Quite masterly trolling here

I like the comment that most of the people who would complain about her being on a fifty pound note would probably never see a real one anyway.

Final decision is with Carney, so it will be someone shit.

“And the chances of a pasty faced lady being on the note are zero anyway.”

Isn’t there one on the other side of every note?….

Looked through the long list obviously most are quite obscure…but this might have a good shout.
James Prescott Joule FRS FRSE was an English physicist, mathematician and brewer, born in Salford, Lancashire.

Turing would be great. Yes, not a woman (and it would be a braver decision for that), but scores SJW points for being gay. Would be interesting to see who on the left argues against him, and how.

However more importantly than any of that, he made some genuinely important discoveries, which is what I care about.

Rosalind Franklin will win – known as the Dark Lady of DNA, and unjustly denied a Nobel by male conspiracy, so she ticks all the boxes.

@ john77
Yes indeed. My tongue was in my cheek. I should have included a 🙂

Hallowed Be: Joule would be a good choice, especially since the SI unit of energy is named after him. But he’s a Victorian White Male so shares the same sort of handicaps as Cecil Rhodes, and energy is a dirty word these days too.

DTP

I believe scientists are those who use the scientific method to conduct their research. Using that definition, Murphy clearly qualifies. Just look at his unassailable empirical and peer reviewed work to prove the tax gap is at least 5 times large than the number used by the UK tax authority.

I believe he’s also made some quite insightful comments on a potential sixth law of thermodynamics

If you want science then you start with Newton, Maxwell, Darwin, and Faraday. Have they all been used before?

But tell me, why must it be scientists?

Thatcher

Then encourage people to withdraw 50 notes and burn them in protest.

All seignorage profits flow back to HMT.

Bank note printing is actually quite complicated. I have been there. I’ve seen the kit. I’ve seen the outputs and the bundles of notes. I’ve also seen the barbed wire and the security teams. Am amazed the lorries with the notes don’t get knocked off given they can only drive down one road to get out. Must have armed police protection though but you’d think a bunch of Albanians with assault rifles would have a crack.

As for Thatcher… she might make it. I was surprised when the bank said “tough shit” to the vegan lobby. Not in those words but it was a rare example of not pandering. They do that by pushing obvious physical diversity on boards rather than actually getting people who are good at challenging.

Shame nobody nominated David Kelly. He was a scientist.

Computing is not a science, some of it is mathematics, some engineering (applied science if you like), a some of it is art and craft.

If not Joule how about Dalton? Or Hooke – clever wee bugger, Hooke. (It may be bleedin’ obvious, but is Watson-Watt on their list?)

Could they do a twosome? How about the geologists, Lyle and Hutton? Or the Braggs, father and son? (The father was an Aussie but I’m sure we don’t mind.) In fact how about more people from the old Dominions? Has Ernest Rutherford been used? How about the insulin duo, Banting and Macleod? Was there a leading Newfoundland scientist while it was a Dominion?

Or if mathematicians are allowed, why not celebrate the Raj with Ramanujan? Or if computer people are on, how about Flowers who built the Bletchley computers? Or just go straight for Napier, the mathematician who made the biggest advance in computation between the introduction of Arabic numerals and the electronic computer.

Jimmers,

“Never realised the Nobel was not awarded posthumously. Thanks.
I’m not familiar with the exact circumstances of Rosalind Franklin and her lack of recognition surrounding the discovery of the double helix, but it is often quoted that she was denied an Nobel by the patriarchy. Seems that’s not the case at all.”

IIRC the timeline went something like:

Nobel awarded for DNA
SJWs complain patriarchy missed Franklin
Nobel committee points out winners must be living
SJWs complain patriarchy waited until she died and should have awarded it earlier

@John77
Some computing may be science (e.g. development of transistors), but not the bits Turing was involved in. That was either mathematics (solving Hilbert’s problem) or engineering (the Bombe). And in addition, Turing’s work wasn’t exactly unique. Alonzo Church preceded him with his lambda calculus, while his work at Bletchley was as part of a team (of 10,000) and followed on the work of Polish code breakers, and his achievements weren’t half as impressive as the worke of Bill Tutte and Tommy Flowers. As for his computer designs, they weren’t actually built unlike those of his contemporaries. The hard part of engineering is actually getting the thing built and working. And as for his “persecution”, I suspect that, given his lifestyle in later life, he would have failed Developed Vetting even today.

Alex November 27, 2018 at 9:08 pm
Shame nobody nominated David Kelly. He was a scientist.

David Kelly is on the list.

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/banknotes/50-character-selection-names.pdf?la=en&hash=F0CCA0655EEC2788748D885BE036662B574B615E

Barnes Wallis…. the perfect Brexit bank note.

Personally I find the attempt to drive a wedge between mathematics, science and engineering rather contrived.

Yes, they are different words. But in practice they are highly interdependent to the point where they are intrinsically linked and quite possibly fundamentally parts of one another, more of a continuum.

It’s a bit like arguing about who qualifies to be a writer and then splitting the field into grammar, syntax and narrative. (‘James Joyce wasn’t a proper writer, he couldn’t even write a proper sentence!’, ‘The Jabberwocky isn’t a real poem, it doesn’t actually mean anything!’)

Mathematics can be described as a language, or a tool, of science. It could be argued that it exists entirely in some abstract realm with no empiricism or deduction involved. And yet there is something almost suspiciously coincidental about how numerical systems models real world phenomena, almost as if mathematics is intrinsic in the fabric of reality that science attempts to deal with.

Mathematics and logic are inseparable, and the every practice of science involves both at some level. Many theoretical physicists are ‘just’ mathematicians, who never perform experiments or are guided by any particular deductive process. Are they not scientists? The same is true for the more arcane end of computer science. There are even many scientific theories in the last century that reality is a form of computer, with information some kind of fundamental property; certainly physical entropy and information science have deep links. Turing’s insight into the universal computer may have just as much scientific relevance as Einstein’s realisation of the universality of matter and energy.

Engineering is often dismissed as some kind of applied science. As if application makes something unreal. Sometimes I agree that it can be more about taking the product of science (understanding of reality) to effect an outcome in reality. But this mistakes how engineering often really works. The bouncing bomb mentioned above is a good example; we knew some general physical principles, but it required multiple iterations of the scientific process to get right. Hypothesis (‘this design should work’), experimental testing (‘it broke up’), deduction (‘this is why’). The fact that the resultant theory was embodied in a physical object and not a paper in a prestigious journal (and engineers do produce scientific papers!) is merely a difference of expression.

In many ways the practice of empiricism necessitates some kind of engineering and application. Is empiricism even possible without applied science?

The discovery of DNA is an interesting case in point for all of this. The crystallography to image the structure was essentially a challenge of engineering. The interpretation of the image into a 3D structure was essentially a mathematical process. Between the engineering and the mathematics, some distinct realm of ‘science’ becomes little more than a god of the gaps.

In the early days of the Enlightenment, we didn’t have the scientific vocabulary we do now. ‘Physick’ was something you did to sick people, and ‘Natural Philosophy’ – structured thinking about reality (nature) – was the term generally used for much scientific activity. I used to find that term confusing as a child but as I got more experienced and knowledgeable it seemed ever more appropriate.

Personally I have long suspected that the intrinsic links between the fundamentals of all these fields is no accident but something weaved into the very nature of reality.

If Turing has been a happily married heterosexual most people in this country would never have heard of him, sadly.

“If Turing has been a happily married heterosexual most people in this country would never have heard of him, sadly.”
His death at the age of 41 is usually blamed on the way he was treated because of his homosexuality. He was still very productive up until that point, starting to produce work that wasn’t hidden in layers of security.
A happily married, long lived, Turing might actually have produced much more and had a much more public life.
He might well have become as famous as Tim Berners Lee or Ada Lovelace in that alternate history.

‘computer science’ is like referring to surgery as ‘knife science’
Edsger W. Dijkstra

Never realised the Nobel was not awarded posthumously. Thanks

This is also why Daniel Kahneman got the Nobel prize for economics but Amos Tversky did not.

The first time I came across “god of the gaps” it was used by Jimmy Saville.

Honest injun!

@ Matthew L
That does *not* answer my point. I was *not* talking about a “ban” but the raison d’etre of Nobel prizes.