Nobel Prize: How English beat German as language of science"Oxygen" or "Sauerstoff"? A scientist conducts an experiment in an undated German film Two Norwegian scientists have won the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine - for work published in the English language. Historian of science Michael Gordin explains why they wrote in the language of Dickens and Twain rather than Ibsen and Hamsun. Permafrost, oxygen, hydrogen - it all looks like science to me.
