I've been coaching my wife with mock interviews to prepare her for her upcoming interview juncket she's about to embark upon. One of the mock interview questions is "what was the greatest scientific discovery of 2012"?
I'm hoping that Curiosity is about to give us a clear victor but that aside, what do you guys think are some of the most exciting?
No doubt, #higgsy was a big one. Who knows though, curiosity could have discovered some Alien microbes.
That hasn't been discovered they assumed it existed then looked for evidence to fit their assumptions. "The Higgs boson or Higgs particle is an elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics. It is the last unobserved particle of that model and has been predicted to exist since the 1960s. It may have been detected at the Large Hadron Collider in 2012. Proving its existence would settle questions about the existence of the extremely significant[6] Higgs field—the simplest[7] of several proposed causes for electroweak symmetry breaking and the means by which elementary particles acquire mass.[Note 3]" - Wikipedia I am just skeptical after the debacle of them claiming electrons traveled faster than light.
Well, there is a very high probability (>99%) that the LHC detected a particle with a mass consistent with the Higgs theory. I think it's important to realize that there isn't any 'them' here. The scientists that thought they detected faster than c electrons are not the same folk. Also those scientist and most others were very skeptical of the electron results. They announced it to get feedback on where they might have made a mistake. The LHC data could be wrong, but I think the chance is extremely low considering all those that are scrutinizing it.
Its between HIggs or the discovery that you can use corporate products as a method for advertising an insubstantial movie because it has something to do with video games I guess. Or the discovery that Zangief is a villain because he's Russian. Actually wait, do we consider marketing a science? Is it evil science?
I am sure that the Curiosity will continue to discover more and more wonderfull things as It ventures into 2013. For me, a smaller breakthrough which is little known, is that of the uses and production/extracion of graphene. I feel that if more is put into graphene research we could see a revolutionary advance in technology. Lets just hope apple doesn't get there hands on it.