Final Jeopardy: Nobel Laureates (3-10-15)

The Final Jeopardy question (3/10/2015), in the category “Nobel Laureates” was:

He was the subject of a 2014 New York Times article headlined “A Pioneer as Elusive as his Particle”.

New champ Jen Jabailey Blackburn won $19,700 yesterday. Today she takes on these two players: Mikki Gibson, from Austin, TX; and Penny Reid, from Bloomington, IN.

Round 1: Penny found the Jeopardy! round Daily Double in “On the Nose” under the $1,000 clue. She was in the lead with $3,800, $1,600 more than Mikki in second place. She bet $2,000 and he was RIGHT.

This creature seen here has quite the nose. show

WHAT IS A PROBOSCIS MONKEY?

Reversed: Alex accepted Jen’s answer “Perce Nez” (instead of Nez Perce) on this $200 clue in “On the Nose” but it was reversed by the judges right before the Daily Double: Though piercing wasn’t common among them, the name of this native American tribe means “pierced nose.”

Penny finished in the lead with $6,600. Mikki was second with $1,600 and Jen was last with $1,400.

Round 2: Mikki found the first Daily Double in “Fiction” under the $1,600 clue. She was in third place with $2,000, $8,200 less than Penny’s lead. She made it a true Daily Double and she was RIGHT.

The novel that inspired “Field of Dreams” grew out of the story “Shoeless Joe Jackson comes to” this place. show

WHAT IS IOWA?

Penny found the last Daily Double in “We ‘CU'” under the $2,000 clue. In the lead with $12,600, she had $8,200 more than Mikki in second place. She bet $4,000 and she was RIGHT.

From the Latin, it means pertaining to the skin. show

WHAT IS CUTANEOUS?

Penny finished in the lead with $26,200, a super runaway. Jen was next with $6,200 and Mikki was in third place with $5,200.

TWO of the contestants got Final Jeopardy! right.

WHO IS PETER HIGGS?

“Science awards are generally not crafted in a way that invites the public to care. A certain percentage of people may know that Peter Higgs and Francois Englert won the 2013 Nobel prize in physics for their work on the theory of the Higgs boson, but even among those people only a small percentage have any idea what the Higgs boson is or why they should care.” (Today’s Scientists Need an Awards Show as Big as the Oscars)

Here is a link to the 9/15/2014 New York Times article the clue refers to, telling how Peter Higgs found out about his nomination. This article, Surprise Announcement, looks into the controversy surrounding who should have gotten credit for the discovery.

Mikki got it right. She bet $5,198 and finished with $10,398.

Jen got it right, too. Her $4,201 bet brought her up to $10,401.

Penny wrote down Biggs. She lost her $3,800 bet but still won the game with the remaining $22,400.

Penny is a newspaper copy editor. During the chat she talked about a camping experience where she and her family were off learning how to protect their campsite from bears. While they were there, the bears were busy ransacking their campsite.

According to Alex, Penny “crossed the top of the ‘H’ and the bottom, instead of Higgs, put in Biggs. It’s a common error. I do it all the time myself.” Penny thought it was pretty funny since she clearly wrote a B.

2 years ago:: Only ONE of the players got this FJ in “Newspapers”

The circulation of the Times of New York & London totals about 1/2 the “Times of” this place, largest of any English daily. show

WHAT IS INDIA?

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