Why are some scientists unhappy with the Nobel prizes?
By T.C.
THE Nobel prizes in physiology or medicine, physics and chemistry are the most prestigious gongs in science. The annual announcement of the winners is a big event in the scientific calendar, as is the ritzy party that takes place on December 10th to honour the winners directly. But talk to scientists in private, and many will grumble. The Nobels are a great way to get people interested in science, they’ll say, and it’s good that we have them. But there have been strange omissions, with people who should have won a prize denied. The grumpiest complain that despite the glitz of the prizes, and the ensuing media attention in articles like this one, the rules that govern them no longer reflect the way modern science works. Why (besides jealousy, perhaps) are some scientists unhappy with the Nobels?
One reason is that the committees can often be slow to recognise achievement. Alfred Nobel, the dynamite magnate who set up the prizes in 1895 (pictured above), specified in his will that the prizes should reward work done in the previous year. But experience soon showed that this was risky, as medals were given out for discoveries that later proved questionable. So a degree of caution is probably advisable. Sometimes, though, it can be taken too far. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, for instance, had to wait until 1983 to win a prize for work he had done in the 1930s on the structure of stars. And caution can sometimes lead to strange results. Albert Einstein never won a prize for his theory of relativity (although he did get one in 1921 for discovering the photoelectric effect). Even though some pretty suggestive evidence had been produced by Arthur Eddington in 1919, relativity—which has subsequently passed every experimental test ever thrown at it—was still considered somewhat risky and recondite.
Another criticism concerns the tradition that no more than three people can share a prize. Science is rarely this clear-cut. Take this year’s physics prize, which recognised Peter Higgs for predicting the existence of the mass-bestowing particle that now bears his name. Dr Higgs was only one of several people with a claim. Two other teams—Robert Brout and François Englert, as well as Gerald Guralnik, Carl Hagen and Tom Kibble—submitted papers on the same idea to the same journal that published Dr Higgs’s work, all within a few months of each other. Science often works like this, with different people coming up with similar ideas at similar times. In the event, the committee decided to honour Dr Englert (Brout is dead, and therefore ineligible), whose paper was earlier than Dr Higgs’s but did not explicitly predict a particle, over Dr Guralnik and his collaborators, who were more comprehensive but published a few weeks later.
The rule of three also reinforces the idea that science is carried out by a handful of geniuses, toiling by themselves in ivory towers. If that was ever true, it isn’t now. Drs Higgs and Englert won this year because their prediction was confirmed by the discovery last year of the Higgs boson. It was uncovered by CERN, which runs the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s biggest particle accelerator. The LHC cost billions to build and employs thousands of scientists and thousands more technicians to analyse the data it produces and keep its beams humming. The papers announcing the boson’s discovery had hundreds of authors. Nor is it just physics. Big science, complicated machines and papers with half a dozen authors or more are now the rule rather than the exception in many disciplines, and that trend will only intensify as science becomes both more specialised and more collaborative. There was speculation this year that the Nobel committee would break with another tradition, that organisations are not honoured in the science prizes, and give part of the physics gong to CERN itself. But they didn’t. The rules specified in Nobel's will have been reinterpreted in the past. It may be time to rejig them once again.
