Since the first award in 1901, conferment of the Nobel Prizes, including the Nobel Prize in Physics, has engendered criticism and controversies. After his death in 1896, the will of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel established that an annual prize be awarded for service to humanity in the fields of physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and peace. Similarly, the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, first awarded in 1969, is awarded along with the Nobel Prizes. 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: as of 2004, 77 percent of Nobel Prizes in Physics had given to discoveries, compared with only 23 percent to inventions. A major controversy-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. 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 - modern science has been described as "the teamiest of team sports". The three-person limit has led to glaring omissions of key participants in awarded research. As an example, the 2008 prize awarded for gravitational waves could not acknowledge the work of the huge LIGO consortium. Similarly, the 2013 prize for discovery of the Higgs boson did not reward the discovering ATLAS/CMS collaboration at CERN. The latter collaboration included a list of researchers filling 15 single-spaced pages. The two area, three person limit, with no prizes to organizations, is mentioned nowhere in Nobel's will. These limitations were added by the award committee, and could be easily changed. The Nobel Peace Prize, for example, has long been granted to organizations as well as individuals. This would certainly have been appropriate in physics for cases such as ATLAS/CMS or LIGO.
Controversies per year
1923: Millikan The 1923 prize went to Robert Millikan "for his work on the elementary charge of electricity and on the photoelectric effect". Millikan might have won in 1920 but for Felix Ehrenhaft's incorrect claim to have measured a smaller charge. Some controversy, however, still seems to linger over Millikan's oil 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.
1938: Fermi The 1938 prize went to Enrico Fermi in part for "his demonstrations of the existence of new radioactive elements produced by neutron irradiation". His team's discovery of slow neutrons and different types of radioactivity were correct. But what he believed to be heavy transuranic elements created by neutron absorption of uranium (ausenium and hesperium) turned out to be something quite different. As part of replicating Fermi's experiments, Otto Hahn, Otto Robert Frisch, Lise Meitner, and Fritz Strassmann instead discovered, in late 1938, that Fermi had actually induced nuclear fission in the uranium, and that his identified "transuranics" turned out to be fission 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."
1950: Lattes and Powell Another case of "scientific injustice" in the Nobel Prize in Physics is the exclusion of Brazilian physicist César Lattes from the 1950 prize, which was awarded solely to Cecil Frank Powell "for his development of the photographic method of studying nuclear processes and for the discoveries revealed by it with regard to cosmic rays and new particles". Lattes was a central member of Powell's group at the University of Bristol and played a decisive role in the discovery and characterization of the π meson (pion), a subatomic particle composed of a quark and an antiquark. He was also the principal researcher and first author of the landmark Nature paper describing the pion, but was excluded from the 1950 prize. The decision to award the prize only to Powell, and not to Lattes or other collaborators, has been interpreted as reflecting a tradition of the time in which the head of the group was the only name submitted for the Nobel, while younger members, even when essential experimentally, were systematically excluded. There have been rumors that Niels Bohr left a letter entitled "Why César Lattes Did Not Win the Nobel Prize – Open 50 Years After My Death". However, during searches conducted at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark, no such document was found.
1974: Ryle and Hewish The 1974 prize went to Martin Ryle and Antony Hewish "for their pioneering research in radio astrophysics: Ryle for his observations and inventions, in particular of the aperture synthesis technique, and Hewish for his decisive role in the discovery of pulsars". Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who first detected the signal from the first radio pulsar, was not included among the laureates. Hewish had initially mistaken Bell's findings as 'radio interference'. While Fred Hoyle argued that Bell should have been included in the prize, 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." Over four decades later, Bell was recognized with a three million dollar Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics of which she donated the entirety to assist female, minority, and refugee students in becoming physics researchers.
1978: Penzias and Wilson
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