"My son, the . . . ."

I've been listening to a series of lectures about the history of 20th-century science, which has now reached the career of Niels Bohr.  The lecturer claimed that Bohr was the only person ever to have won both a Nobel Prize and an Olympic Gold Medal.  Alas, the wonderful factoid is not quite true.  His brother Harald was on a team that took a silver medal in soccer, and apparently Niels sometimes played with the same team, but not in the Olympics.  Still, it suggests an impressive well-roundedness.  If nothing else, you have to imagine that Mrs. Bohr had plenty of tidbits to drop into conversations with her friends about what her sons were up to these days.

It turns out that Nobel laureates who won other prestigious prizes generally have received Nobel Peace Prizes or literary prizes rather than straight science prizes.  George Bernard Shaw, for instance, had to find room on his mantel for a Nobel Prize in literature as well as an Oscar (1938, Pygmalion, best adapted screenplay). Philip Noel-Baker, a British diplomat, won both the 1959 Nobel Peace Prize and a 1920 Olympic silver medal in track. Charles Gates Dawes, who was vice-president to Calvin Coolidge, won a 1925 Nobel Peace Prize after writing a tune in 1912 that ultimately was recorded as a number-one pop hit in the U.S., "It’s All In The Game.” George Smoot won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics after winning $1 million on TV's "Are You Smarter Than a Fifth-Grader," but that's not cross-training, strictly speaking.

6 comments:

Assistant Village Idiot said...

Tourists go to Edinburgh. But when you read the word "Scotland," think also of Glasgow.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

Oops. Wrong thread.

Texan99 said...

I was struggling a bit there.

Sadly, I have never visited Scotland.

Joseph W. said...

I thought Eratosthenes would be a good bet for the Nobel/Olympic combination (if there'd been any Nobel Prizes back then)...I'd read he was an accomplished athlete as well as a scientific polymath...but online sources suggest he was nicknamed "Pentathlos" for his versatility rather than his actual athletic prowess.

Freud won a Goethe (literary) prize rather than any scientific prizes...but then he didn't really do any science.

Ymar Sakar said...

Human experimentation is still a science, although frowned upon by the masses.

Competing for world acclaim and then competing for world recognition of crazy genius traits, is less cross training and more like over specialization. In both cases world opinion and changing the world matters more. Only in one case do the results become independent of human emotion.

Ymar Sakar said...

Elaboration: That case being fighting for yourself, pursuing a goal due to personal motivations, and changing yourself vs changing the world by carrying your national or social brand name on your shoulders.