I was a collaborator on the SNO project. I worked with Art McDonald, who co-won the 2015 Nobel prize in physics for the project.
There were hundreds of people involved. We couldn't have done it without the hundreds of people. While Art was a fantastic guy and a tireless worker, a good chunk of his contribution was management.
i.e. A competent manager. He not only understood all of the physics involved, but a good chunk of the engineering, along with having decent managerial skills. No one with skills solely in an MBA, or theoretical physicist, or civil engineer could have done it.
Even if he didn't win based on something he mathematically proved, there's no question he's one of the top physicists around.
If you look at the Nobel prizes as the "best of" awards, and not "the guy who invented something all alone", it becomes a bit more palatable.
On top of that, the Nobel committee is limited by the rules of their foundation. Even assigning Nobels for something done 5 years ago is arguably outside of the directions of the trust.
So yeah, the article isn't theoretically wrong, but it's wrong for practical purposes.
It concerns me that we award managers all the credit for collaborative innovations. History remembers Thomas Edison as a great inventor with 2,332 patents. This is a distortion though. He was mostly a manager, who stamped his name on everything his building of inventors produced. I see the same thing happening with the mythologizing of Steve Jobs as an inventor instead of as a CEO.
This "great man" view of history distorts our perceptions. It tricks us into believing any lone person can rise from nothing. The reality is that it takes collaboration, funding, and often privilege. People might be a little happier with their lives if they knew the "great man" concept is just propaganda, and that simply contributing to something great is a worthwhile aspiration. I know I'm happier for discovering this in my mid-life.
> The article address this argument though and says that the Foundation has already stretched the rules.
That bit of the article is arguably misleading. The foundation is not stretching its rules in awarding it to three people. That stretching (from one to three) was done immediately after Nobel's death as part of the settlement of his Will, and enshrined in the statutes of the foundation ("nor shall it be divided into more than three prizes at most")[0].
Whether it's possible to change it now to allow more than three is a question for someone who knows Swedish Trust law.
> The foundation is not stretching its rules in awarding it to three people. That stretching (from one to three) was done immediately after Nobel's death
I'm baffled! I have read the will of Alfred Nobel before, but it never struck me that it doesn't allow for sharing of a prize. Here is the part of the will [0], in English translation, that deals with the prizes, for anyone who wants to read it:
> The whole of my remaining realizable estate shall be dealt with in the following way: the capital, invested in safe securities by my executors, shall constitute a fund, the interest on which shall be annually distributed in the form of prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit to mankind. The said interest shall be divided into five equal parts, which shall be apportioned as follows: one part to the person who shall have made the most important discovery or invention within the field of physics; one part to the person who shall have made the most important chemical discovery or improvement; one part to the person who shall have made the most important discovery within the domain of physiology or medicine; one part to the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction; and one part to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses. The prizes for physics and chemistry shall be awarded by the Swedish Academy of Sciences; that for physiological or medical work by the Caroline Institute in Stockholm; that for literature by the Academy in Stockholm, and that for champions of peace by a committee of five persons to be elected by the Norwegian Storting. It is my express wish that in awarding the prizes no consideration whatever shall be given to the nationality of the candidates, but that the most worthy shall receive the prize, whether he be a Scandinavian or not.
(It also says that the peace prize should be given to one person, not an organisation.)
Just to play devils advocate, where should the line be drawn? None of this work could be done if it weren't for the cafeteria staff that provided brain food, or the spouses who shouldered the responsibilities of any parents who worked on the project while providing moral support. It could get messy.
When you do your work, do you share awards and raises with the cafeteria staff? Does the cafeteria staff understand the work you do? Do they contribute materially to it? i.e. technical contributions which are meaningful in the field?
No? Then the analogy is false.
The difference with physics (for example) is that when a paper has 160 co-authors (as in my experience) all of those people contributed materially to the result. They are all experts in the field, and they all understand the contents of the paper.
I agree with parts of the article, that big breakthroughs are rarely these days individual efforts, and that praising only the ones at the top is misleading and potentially damaging; however, as a member of the LIGO collaboration, I think these three guys really do deserve credit for what they've driven over the past 50 (!) years, and all of the work we've been able to do over the years has only been enabled by their drive. While choosing three from thousands is never fair, it's probably more fair than distributing the award equally among anyone who's ever played a part in gravitational wave science.
The recipients have been at pains to make the collaborative effort clear. One of the first things Rai Weiss (winner this year) said on the phone to the Nobel press conference today was that he saw this as an award for the 1000+ scientists in the (LIGO) collaboration. When a special Breakthrough Prize was awarded to all of us last year, with large prize money being given to Rai, Kip and Ron Drever (who died earlier this year and who otherwise might have been one of the three Nobel laureates today), Rai and other senior scientists spent the money funding grad students and other science activities [1]. They have given ample credit to the people that helped in their success, and they've shared their knowledge and resources with the newer generations.
Today, we're celebrating this as a recognition foremost for the three new Nobel laureates, but also to the other pioneers who didn't make the "final three", the diverse collaboration of scientists past and present who've been involved around the world in gravitational wave physics, and all the technicians and students that did the grunt work building the machines and lab experiments. While our names aren't all stamped on the medals, I for one am deeply satisfied to have played some (tiny) part in it all alongside these greats.
Well done. Your post embodies and expresses how I expected the majority of fellow scientists responded to this news. I don't want to say that's how they/you should respond, but that's how I hoped you'd respond.
To have even played a small part in LIGO must be an awesome feeling of accomplishment and enable a true appreciation for collaboration with genius.
Congratulations on your (tiny) part. The effort that went into the project is mind boggling.
Yes, I think vision of Nobel prize has changed with years. Now it's mostly regarded as avery prestigious mark to put on "best of the best" but originally it was probably not just award for achievements but a way to distribute money to the people who can really use it to advance science, it's a way to choose from all the people, those who can use the money effectively. That's why they don't award Nobel Prize to dead people, because they can't use those money to advance science any more. And also that's probably why they added a rule to wait for some time before awarding the prize - to check that this achievement is real and person or persons who are related to it can be trusted.
I visited Sweden once, during the Nobel Prize award ceremony.
I loved how the ceremony was broadcast on TV, and the scientists, who are famous in their own field, walk the red carpet and are given the (literally) royal treatment for their visit.
I loved the clips where they show the award winners and family visiting places in Sweden - a bit like the background clips they show during the Olympics.
For this brief time, scientists eclipsed actors, athletes, and the other pop culture stars.
'Course that could have been just me. I do like a bit of absurdism.
When I was a young child, I used to daydream about winning a Nobel. I didn't daydream about winning an Emmy or a Grammy, but I did dream of winning a Nobel. (And Formula 1 championship races, but that's not important right now.)
Do kids today daydream of getting a Nobel? Science was a Pretty Big Deal when I was young. We were just getting started with space exploration and splitting the atom was pretty new. We kids talked about the breakthroughs we would make, when we weren't seriously considering our future career as baseball stars and how we'd enjoy our flying cars and robots.
My kids are all grown, so I can't really ask them what little kids daydream of. The kids my daughter interacts with are probably a bit too preoccupied to think about winning a Nobel.
>>When I was a young child, I used to daydream about winning a Nobel. I didn't daydream about winning an Emmy or a Grammy, but I did dream of winning a Nobel. <<
I suspect that lots of us as kids had the same daydreams, self included, and I'm sure that many kids today with a love for science daydream about the same thing.
Surely the daydreaming about the prize comes from the interest in science rather than an interest in winning a Nobel taking someone down a scientific path? Had you been interested in drama you'd have dreamt of winning an Emmy.
The prize correlates with the interest. It's not a likely causal factor.
This is way off-topic and I accept the karma hit...
At night, I'd sit up with my back propped up by pillows. I'd tuck the blanket underneath my feet and tuck it in firmly by my sides. I'd prop a bit of the blanket out away from my chest and I was inside my imaginary monocock, doing laps at Monaco. I'd make the appropriate sound effects as I shifted and accelerated, braked and cornered at the edge of the envelope. Sometimes, I'd push it past the limits of the car and my own ability and would suffer the horrifying crash as a consequence.
Much to the dismay of the missus, I sometimes still do. I just don't usually throw myself off the bed as I imaginary crash.
I think that there is a similar problem in the software world when it comes to free software projects. Who created Python? Linux? Perl? Wikipedia? If your answer is Guido van Rossum, Linus Torvalds, Larry Wall and Jimmy Wales you are about as wrong as the Nobel Prize committee. But sometimes there are a single guy who is responsible for a lot of the project even if that person is almost never credited, like Tom Lane or Fabricio Bellard.
I don't know about what to do about this unfair distribution of credit. Probably nothing.
On the other hand, would we have Python, Linux, Perl, or Wikipedia without those people? They had the vision and they made it happen. Sure many other people could have done it. But those people did do it.
It's much easier to be a contributor, than a founder/leader. The founders/leaders deserve more credit.
For me Nobel prices in Science are one of the things that work better the way they are that most alternatives.
Nobel prices in peace are ridiculous. Not talking about (fake) Nobel prices of Economy that do not exist but have managed to buy themselves some recognition because the money printing of central bankers.
For me this article is absurd. If you have a better way of giving to science, create your own price with your own money.
Agreed. Nobel laureates in peace are basically bullshit. Look at Obama---good president, but how many drone strikes did he order, and Aung San Suu Kyi--currently accused of genocide. The Nobel laureates in science indisputably pushed forth the frontiers of human understanding.
Frankly, I think the Nobel prizes in the sciences are carrying the name.
Perhaps look at it another way - assigning a Nobel peace prize is a way of putting wider attention onto someone, and maybe works as a soft pressure to keep them behaving a little? For half a year or so after you get awarded a peace prize, your profile in the world is a lot higher than normal, perhaps giving you a bit more of a nudge in the right direction.
Also, Aung San Suu Kyi won her Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, 26 years ago. How old is that? Well, that was the year that the world-wide-web was born. Kurt Cobain was still alive. George Bush was in office and was just 'George Bush', not 'George Bush Sr' (and the first Bush war against Iraq started in January). The Soviet Union still existed, dissolved only in December of that year. Street Fighter II hit the arcades. The Rodney King beating sparked the LA riots. The war that gave us the term 'ethnic cleansing' started that year in Yugoslavia. Apartheid was still going on in South Africa, with a couple of years left to go. Linus Torvalds announces Linux on comp.os.minix.
Calling the Nobel Peace Prize bullshit because a recipient behaves differently-to-expected a generation later is itself bullshit.
The rules prevent it other than in exceptional circumstances. See my comment above about the consideration of an award to Gandhi for example. Apart from wanting the candidate to continue to do good, there are also considerations such as practicalities of where the money should go as the money is awarded with the intent of using it to further the purposes of the prize, though the recipient has wide latitude, and so it is not a given that it'd be appropriate to just hand the money to someones estate for example.
This is something we discuss a lot in Sweden. The Nobel peace prize is issued by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, not the Swedish one. And the economy prize was constituted as a response to the bank who started financing the Nobel committee.
While I agree the price to Obama was ridiculous, you need to see that one basically as an expression of just how much relief the election of Obama was for the rest of the world.
It was a "please prove you're not like Bush" prize. The election of Obama is the first time I've seen widespread parties with non-Americans celebrating the election of an American president.
Don't underestimate just how terrifying a lot of the world saw the willingness of the US to elect Bush not once but twice (now imagine how we feel about Trump).
One might argue Obama failed to live up the aspirations of giving him the price to some extent, and hope they learn from that, but that's a different issue.
> Aung San Suu Kyi--currently accused of genocide.
Two things: She is not generally "accused of genocide". There is a real argument to be made that she should not stay quiet, and that she is not doing enough, and there is the fear that this might be because she might even agree with the violence or have an antipathy for muslims, but to my knowledge there is no clear evidence about why she has remained quiet on the matter and certainly nothing to imply that she has personally been involved in making decisions on the matter. Of course that doesn't prove she is innocent either, but it's a bit early to start throwing around accusations she is part responsible for genocide.
Secondly, the price was awarded a long time ago. When it was awarded, she deserved it. Maybe she's changed. The price is very specifically not awarded for "lifetime good behavior" unless that is specifically the reasoning used by the committee, but generally for specific acts or specific service set out when it is awarded.
There might be an argument that it'd be better to hand it out posthumously so a persons whole life could be considered, but AFAIK the terms of the Nobel Prizes specifically prevent posthumous awards other than in special circumstances (which generally have been treated as if the award is decided before the Nobel Committee is aware that the nominee has died), not least because part of the intent is to encourage people to continue to do good.
This has famously "backfired" on the committees in the sense that for example Gandhi was nominated several times, and lost out in part because of concerns that were relevant at the time (e.g. in 1947 diary notes from the committee chairman shows that concerns over the Indian-Pakistani conflict were raised as objections for giving it to him at that time), and where the committee appears to have expected there'd be a better time to award it.
By the time of his death, and certainly for many years afterwards, an award would have been relatively uncontroversial, but the it was too late. Gandhi was nominated again in 1948, died right before the end of the nomination window, the committee considered it, since there were some degree of openings in the rules given the timing. But instead the committee decided not to award the prize at all that year saying "there was no suitable living candidate" - given that Gandhi was the only prominent nominee in 1948 that was dead when the decision was made it was a very clear message, but the committee did not believe they could award it to him posthumously.
> Not talking about (fake) Nobel prices of Economy that do not exist but have managed to buy themselves some recognition because the money printing of central bankers.
Name one Nobel prize winner in economics with whom you disagree the awarding and explain your disagreement.
Otherwise your comment can be dismissed as another vapid "I disagree with the economics Nobel because the economic science sometimes disagree with my preferred political ideology".
There are technically no Nobel Prize winners in economics. I think that's what the comment was talking about. The economics prize is not a Nobel Prize as established by Alfred Nobel, it is the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences [1], established in 1968 by the Swedish National Bank. It is grouped with the others and awarded in the same ceremony, however.
Sure, but he was trying to delegitimize the highest honor in a field of study. The economics Nobel is functionally equivalent to the Fields medal or Turing award, regardless of Alfred Nobel's original intent.
The point is the poster above was trying to diminish the field of study's legitimacy. Reading between the lines of his post he was doing so because of his political leanings, not because he disagreed with any particular contribution of a economics Nobelist's contribution to human knowledge.
We should aspire to be above of such toxic ideologism.
Why can't he, or I, diminishing the legitimacy of economics?
If someone had made up a fake Nobel prize in psychology I would diminishing the legitimacy of that too.
The field of economics is far, far less rigorous than any of the hard sciences for which Nobel prizes are awarded. The fake Nobel prize for economics is strongly disputed by much of the Nobel family, Keynes, and it makes economists act more blowhard, self-congratulatory and self-important than they already do.
I say this as someone spends a fair chunk of my time reading economics books and blogs.
Even if you were to completely deny any scientific nature of economics, it would not be reason to lessen the "memorial price", as there is no implication that "Nobel price" means science. 40% of the original five have nothing at all to do with science and even if you dismissed the peace price for being the odd one with all the norwegianness and questionable recipients, there would still be literature . Just think of the memorial price as "the Nobel for economic literature", you won't find a hair in that.
(Also I suspect that there might be some linguistic misunderstanding here, maybe some participants are used to think in a language where the most common translation of "science" does not include the subset of social sciences?),
I read Nobel in Economics as 'Nobel in maths (largely statistical optimization) and behavioural psychology'. I personally believe the field adds significant value to society.
That said, I do think the award is rather liberally given away. We credit scientists only when their theories test out in practice with sufficient evidence whereas we are more willing to give economists a pass in the name of 'not enough data' or 'valid under certain conditions' . I think we should award only the fundamental time tested truths (statistical or otherwise) which are so entrenched in the way of the world that its discovery has little or no bearing on its exact function. This would award Nash/Selten but not Merton/Scholes. The basic option pricing ended up being just a bunch of really cool but limited equations which tend to be self fulfilling prophecies until when they don't.
Economics is a pretty hard science. Certainly more robust than "peace" or "literature". Less than Physics and Medicine, sure. Not sure how to compare it to all the fields under "medicine".
I think we should aspire to be above reading between the lines. When we do so, we tend to see that which we want to see, regardless of the author's intent.
I think the best argument against a Nobel Prize in Economics was made, precisely, by one of its recipients, Friedrich August von Hayek, during the 1974 ceremony [1]:
> I must confess that if I had been consulted whether to establish a Nobel Prize in economics, I should have decidedly advised against it.[...] the Nobel Prize confers on an individual an authority which in economics no man ought to possess.
> This does not matter in the natural sciences. Here the influence exercised by an individual is chiefly an influence on his fellow experts; and they will soon cut him down to size if he exceeds his competence.
> But the influence of the economist that mainly matters is an influence over laymen: politicians, journalists, civil servants and the public generally.
> There is no reason why a man who has made a distinctive contribution to economic science should be omnicompetent on all problems of society - as the press tends to treat him till in the end he may himself be persuaded to believe.
That behavior which he describes... sounds like any Nobel Prize in Economics you know?
Well he's still sort of right. The 2008 shock was legitimately more intense than the 1929 one and we came out of it with a "mere recession" instead of the horrors of the 1930s.
This is largely due to what the US fed did in response (the US gov. fiscal stimulus probably helped some but not on the same scale). Luckily the fed was headed by Ben Bernanke, one of the most erudite scholars of the Great Depression at the time the world economy was hanging on by a thread.
which is also by Aad et al., but that one has a mere 2,926 authors (because it includes only the ATLAS collaboration and not the CMS collaboration).
Seeing all of these people listed definitely lends some weight to the "it's kind of unreasonable for only 1-3 people to win a Nobel for this sort of work" view for me.
> Seeing all of these people listed definitely lends some weight to the "it's kind of unreasonable for only 1-3 people to win a Nobel for this sort of work" view for me.
But what is the alternative? The article doesn't give much detail; it just says, "Why not award the scientific prizes to teams and organizations, just like the Peace Prize can be?
The price of reform is low, and the cost of avoiding it is high."
But this is clearly wrong. If you give the Nobel to a collaboration of 5000+ physicists, then you greatly devalue the Nobel prize. Either they are all laureates, including those hundreds of grad students who signed on for just six months, or maybe none of them really are. After the Nobel is devalued it will be nearly impossible to rebuild its status, or to replace it with another prize with equal status in the public consciousness.
The main problem described in the article is that the current system gives a "misleading impression of how a lot of science is actually done." I don't agree with this claim; anyone who has seen a picture or budget for LIGO knows that this isn't a one-man show.
And that is not the point anyway. The prize puts a human face on major scientific accomplishments. This is far more important than the possible downside of slightly misleading some people about how science works.
Evidently ATLAS listed its members alphabetically and CMS listed them by some other criterion (maybe seniority?). However, I would guess that ATLAS got its member list first in the paper by being the alphabetically prior of the two collaborations (!).
So, that suggests that you should not only change your name to Aaalweachter, but also be sure to work on the AARDVARK research collaboration. (Or found one if it doesn't already exist.)
Hi, member of CMS collaboration here. The author list is ordered: by country name (in English), by town name, by institute name, by author name, by author first name. So, as of this writing, the list starts with authors from Armenia.
This is like open source projects.. Even though hundreds and thousands of people contribute to these projects when you think of Perl you credit Larry wall, linux is Linus, laravel is taylor otwell, etc.
It would be interesting to know what the prizes would be awarded for if they considered only individual efforts, no huge projects with decade long collaborations of thousands of people.
The effect would likely just be that a few theoretical advances could be nominated while experiments, even those that confirm the theories in question (Higgs, or this years prize) would go unawarded.
It might end up looking like a random "employee of the month". There are thousands of individuals working on their own little puzzle piece of these large cooperations, singling out some individual contributors "down in the trenches" for an award would be a lot more disrespectful to their peers than awarding some shared head figures who implicitly represent their entire extended teams.
I was thinking that the prizes would go to smaller individual discoveries, rather than to the major ground breaking discoveries. I.e. either the prize would be basically for theoretical physics, in which case Higgs could get the prize (and no one involved in confirming it would be awarded). This would basically leave experimental physics out of the question because these huge experiments obviously always involve huge amounts of people.
Or the awards would go to small discoveries that actually were made by individuals or small teams. Basically you'd see the largest and most groundbreaking discoveries go completely unawarded because they are group efforts, and since the price is directed towards the lone genius, it would be awarded for tiny discoveries.
But are there even small discoveries in physics? Anything not predicted by current models would be considered huge, and everything else would not be a discovery.
I think the prizes are important as a means of drawing the attention of the general public to certain important discoveries. I do think they should do more to recognize more contributors to various discoveries, even if they have to limit the number of people who receive the monetary award.
This is a fabulous article. Touches on everything from large groups of people, obviously missing attributions due to death, and even the sexist outcomes.
Typical competitive thinking from everyone here. Just see the Nobel Prize as a little gem alongside the road to greater goals. Focus on the work to come instead of arguing about a procedure older than any human alive.
It doesn't matter who gets a shiny medal, the only thing that matters is that we push science to next level. To help our understanding of the world and to help the people.
Also: it doesn't matter who picks up the shiny medal, what matters is also that science, like sports or movies, also has a couple of hours of glamour. The Oscars are also a charade, but it makes the whole industry a bit more magical and glamorous. The glamour and attention might attract that next Curie or Einstein to science, in which case it was all worth it.
If viewed as context of a CEO of company or captain of a sports team (or even solo sports) these nobel prizes seem to make sense. The winners are the face of the organisation.
If companies and universities tried to win Nobel Prizes like teams try to win the Super Bowl, the Olympics, America’s Cup, etc it would be more useful.
It does give visibility to science, which hopefully, motivates a few more people to grow up to want that achievement.
Personally, I think we need more prizes and “sports” for these endeavors:
A heretic thought: Maybe the Nobel Prize only manages to ~"distort our perception of science" because the reporting about it can fill the void created by incredibly bad, superficial science journalism?
Alfred Nobel only wanted to reward people for making discoveries. There are many reasons one can argue that this is counterproductive (Like this article points out, science is not a single-person endeavor, but even more importantly is that it invokes a huge survivorship bias: You only get the prize for being correct, so someone else who did just as important work on another theory that showed that it was not correct will never be rewarded.)
But in the end, it was Nobel's prerogative to do what he wanted with his money. We can argue whether it would have been better if he had done something different, but it is what it is. It's not a reward by a government or any community or democratically elected organization where we really have standing to argue that it should be different, it's just a committee trying to follow the century-plus old will of a single person. If we don't like what it does, we don't have to pay attention.
Hmm... Should we follow his idea how to reach his goals, or maybe we should follow his goals with our best? Nobel idea how to invest his money is based on the understanding science as it was at XIX century. But now science is different and is changing further constantly. So if we follow Nobel last will, than Nobel Prize would become irrelevant, having zero influence on science, just some tradition from the past to give money for good managers or for respectable elderly scientists choosed from hundreds of other equally respectable and elderly scientists by some qualities having nothing to productivity in science or revolutionary ideas. Alternatively we can try to adapt the Nobel Prize to new reality, allowing it to reflect current state of affairs and to hold its influence on science.
I'm not a lawer, so I don't know is it possible to change Nobel Prize principles. All I want is to point to futility of blind following the old rule.
> It's not a reward by a government or any community or democratically elected organization where we really have standing to argue that it should be different, it's just a committee trying to follow the century-plus old will of a single person. If we don't like what it does, we don't have to pay attention.
It's apparent that mainstream society sees it fit to uphold the tradition started by Aflred Nobel; so it's worth questioning what exactly is being sought after.
This seems like less of an issue with the Nobel Prizes and more that the author doesn't like prizes in general. Not everyone that contributes to a movie gets to go up on stage to collect the Oscar. There are always going to be problems with subjective awards in terms of leaving people out, people being overshadowed who would have won in other years, etc. I think the award does a good job of celebrating achievements that otherwise wouldn't be nearly as widely recognized.
Sport/Media are ripe with awards and top personalities are paid a salary directly proportional to their recognition.
Science powers the whole world, yet scientist receives a very minimal recognition for it, either in salary or prizes. Nobel Prizes are basically the only way that scientists achieve a bit of that.
This is because most people care about pop musicians much more than about scientists, regardless of lip service to the contrary. You can't make them care by creating more awards. There are already an uncountable number of awards in physics (e.g., the Dirac medal, the Sakurai prize, the Wolf prize, the Newton medal, the Breakthrough prize, etc., etc.).
Why not start a website where scientific discoveries can be linked to their uses on the one side, and on the other side to their contributors and former discoveries it is based on? Could be a wiki.
I am not sure if the discovery of gravitation waves can be of any use to us (other than perhaps stimulate funding for further astrophysics research, that is).
Can you imagine what went into building the gravitational wave observatories? Don't you think that's advanced the state of the art with respect to the different kinds of technology, manufacturing, and construction techniques involved?
I support biomedical research. We're adopting scientific collaboration tools developed by the high energy physics community and specifically LIGO. These tools make it possible for large-scale, multi-institution, transnational collaborations to readily and securely share data worldwide. I'm really excited about what has become possible.
Admittedly, that has nothing to do with the detection of gravitational waves themselves. Still, these projects (and others) have improved the state of the art, and while it might not lead to something you can buy at Walmart any time soon, it might make a malaria cure happen sooner, or improve the quality of care for tuberculosis patients, or reduce the rate of breast cancer---little stuff that over time adds up to hundreds of thousands of people alive and well who, without all those little things adding up, wouldn't be alive today.
any ancillary benefits that occur as side effects of funding a physics project, could almost certainly have been achieved, without the funding of the physics project. for example, direct investment into disease research is much more likely to have short-term impact.
that's not to say ancillary discoveries with impact outside the original domain don't occur- they're just not as cost effective.
But then that means you wouldn't have funded the physics project. In the long term, research in fundamental physics is the main thrust for human scientific progress, which is why it is given the importance it is.
Ancillary benefits are, by definition, not the primary thrust of what research is about.
Most of the big expensive physics projects actually have little to no impact on daily life, or really scientific progress they're mainly about confirming theories that were thought up a long time ago. Dollar-for-dollar medical research has a much greater impact than physics
As I understand it there are four fundamental forces in physics: strong and weak nuclear forces, the electromagnetic force, and gravitational force.
This discovery of gravitational waves is similar to the discovery of electromagnetic waves that has touched almost every aspect of our lives.
I'm sure there will be ways to use this information. Maybe not now, but it certainly might help when humanity eventually looks to permanently slip the surly bonds of earth.
Those things are a question of energy scales. The energy scales at which human life is possible are far (many orders of magnitude) removed from the energy scales at which gravitational waves could be meaningfully used, this won't change in any conceivable future. You would need to be able manipulate black holes to get even the tiny measurable distortions they just found, just by conservation of energy that most likely will forever be out of reach for humans.
The same is pretty much guaranteed for high energy applications of the strong and weak nuclear force like they are being explored by the LHC, although there it is less certain (quark gluon plasmas for example might be useful for something, maybe). Electromagnetic waves on the other hand are very compatible with the energy scales of human life.
Not really, gravitational waves are distortions in space-time caused by gravity. They just confirmed something that was predicted by general relativity a century ago. That's a big deal, and I don't mean to sully that achievement, but saying it's as big a deal as the discovery of electromagnetism is really overselling it. Gravitational waves are profoundly difficult to detect and can only be created by monumental celestial events (colliding black holes), it's not going to spark an energy revolution like the study of electromagnetism did.
I do wonder if we will ever be able to refine the detection and use it to infer information about distant objects which we can't otherwise observe. If my understanding is correct, the waves should be subtly altered as they pass celestial objects.
Speaking of atoms, indeed, as far as the ancient philosophy was concerned, atomism was a rather abstract idea. But the discoveries that confirmed the existence of atoms had been directly stimulated by the chemical research, and further advances in chemistry as well as the industry and medicine critically depended on it. (The atomic bomb, on the other hand, required the discovery of the atomic nucleus - which is a completely different object of study, and nothing about it was "abstract", either.)
Are you nuts? Without gravity waves how am I supposed to move the hand of my kid's watch in morse code, and transmit critical scientific data from beyond the event horizon of a black hole? And that's just the practical stuff we already know about... who knows what we'll come up with in a few years? :)
Yes, being part of the team is one achievement, being leader of the team is another achievement on top of that.
Sorry there's not "participation prizes" for everybody, but there are concrete important differences between being team member and team leader, as much as some seem to want to delude themselves otherwise and give themselves the "consolation prize" of feeling good, instead of getting the result (being the PI/project lead and getting the Nobel) they wanted.
Zero sympathy for the people who would want to Nobel, now trying to diminish the achievements of those who won the Nobel, just to console themselves. Everyone knows how science works. There are teams and PIs and projects and project leaders. Instead of crying that the reality is "unfair" if the complainers actually cared enough about winning, they would have tried to position their careers in such a way that they were competitive. To pretend you were disserviced when you know how it works is disempowering your own potential to have done better, and also really disrespectful to diminish the importance of Nobel recognition, to people who contribute to winning those prizes.
TL;DR - Looking at the group complaining about not being recognized, all I see is a bunch of sore losers, inventing disempowering reasons to console themselves, instead of inventing results for themselves. Take personal responsibility, be inspired by the achievements of others, these traits will help you win.
I see nothing wrong with recognising the project leaders.
If you think, however, that the "sore losers" want to change the rules of the game solely in order to give themselves a better chance of winning, then there's something missing in your understanding of humans. People like fairness
I understand if you feel otherwise, but I see no unfairness in Nobels going only to project leaders and PIs.
I think the sore losers act entitled to something they didn't earn. I don't think that means I'm missing something about humans. Why would you want to suggest that? Your argument ought to stand on its own not by pretending I'm less. That's not nice. Nor kind. But, look, I am missing many many things in my understanding and experience about humans, and life, and every topic, because I don't understand anything completely or nearly so. And I've only experienced what I have in my life. I'm okay with that.
If you think people prefer fairness, then maybe you didn't face what I did, or maybe you just reacted differently (and if you did then you better teach me how!). I learned people prefer themselves, to fairness, and will cooperate or cheat as either pays off.
I'm no better than that. Let me show you: If you don't think the same way as me, then clearly there is something missing about your understanding of humanity, or your experience. See? I like to cheat, too. When it pays off. Or maybe it's fair to give like you get? What do you think, given that you said there's something missing in my understanding, was that comment fair and justified?
My view is both of us are missing many things about understanding and experience, and if we think differently it's just because we had different experiences and reactions. There's not one true way. And I think that's fine. Diversity right?
So if we can put all that nastiness behind us, what's our common ground, how do you think we ought to make the Nobel prizes more fair and still have them be effective? Do you think we ought to preserve, dismantle or alter the hierarchies and institutions that have worked for science? And do you think we can agree that "fairness" is not a universal good, and that in this case we have (possibly competing) interests such as progress, or effectiveness?
"Moral revulsion" seems reasonable to feel at Kissinger's win.
Obama's is meaningless, even if you believe he did contribute materially to international peace (he didn't) he hadn't done so yet, with less than a year in office.
Giving it to the EU is just farce, in the same sense as "corporations are people." The EU is the result of the process the prize is supposed to encourage. It should be going to the people responsible for that institution's functioning - but good luck convincing anyone that its leaders have done a particularly good job navigating post-sovereign-debt-crisis, the period the prize would usually be awarding.
(I agree the award is necessarily political. I think it's better to say many recent awards have been tactical - moves in an attempt to bring about better relations, mostly unsuccessfully, rather than recognizing those who do really encourage them.)
The efforts of the EU (and other things, of course) have helped the major powers in Europe avoid war for over half a century now, a rarity in European history. Why wouldn't that be worth recognising?
I mean hell, on this page we have people complaining that the prize "only goes to three people when thousands were involved", and here you're complaining that "a group of people are awarded instead of a few individual". Damned if you do, damned if you don't...
I support the EU, but it's not clear to me that they are the primary entity responsible for peace in Europe between 1945 and 1991. And I think they have acted especially parochial and conservative during 2007-2012, the period prior to getting the Nobel.
I think that's part of the point though. Politics is the way by which you achieve peace. So the Peace prize is also a political tool. "We're giving you this prize and now you have to live up to it.".
Because it's fundamentally about a political objective, I think it's nonsense to even talk about it being divorced from politics, even if it could be awarded posthumously.
It would be funny if the distinction between politics and history was explicitly whether the subjects' life was over. Id love to pedantically say to someone "osama bin laden is part of history now, not politics"
The peace prize has always been somewhat aspirational - the point is usually to shame the recipient into living up to the prize, not to recognize those who've actually most contributed to peace. The latter is pretty hard to do, because peace is the absence of war, and so "the people who most contributed to peace" are really the majority of citizens who mind their own business and don't seek to dominate others.
It always has been political. This means that the prize can be controversial at times. That's just the nature.
Past controversial examples would be the 1935 award to Carl Von Ossietzky (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_von_Ossietzky), who angered the type of folks that do not like people who reveal state secrets. Or Cordell Hull's 1945 award (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordell_Hull), which was controversial because in 1939 he rejected a ship of 936 Jews seeking asylum from Germany. Or Linus Pauling's Peace Prize in 1962 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Pauling), which was controversial among those who disagreed with his left wing pacifist views (to the point where he was labeled a suspected communist in the 1950s, as was fashionable at the time).
(We haven't even gotten to Henry Kissinger and Yasser Arafat yet...)
Yeah, the peace prize has become a joke. I have to disagree with the author about the science prizes, though - I think it's pretty reasonable to award people for moving the ball forward even if they didn't do it all themselves.
> I agree with what people have already said, but I think there's one more point to add: people usually over-estimate how funny their own comments are. We have a tendency to think, "This idea of mine is hilarious! And different! Surely this witticism is the exception." And we are usually wrong. When you have N people all doing that, there's a lot of noise.
> I try to gently point this out to people who complain when their attempt at humor has been downvoted by the community. It's not that we don't like humor. We just don't like banal attempts at humor, which becomes noise. Or, put in a less charitable fashion, "You're not as funny as you think you are."
I think this is what you get when the participation trophy generation wants to rework the Nobel Prize.
Some of his criticisms are valid - e.g. discrimination against female nominees (although perhaps not the number of same) - but for the most part it seems to be a thinly veiled complaint about the concept of prizes in general.
They reward some notable people in science, they don't determine what was the best and most worthwhile science. You might as well criticise bananas for not actually being bicycles.
Want to briefly hijack this thread to quickly point out that there is no such thing as a Nobel Prize in Economics. Literally a Swiss bank made it upon the 70’s and dubiously said their prize was to “honor Alfred Nobel”. They were very forceful and never backed down from the prize, ultimately winning the PR battle and forcing the real Nobel org to sort-of acknowledge them.
They did this to originally award distinctions to conservative economists like Milton Friedman, though today they’re a little bit sneakier and will every now and then sneak an award to someone like Joseph Stieglitz.
EDIT: I understand the downvotes for the incorrect factual background. I want my main point to be the issue of economics not doing a great job over the last 30-40 years when these awards were begun / the general retreat of Keynesian economics in favor of Neoliberalism. That being said it’s sometimes mentioned that the peak of a scientist’s productivity is right before he or she gets the Nobel (Memorial) Prize due to the resulting fame, so perhaps other economists are to blame.
> Literally a Swiss bank made it upon the 70’s and dubiously said their prize was to “honor Alfred Nobel”. They were very forceful and never backed down from the prize, ultimately winning the PR battle and forcing the real Nobel org to sort-of acknowledge them.
1. Swedish, not Swiss. Both start with “Sw”, but, still, completely different countries.
2. And not just some random Swedish Bank, but the Swedish central bank (equivalent to the US Federal Reserve.)
3. And the first award was in 1969, which would be hard if it was made up in the 1970s.
4. The “real Nobel org”, as relevant to this discussion (there's actually four different ones) is the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (which awards the Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry.) Which don't just sort-of acknowledge the Economics prize, they are the ones who award it.
5. And, as requested by the bank which both endowed the prize and pays for administrative expenses related to it, the Academy awards it using the same standards as associated with the prizes funded by Nobel’s endowment.
6. While Hayek and Friedman did win the prizes in the 1970s, neither earlier nor later laureates were consistently identify with conservatism.
The idea that you seem to be pushing, that it's a right-wing propaganda tool issued by some other organization unrelated to the prizes endowed by Alfred Nobel that is merely “sort-of acknowledged” by “the real Nobel org” is simply not supported by the facts.
You know I briefly wondered as I was writing whether it was Swedish or Swiss but then I was like, “aren’t all the bad banks from Switzerland, aren’t they also just famous for their banks?”.
Thanks for the correction or else I would have been misstating this fact for years, probably in less friendly forums than HackerNews too.
It was the central bank of Sweden, not some random Swiss bank. It's always been administered by the same Nobel organization. The central bank of Sweden does not have an editorial say in who wins.
I don't think there's enough evidence to say they did it to promote a particular branch of economics. More likely just to promote the credentials of economics as sound science.
But yes, it was founded in a rather dubious way, and of course there's no obligation on the public to accept it as a Nobel prize.
There were hundreds of people involved. We couldn't have done it without the hundreds of people. While Art was a fantastic guy and a tireless worker, a good chunk of his contribution was management.
i.e. A competent manager. He not only understood all of the physics involved, but a good chunk of the engineering, along with having decent managerial skills. No one with skills solely in an MBA, or theoretical physicist, or civil engineer could have done it.
Even if he didn't win based on something he mathematically proved, there's no question he's one of the top physicists around.
If you look at the Nobel prizes as the "best of" awards, and not "the guy who invented something all alone", it becomes a bit more palatable.
On top of that, the Nobel committee is limited by the rules of their foundation. Even assigning Nobels for something done 5 years ago is arguably outside of the directions of the trust.
So yeah, the article isn't theoretically wrong, but it's wrong for practical purposes.