Eighty-nine seniors received this year’s prestigious Hoopes Prize for outstanding research or scholarly work, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Prize Office announced Friday.
The distinction—funded by the estate of Thomas T. Hoopes ’19—comes with a $4,000 award for students and a $1,000 honorarium for faculty advisors who nominated student theses or projects this spring, according to Tarik Umar ’10, an economics concentrator and a Hoopes winner.
Four prizes were awarded to Harvard Astronomy Undergraduates:
Dierickx, Marion Inge for her submission entitled "Constraining Local Group Dark Matter Using M33's Past Orbit" - nominated by Professor Abraham Loeb
Fogarty, Kevin Welsh for his submission entitled "Galaxy Cluster Mass Proxies: Examining X-Ray and Sunyaev- Zel'dovich Effect Observations of 114 Galaxy Clusters in the Planck Early SZ Catalog" - nominated by Dr. Christine Jones
Kruse, Ethan Alexander for his submission entitled "A Systematic Search for New Kepler Circumbinary Planets" - nominated by Dr. Darin Ragozzine
Rice, Thomas Sean for his submission entitled "A Hierarchical Catalog of Molecular Clouds in the Milky Way" - nominated by Professor Alyssa Goodman
Harvard Astronomy Professor and Department Chair was selected to be a 2012 American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellow. Founded in 1780, the Academy is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. Election to membership is an uncommon honor. Other 2012 AAAS Fellows include Mel Books, Clint Eastwood, and Hillary Clinton.
"The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation announced its new fellows for 2012 in the United States and Canada on Thursday (April 12). The 181 recipients represent a diverse mix of scientific, scholarly, and artistic fields, and many of them are affiliated with colleges or universities. The winners, chosen from nearly 3,000 candidates, will receive grants ranging from six to 12 months that are intended to allow the recipients to pursue creative projects with as much freedom as possible. A list of the new fellows is available on the foundation’s Web site." (http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/guggenheim-foundation-announces-181-new-fellows-in-the-u-s-and-canada/42335)
In physics, the value of a theory is measured by how well it agrees with experimental data. But how should the physics community gauge the value of an emerging theory that cannot yet be tested experimentally? With no reality check, a less than rigorous hypothesis such as string theory may linger on, even though physicists have been unable to work out its actual value in describing nature.
