No, absolutely not. Science is much different in 2015 than it was in 1915. The remaining problems are much harder and require the efforts of many, many more peo

No, absolutely not. Science is much different in 2015 than it was in 1915. The remaining problems are much harder and require the efforts of many, many more people to attack, but the archaic structure of the Prize means 99% of them can never be rewarded. I used to work on an extremely similar experiment to SNO and Super-K. I played a small but key role in getting the thing to work at all. (I like to think things went a lot smoother with me helping out than they would have with someone else doing my job, but you never can tell, can you?) Did this year's Prize recipients contribute more to science than the people at the bottom of the ladder? I don't know, I didn't work on those experiments. I also know that you should not under-value leadership. On the experiment I worked on (and now you see why I'm not naming it), one of the top people -- one of the candidates for any major awards or prizes -- was a total and complete fool and roadblock, in the classic style of legendarily terrible senior managers. Yet he has received a lion's share of the credit for this mismanagement. (To be fair, there were plenty of other top people who were good at their jobs.) My direct supervisor on this project seemed to deal with this by wanting his fingers in as many pies as possible. I can only explain his behavior by speculating that he really, really wanted a Nobel Prize. But he will almost certainly never win one. To get a Prize in experimental particle physics these days, you must be a senior member of an experiment, and you must be very, very lucky that your experiment turns out to be Prize-worthy. This guy seemed to want to be involved in as many experiments as he could so that one of them would work out. But that meant he had little attention for each project, could not rise to the top levels of any of them, and generally never made as much total impact as if he'd concentrated on just getting one thing right. If our hunches were correct, and his life goal really is a Nobel Prize, it's kind of sad to think this talented scientist is on a life course that will only distract him with mirages, never bringing him towards his real goal. In any case, the hundreds of us working on the experiment knew that we would never receive any high-level acknowledgements of our work, no matter how important our contributions were to the project. And that, I think, was a small but meaningful contributor to why I left science for engineering. (More importantly, I found while working on the project that I preferred engineering and am personally more fulfilled, as well as better paid, this way, but observations like that aren't going to improve modern science.)