Is the Physics Nobel Prize Also Becoming a Joke?
The history of the physics prize is dotted with slights to those who deserved it and honors to those who didn't.
Practically everyone, both left and right, considers awarding President Obama the Nobel Peace Prize to be a joke. The late John Updike wrote that the Nobel Prize in Literature was a “prank.” But practically everyone still considers the Nobel Prizes in the hard sciences to be serious prizes, awarded to scientists with genuine accomplishments.
Is this really true? Or is the Nobel Prize in Physics, the hardest of the hard sciences, equally becoming a joke?
There was considerable controversy among physicists in 2008 when the Nobel Physics Prize was given for the discovery of the CKM matrix, a genuine Nobel quality achievement. Why then was there a controversy? Because “CKM” is an abbreviation for Cabibbo, Kobayashi, and Maskawa, whereas only Kobayashi and Maskawa were awarded the Prize. But the essential idea was due to Cabibbo in the 1950s, and all Kobayashi and Maskawa did was to expand on his idea in the 1970s. Kobayashi and Maskawa would have done nothing without Cabibbo’s absolutely essential first step.
Nuclear fission was the most important physics discovery made during the 1930s. Lise Meitner, an Austrian-German physicist forced to flee Germany when Hitler took over Austria, discovered nuclear fission. Meitner, a theoretical physicist, had been working in Berlin with the experimental chemist Otto Hahn on nuclear transformations of uranium. Hahn provided the data and Meitner analyzed the information. It was Meitner who first realized that Hahn’s data could only be interpreted as the splitting of the uranium nucleus.
But only Hahn received the Nobel Prize (in chemistry) for this great work. Meitner was completed ignored, even though she was responsible for the essential idea. Actually, as I indicated, for the discovery itself: uninterpreted or misinterpreted data is meaningless, and not a contribution to human knowledge.
My own opinion is that she was denied the Nobel Prize in Physics because of Swedish politics. She took refuge from the Nazis in Sweden, and had she been given the Nobel Prize for nuclear fission, the Swedish government would have considered her to be the greatest Swedish expert on nuclear fission. But a physicist on the Nobel Prize committee wanted the Swedish government to consider him, not Meitner, the leading Swedish expert on nuclear physics, so that he could obtain grant support from the government for his own work.
The American Paul Chu probably also missed a deserved Nobel Prize in Physics due to politics. In 1987, the Nobel Prize was given to J. Georg Bednorz and K. Alexander Müller for their discovery of superconductivity in ceramics. But it was Chu who forced the physics community to pay attention to the work of Bednorz and Müller — by confirming their work — and also for a crucial improvement of their work.
Chu discovered a new ceramic that went superconducting when placed in liquid nitrogen. Prior to Chu, superconductors, even the new Bednorz-Müller superconductor, only worked when placed in liquid helium, a very expensive and difficult-to-handle material. Liquid nitrogen is cheap and very common in industry. A high school student can show Chu’s ceramic is superconducting by placing it in a bowl of liquid nitrogen and putting a small magnet above it. The magnet will float above Chu’s superconductor, because superconductors are unique in excluding all magnetic field lines.
But Chu did not release the formula for his superconductor in the politically correct way. He submitted the paper containing his formula to the leading physics journal, as politics required. But he was fearful that his formula would leak out before publication, though the journal’s editors promised that they would keep his formula secret. Chu, knowing what that promise was worth, was clever: in his manuscript, he replaced the symbol for one chemical element, and after the paper was accepted, he corrected the “error” when he received the proofs for his paper.
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Frank J. Tipler is Professor of Mathematical Physics at Tulane University. He is the co-author of The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford University Press) and the author of The Physics of Immortality and The Physics of Christianity both published by Doubleday.
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27 Comments
1. Bender:You’re not fooling anyone writing about physics, you know.
You’re obviously just a racist who is upset that a black man won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Oct 15, 2009 - 11:25 pm 2. ic:“Perhaps we should retire the Nobel Prize in all fields,” Who is going to inherit the Nobel fortune?
“or at least not take it seriously in any field.” Yes, the award committees are not up to the job to decide the receipients.
or to be taken as seriously as Hollywood’s Oscar
Oct 15, 2009 - 11:37 pm 3. Francis W. Porretto:I recall the Paul Chu incident: He called the publishers a bare two days before the print date and told them, “Change every occurrence of ‘euterbium’ to ‘yttrium,’” and they were outraged. But it was Chu who had genuine grounds for outrage.
Prizes of any sort are a poor way of judging who is most deserving of respect in a given field. Prizes are awarded by prize juries, not one of which has ever been or will ever be free of biases and unspoken agendas. A sane man goes by results and implications.
Oct 16, 2009 - 3:12 am 4. Paul -Indiana:Bender, ‘Black Man’? Well you got the ‘Black’ part right.
Oct 16, 2009 - 5:46 am 5. John "birther" Samford:Paul, Half Right. The 3% rule was outlawed in 1803
Oct 16, 2009 - 6:53 am 6. CJ:I recall a similar disparity in 2002 when the physics prize was awarded to Ray Davis and Masatoshi Koshiba but not John Bahcall for their solar neurtino work. All three contributed tremendously, but Bahcall’s theories and data interpretation guided Davis’ experimental measurements and many people thought of them as a team. Even Davis seemed surprised and a bit embarrassed that Bahcall was slighted. One colleague likened it to “giving an Oscar to Abbot but not Costello.”
Oct 16, 2009 - 6:53 am 7. Paul Gross:Bender: Nobel prize for satire. Great line.
Oct 16, 2009 - 7:12 am 8. Manny:Personal bias affects all awards whether the judges will admit it or not. Today’s political climate is such that i doubt few of the Peace Prize winners prior to 1970 would win today. Do you think Norman Borlaug would win in the midst of today global warming hysteria? The fact that he kept kept millions from starving to death would be outweighed by the fact that he singlehandedly proved Paul Ehrlick wrong!
SURE BENDER SURE, ANYONE WHO DOESN’T AGREE WITH YOU IS A RACIST. I HOPE YOUR TREATMENT HAS STARTED AND WISH YOU A SPEEDY RECOVERY
Oct 16, 2009 - 8:27 am 9. KBK:@ic: “Who is going to inherit the Nobel fortune?”
Just spread it around. Everyone on earth gets thirty cents, one time, and that’s the end of it.
No, wait, the government(s) get fifteen cents and everyone gets fifteen cents. Twenty people can pool together and get a latte. (Gov’t gets another 8% at that point)
Oct 16, 2009 - 8:56 am 10. biblio44:1. Bender: “You’re obviously just a racist who is upset that a black man won the Nobel Peace Prize.”
4. Paul -Indiana: “Bender, ‘Black Man’? Well you got the ‘Black’ part right.”
5. John “birther” Samford: “Paul, Half Right. The 3% rule was outlawed in 1803″
Welcome to PJM, Professor Tipler!
Oct 16, 2009 - 9:08 am 11. Professor Guvinoff:There is a long list of physicists worthy of a Nobel prize, but who did not receive it. George Gamow, born Russian, came to the US and had a distinguished career as a physicist.
He was also a brilliant educator. His book “One, two, three, infinity” is a masterpiece. I read it as a teenager in the early 60s. Luckily, the book is back in print nowadays. It is a delight, and it is a great read for curious children and inquisitive adults (old children?) alike. A great gift. George Gamow did not get the Nobel, but at least he gets some royalties when you buy the book.
Oct 16, 2009 - 9:39 am 12. Bruce Lagasse:I will add my enthusiastic endorsement for “One, Two, Three, Infinity”; I also read it as a teenager and I still have a tattered copy in my library. Gamow was clearly the model for the character of Dr. Kovorski in James Blish’ novel “V-O-R”.
Another miscarriage of justice came with the ignoring of Fred Hoyle in the award for the “B-squared-FH” theory of stellar creation of elements, even though his colleague Fowler was given the award. Ironically, one prominent speculation for leaving Hoyle out in the cold was his strong criticism of the Nobel Committee for ignoring Jocelyn Bell as the true discoverer of the pulsar.
Oct 16, 2009 - 11:39 am 13. Bryan Dilts:Michael Millikan got the Nobel Prize for determining the weight of an electron. The experiment was conceived by a graduate student, set up, executed, and the calculations made all while Millikan was away. He took the experiment over since he was the students graduate advisor. The student got a PhD. Millikan got a Nobel Prize.
Oct 16, 2009 - 12:25 pm 14. Wil:At the detail level, virtually everything humans are involved in is messy, to say the least. The Nobel prize is no exception. The only constructive things that can be done, are to vigilantly minimize politics, and to maximize the flow of accurate, detailed information. No system can ever be made perfect, including the Nobel prize.
Oct 16, 2009 - 1:02 pm 15. ReNae:The only “prize” worth having is personal integrity. You don’t take the Nobel with you when you die.
Oct 16, 2009 - 2:14 pm 16. Michael Lerman:It’s time to remained the Nobel committee of Newton’s dictum:
Oct 16, 2009 - 3:06 pm 17. Pinky:“The second inventor counts for nothing”
Heh. Physicists griping about people who don’t deserve their Nobel Prizes. If you really want to hear someone complain, ask an economist if Paul Krugman deserved his award. Political pundits may tell you that there have been three Nobels given for not being Bush, but economists put the number at 4.
Oct 16, 2009 - 3:55 pm 18. Marc Malone:#17 Pinky – Nice catch! Hilarious! And true!
Oct 16, 2009 - 5:18 pm 19. jamma:I third on “One, Two, Three, Infinity” — great book — and the Krugman comment, which is more in my bailiwick. Nice article, Prof. Tipler.
Oct 16, 2009 - 7:10 pm 20. Dolt:Mathematicians should be forever grateful to Mittag-Lefler, who, in addition to his contributions to complex analysis, was, umm, friendly with Alfred Nobel’s wife, thus causing Mr. Nobel to exclude mathematics from his prizes (Mittag-Lefler would be a shoe-in). The Fields Medal, Wolf’s prize and other math prizes do have corrupting influence but not quite as much.
Oct 17, 2009 - 2:23 pm 21. Gringo:13. Bryan Dilts:
I met an engineering prof who had some 130 publications in 25 years to his credit. What a brilliant, productive man, I thought to myself. I later found out that as head of a laboratory, he required all research papers coming out of that lab that were submitted for publication include his name on it.
Oct 17, 2009 - 4:24 pm 22. GaryC:Rudi Mossbauer was much luckier than Jocelyn Bell. His adviser refused to be the lead author on the paper for which Mossbauer won the Nobel Prize, as was traditional at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research, presumably because he thought there had to be some error in the experiment.
Cal Tech established the informal Mossbauer Rule, that any Noble Prize winner was entitled to become a full Professor, to avoid embarrasment about Mossbauer being a mere Senior Research Fellow.
Oct 17, 2009 - 11:49 pm 23. Raj:These guys – the lily-white Norwegians – are so interested in sticking it to America.
I’ll remove Norway from my itinerary for my European trip this december. Why spend my hard earned immigrant dollars in a NIMBY-racist uppity America-detesting people. clowns.
Oct 18, 2009 - 7:07 am 24. Jeffrey:Nobel Prize = Idiots prize and should be avoided at all cost.
Oct 18, 2009 - 10:37 am 25. Paul -Indiana:Nobel Prize = Beelzebub prize given to liars, cheats, murderers, racists and all those that hate God.
The prize reminds one of those who are praised by the likes of Castro, Chavez, Putin and the rest of the evil kingdom leaders. We should all worry when the devil and his minions are praising our leaders.
#23. Raj, I’ve been to Oslo in mid summer and it was uncomfortably cool. In the 50’s, in fact. Florence is nice that time of year.
Oct 19, 2009 - 9:48 am 26. bbbeard:Frank:
You know full well that most physicists are (a) aware of the many-world interpretation of QM, and (b) don’t buy it. MWI explains absolutely nothing that the Copenhagen interpretation can’t, and fails any reasonable test of parsimony. The fact that you throw criticism of Born into an otherwise compelling narrative says something about your judgment.
BBB
Oct 19, 2009 - 12:56 pm 27. Gabriel Hanna:I have to second bbbeard here. It is not right for Dr Tipler to pretend that entire physics community agrees with his criticism of Born by calling his ideas “disproved”.
Feel free to make that case in papers and conferences. When enough of your peers agree with you, then tell people who don’t have the education to judge what you are talking about.
Oct 20, 2009 - 7:55 pm