| Nobel Prize in Physics | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Awarded for | Outstanding contributions to mankind in the field of physics |
| Country | |
| Presented by | |
| First award | 1901; 125 years ago (1901) |
| Most awards | John Bardeen (2) |
| Website | www |
Since the first award in 1901 year, conferment of theNobel Prizes, including theNobel Prize in Physics, has engenderedcriticism and controversies.[1][2] After his death in 1896, the will of Swedish industrialistAlfred Nobel established that an annual prize be awarded for service to humanity in the fields ofphysics,chemistry,physiology or medicine,literature, andpeace. Similarly, theSveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, first awarded in 1969 year, is awarded along with the Nobel Prizes.[3]
Nobel sought to reward "those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind". One prize, he stated, should be given "to the person who shall have made the most important 'discovery' or 'invention' within the field of physics". Awards committees have historically rewarded discoveries over inventions: up to 2004 year, 77 percent ofNobel Prizes in Physics have been given to discoveries, compared with only 23 percent to inventions.[4][5]
A major controversies-generating factor for the more recent physics-related prizes is the Nobel rule that each award can not be shared by more than two different research areas and no more than three different individuals each year.[6] This rule was adequate in 1901, when most of the science research was performed by individual scientists working with their small group of assistants in relative isolation. But in more recent times science research has increasingly become a matter of widespread international cooperation and exchange of ideas among different research groups. These groups are themselves composed of dozens or even hundreds of researchers, spread over the years of effort needed to hypothesize, refine and prove a discovery,[7][8] leading to modern science being described as "the teamiest of team sports".[9] This in turn has led to glaring omissions of key participants in awarded researches: as an example see below the case of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Physics, or the case of theATLAS/CMS Collaboration that produced the scientific papers that documented thediscovery of the Higgs boson and included a list of researchers filling 15 single-spaced pages.[10]
Multiple commentators have noted that the three person limit, and no prizes to organizations, is mentioned nowhere in Nobel's will. These limitations were added by the award committee, and could be easily changed. TheNobel Peace Prize has already done this, and the prize is commonly granted to organizations. This would certainly have been appropriate for cases such as ATLAS/CMS orLIGO.[11][12]
The 1923 prize went toRobert Millikan "for his work on the elementary charge of electricity and on thephotoelectric effect". Millikan might have won in 1920 but forFelix Ehrenhaft's incorrect claim to have measured a smaller charge. Some controversy, however, still seems to linger over Millikan'soil drop experiment and experimental interpretation, over whether Millikan manipulated his data in the 1913 scientific paper measuring the electron charge. Allegedly, he did not report all his observations.[13]
The 1938 prize went toEnrico Fermi in part for "his demonstrations of the existence of new radioactive elements produced by neutron irradiation". His team's discovery ofslow neutrons and different types of radioactivity were correct. But what he believed to be heavytransuranic elements created by neutron absorption ofuranium (ausenium and hesperium) turned out to be something quite different. As part of replicating Fermi's experiments,Otto Hahn,Otto Robert Frisch,Lise Meitner, andFritz Strassmann instead discovered, in late 1938, that Fermi had actually inducednuclear fission in the uranium, and that his identified "transuranics" turned out to befission products, isotopes of much lighter elements than uranium. Fermi delivered his Nobel Prize lecture only a few weeks before this discovery; he added a footnote to the lecture afterwards, indicating that the discovery of fission products by Hahn et. al, "makes it necessary to reexamine all the problems of the transuranic elements, as many of them might be found to be products of a splitting of uranium."[14][15]
The 1974 prize went toMartin Ryle andAntony Hewish "for their pioneering research in radio astrophysics: Ryle for his observations and inventions, in particular of theaperture synthesis technique, and Hewish for his decisive role in the discovery ofpulsars".Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who first detected the signal from the first radio pulsar, was not included among the laureates.[16] Hewish had initially mistaken Bell's findings as 'radio interference'.[17] WhileFred Hoyle argued that Bell should have been included in the prize,[18] Bell said, "I believe it would demean Nobel Prizes if they were awarded to research students, except in very exceptional cases, and I do not believe this is one of them."[19]
Over four decades later, Bell was recognized with a three million dollar SpecialBreakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics of which she donated the entirety to assist female, minority, and refugee students in becoming physics researchers.[20]
The 1978 prize was awarded for the chance "detection ofcosmic microwave background radiation" by Bell Labs physicistsArno Allan Penzias andRobert Woodrow Wilson. There was some controversy over the award for a serendipitous discovery since it did not includeRalph Alpher andRobert Herman, who predicted the cosmic microwave background radiation in 1948, or Princeton physicistRobert Dicke who was also searching for the same phenomenon and co-published with Penzias and Wilson, explaining their results.[21][22]
Half of the 1983 prize went toWilliam Alfred Fowler "for his theoretical and experimental studies of the nuclear reactions of importance in the formation of the chemical elements in the universe". Fowler acknowledgedFred Hoyle as the pioneer of the concept ofstellar nucleosynthesis but Hoyle did not receive a share in the prize. Hoyle's championing of many disreputable and disproven ideas may have damaged his overall reputation and invalidated him in the Nobel committee's view.[23][24] Hoyle's obituary inPhysics Today notes that "Many of us felt that Hoyle should have shared Fowler's 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics, but the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences later made partial amends by awarding Hoyle, with Edwin Salpeter, its 1997Crafoord Prize".[25]
The 1997 prize went toSteven Chu,Claude Cohen-Tannoudji andWilliam Daniel Phillips "for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light". The award was disputed by Russian scientists[26] who questioned the awardees' priority in the acquired approach and techniques, which the team of Vladimir Minogin andVictor Balykin claimed to have carried out more than a decade before.[27]
Half of the 2005 prize went toRoy J. Glauber "for his contribution to the quantum theory of optical coherence". Several physicists wrote to the Swedish Academy, protesting that Indian theoretical physicistE. C. George Sudarshan should have been awarded a share of the Prize for the Sudarshan diagonal representation (also known as Glauber–Sudarshan representation) in quantum optics, for which Glauber won his share of the prize.[28] Sudarshan and other physicists sent a letter to the Nobel Committee claiming that the P representation had more contributions of "Sudarshan" than "Glauber".[29]
Half of the 2008 prize went toMakoto Kobayashi andToshihide Maskawa for their 1972 work onquark mixing. This postulated the existence of three additional quarks beyond the three then known to exist and used this postulate to provide a possible mechanism forCP violation, which had been observed 8 years earlier.[30] Their work expanded and reinterpreted research by the Italian physicistNicola Cabibbo, dating to 1963, before the quark model was even introduced. The resulting quark mixing matrix, which described probabilities of different quarks to turn into each other under the action of theweak force, is known asCKM matrix, after Cabibbo, Kobayashi, and Maskawa. Cabibbo arguably merited a share of the award.[31] The recipient of the other half of the 2008 prize wasYoichiro Nambu for the discovery of the mechanism ofspontaneous broken symmetry insubatomic physics.[32] The fundamental step in this field is theNambu–Jona-Lasinio model (NJL model), developed together with the Italian theoretical physicistGiovanni Jona-Lasinio, who was left out of the prize like Cabibbo. In recognition to his colleague's work, Nambu asked Jona-Lasinio to hold the Nobel Lecture at the Stockholm University in his place.[33] As the prize is awarded each year to at most three people for no more than two different research works, the committee was forced to skip one member each from both the CKM and the NJL workgroups.
The 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics was divided between three recipients over two disciplines,fiber optics andcharge-coupled devices. Combined with the limit of three awardees, this led to some omissions.Charles Kuen Kao's award for his work in fiber optics led to claims thatNarinder Singh Kapany's previous work had been overlooked.[34][35][36][37]
The second award topic was "for the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit—the CCD sensor". The awardees,Willard Boyle andGeorge E. Smith, developed the CCD, but for use as a memory. This led toEugene I. Gordon andMichael Francis Tompsett claiming that it should have been theirs for establishing that the technology could be used for imaging, especially as "imaging" is part of the award description.[38]
The 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded toAndre Geim andKonstantin Novoselov of the University of Manchester "for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional materialgraphene". Several problems with the factual accuracy of the supporting documents issued by the Nobel committee have been pointed out, including that they seem to wrongly attribute the discovery of graphene to Geim and Novoselov, and they did not take into account other contributions to graphene research, like those fromWalter de Heer andPhilip Kim.[39]
Peter Higgs andFrançois Englert were awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics for their theoretical predictions related to theHiggs boson. This ran into the problem of the Nobel only awarding three individuals since three separate1964 PRL symmetry breaking papers have been credited with the discovery of theHiggs mechanism andHiggs boson. These PRL papers were written by 1)Robert Brout andFrançois Englert, 2)Peter Higgs, and 3)Gerald Guralnik,C. Richard Hagen, andTom Kibble. Brout died a few years earlier and was not included. There was debate over whether Guralnik/Hagen/Kibble should have been included in the Nobel Prize for their 1964 PRL symmetry breaking papers.[40][41][42][43][44][45]CERN, whose experiments proved the existence of theHiggs boson, was also excluded from the 2013 Prize.[46]
The 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded toIsamu Akasaki,Hiroshi Amano andShuji Nakamura for the bluelight-emitting diode, did not recognize the decades of incremental work in developing the LED by other pioneers such asOleg Losev,Nick Holonyak, andGertrude Neumark[47][48] and overlooked a prior claim for invention of the blue LED byRCA materials researcher Herbert Paul Maruska.[49][50]
The 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded toReiner Weiss,Kip Thorne, andBarry Barish for their contribution toLIGO, which led to the detection of gravitational waves. Despite the contributions of the upwards of a thousand scientists and engineers in LIGO, theNobel Committee continued its tradition of awarding the prize to only three physicists. All three winners commented saying that the prize belongs to the entireLIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC). Thorne said "It is unfortunate that, due to the statutes of the Nobel Foundation, the prize has to go to no more than three people, when our marvelousdiscovery is the work of more than a thousand."[51] Further controversy was narrowly avoided by the death ofRonald Drever, who if still alive would have forced the committee to choose three of the four main contributors.[52]
The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded toJohn Hopfield andGeoffrey Hinton for their work onneural networks. The announcement sparked debates between physicists in social media about whether the laureates' work onartificial intelligence belonged to physics or not.[53][54][55] It has also been argued that Japanese pioneers in artificial intelligence likeShun'ichi Amari, who developed an algorithm equivalent to that ofHopfield networks prior to Hopfield and anticipated Hinton'sbackpropagation algorithm, were excluded from the prize.[56]
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None of the contributors to the discovery ofnuclear fission won the prize for Physics. Instead, the prize for Chemistry was awarded toOtto Hahn for his discovery of fission in Berlin in 1938.Lise Meitner also contributed to the discovery of nuclear fission,[57] through her collaboration with Hahn. From the beginning, she had worked with Hahn on the neutron bombardment of Uranium, but left Germany for Sweden before fission was discovered. Working there with the experimental data supplied to her by Hahn, she managed, withOtto Robert Frisch's participation, to incorporateNiels Bohr'sliquid drop model (first suggested byGeorge Gamow)[58] into fission's theoretical foundation. In an earlier collaboration with Hahn, she had independently discovered a new chemical element (calledprotactinium). Bohr nominated both for this work, in addition to recommending the Chemistry prize for Hahn. Hahn's assistant,Fritz Strassmann, was not considered for the Physics prize.[59]
Chien-Shiung Wu disproved the law of theconservation of parity (1956) with the so calledWu experiment, becoming the firstWolf Prize in Physics laureate. She died in 1997 without receiving a Nobel. Wu assistedTsung-Dao Lee personally in his parity laws development—withChen-Ning Yang—by providing him in 1956 with a possible test method for beta decay that worked successfully.[60] Her bookBeta Decay (1965) is still asine qua non reference for nuclear physicists.
Several Nobel Prizes were awarded for research related to the concepts of theboson,Bose–Einstein statistics andBose–Einstein condensate—the latest being the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics given for advancing the theory of Bose–Einstein condensates althoughSatyendra Nath Bose himself was not awarded the Nobel Prize. In his bookThe Scientific Edge, physicistJayant Narlikar observed: "SN Bose's work on particle statistics (c.1922), which clarified the behavior ofphotons (the particles of light in an enclosure) and opened the door to new ideas on statistics of Microsystems that obey the rules of quantum theory, was one of the top ten achievements of 20th century Indian science and could be considered in the Nobel Prize class."[61] The work of other 20th century Indian scientists which Narlikar considered to be of Nobel Prize class wereSrinivasa Ramanujan,Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman andMeghnad Saha.However, when asked about the omission, Bose himself said: "I have got all the recognition I deserve."[62]Rolf-Dieter Heuer, the director general of European organization for nuclear researchCERN, commented in a scientific meet inKolkata titledFrontiers of Science that "it is unfortunate that pioneering Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose did not win the Nobel Prize for work on quantum physics in the 1920s that provided the foundation of the Bose–Einstein statistics and the theory of theBose–Einstein condensate".[63]
Albert Einstein's 1921 Nobel Prize Award mainly recognized his 1905 discovery of the mechanism of thephotoelectric effect and "for his services to Theoretical Physics". The Nobel committee passed on several nominations for his many other seminal contributions, although these led to prizes for others who later applied more advanced technology to experimentally verify his work, most notably the 2017 prize awarded to the heads ofLIGO. Many predictions of Einstein's theories have been verified as technology advances. Recent examples include the bending of light in agravitational field,gravitational waves (detected byLIGO),gravitational lensing andblack holes. It was not until 1993 that the first evidence for the existence of gravitational radiation came via the Nobel Prize-winning measurements of theHulse–Taylor binary system.[64]
The committee also failed to recognize the other contributions of hisannus mirabilis papers onBrownian motion andspecial relativity. Often these nominations for special relativity were for bothHendrik Lorentz and Einstein.Henri Poincaré was also nominated at least once for his work, including on Lorentz's relativity theory. However,Walter Kaufmann's then-experimental results (incorrectly) cast doubt on special relativity. These doubts were not resolved until 1915. By this time, Einstein had progressed to hisgeneral theory of relativity, including his theory of gravitation. Empirical support—in this case the predicted spectral shift of sunlight—was in question for many decades. The only piece of original evidence was the consistency with the knownperihelion precession of the planet Mercury. Some additional support was gained at the end of 1919, when the predicted deflection of starlight near the Sun was confirmed byArthur Eddington'ssolar eclipse expedition, though here again the actual results were somewhat ambiguous. Conclusive proof of the gravitational light deflection prediction was not achieved until the 1970s.[65]
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