Mass Destruction at Pluto or the Kuiper belt, maybe we can have a vigorous, well-funded, growing space program again.

Jonathan vos Post wrote:

Caltech does actual science. More Nobel prizes than any other institution, right?

It's not in the top 10

Luke:

I stand corrected. Perhaps I was normalizing as Nobel prizes per student?

The web page you link to says:

Nobel Prizes have always been a source of pride for universities, suggesting their excellence in teaching or in providing research opportunities. The following list provides information on nobel laureates and their affiliation to academic institutions.

There has been controversy surrounding the question of which institution was key to the contribution for which each respective laureate was honored. Each institution practices different methods for counting affiliates, from extremely generous counting to extremely conservative counting at such universities as the University of California, Santa Barbara (only current faculty). The present list only speaks of affiliation and indicates how the laureate was or is related to the respective institution; it does not clarify where the honored work was completed. By presenting the most complete picture, one can distinguish organizational influence.

83 = University of Cambridge[1]
82 = Columbia University[2]
79 = University of Chicago[3]
76 = Harvard University[4]
63 = Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)[5]
61 = University of California, Berkeley[6]
50 = Grandes Ecoles
50 = Stanford University[7]
47 = University of Oxford[8]
41 = University of Paris
40 = Cornell University[9]
33 = Yale University
32 = Georg August University of G�ttingen
32 = Johns Hopkins University[10]
31 = California Institute of Technology[11]
29 = Princeton University[12]
29 = Humboldt University Berlin[13]
23 = New York University (NYU)
21 = University of Manchester[14]
20 = Rockefeller University[15]
19 = University of Minnesota
19 = University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign[16]
19 = University of Michigan
19 = University College London[17]
19 = University of Zurich
18 = University of Pennsylvania[18]
17 = University of Wisconsin
16 = Case Western Reserve University
15 = Carnegie Mellon University
15 = Uppsala University
14 = Imperial College[19]
14 = London School of Economics[20]
12 = University of California, San Diego[21]
11 = Bell Laboratories[22]
11 = University of Utrecht[23]
10 = University of California, Los Angeles
10 = University of Copenhagen
10 = University of Heidelberg[24]
10 = Northwestern University
10 = City University of New York[25]
9 = University of Edinburgh[26]
and so on down through single digits.

1. â For the purpose of this ranking, "affiliation" is defined by the broadest possible terms to avoid any discussion on the parameters of an affiliation. Therefore, an affiliate is a Nobel laureate who can be classified as attendee, graduate, researcher or faculty at or of the respective institution. Laureates who qualify for several categories are only counted once.
2. â The academic entity or any affiliated institution (for example: Hoover Institute and Stanford).
3. â Any laureate who received a degree from the academic institution.
4. â Any laureate who attended at least one course or conducted research at the institution, but did not receive a degree from it.
5. â Any laureate who served on the respective institution's faculty before or during receiving the prize. The degree of affiliation (adjunct, visiting, tenured etc.) is irrelevant for these purposes.
6. â Any laureate who served on the respective institution's faculty only after receiving the prize. The degree of affiliation (adjunct, visiting, tenured etc.) is irrelevant for these purposes.

* A star (*) indicates a Nobel laureate who has more than one affiliation to the respective institution. To be counted only once.

* The Nobel Committee has their own list at http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/lists/universities.html which lists the university the Prize Winners were affiliated with at the time of the Prize announcement.

Jonathan: You're right - Caltech is first in Nobel prizes per alumnus. I'm not sure which normalization is best.

To get back to the main point of this thread, Alan Stern is unbelievably tenacious, so I think his appointment can only benefit science at NASA.

Okay, I'll hope for the best. Pluto mission PIs have had to be unbelievably tenacious.

So, if roughly there are roughly 25,000 Caltech alumni, who have won 17 Nobel prizes (so far), do I still have a 17/25000 = 0.00068 probability = 0.068% chance to win one myself?

If they detect an imaginary rest-mass particle violating conservation of linear momentum at LHC, as I predicted in one of my wackier papers, or if we detect extraterrestrial civilizations by gravity wave telegraph as I first suggested in print, I've got a shot at it.

Maybe my odds are better by continuing to publish explicit Science Fiction. Several Science Fiction authors have won Nobel prizes in Literature...