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The Absurdity of Nobel Prizes in Science
- SubiculumCode 9y agoOh My! What a ghastly notion. Of course the prize won't go to THEM, darling. Give the slaves notions, Why! Who'd crunch my numbers? Make my tables done up all pretty; clean and polish my figures? Besides, [Slavery] was established by decree of Almighty Tenure...it is sanctioned by the Journal, from Nature Genetics to Nature Neuroscience...it has existed in all disciplines, has been found among the labs of the highest prestige, and in labs of the highest proficiency. It is the natural order, and without us, they'd be lost and wayward. Goodness, it really is a lot to bear sometimes. I think I need some air.
- SubiculumCode 9y agoReally? Down votes for some crafted satire and an adaption of Confederate Jefferson Davis's famous quote on slavery?
- SubiculumCode 9y agoI am shocked and curious at the number of downvotes for the above satire. I don't think it was horribly executed. I mean I hope they understood it is satire. Or perhaps they don't think that post-docs and graduate students are exploited?
- DanBC 9y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7609289 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7609289 > 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."
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- HeavenBanned 9y agoI thought it was pretty funny, and I have no say in it. And that was extremely uncharitable. Here's a more charitable one: "OUR COMMUNITY DIDN'T GET YOUR JOKE."
- EGreg 9y agoWhy 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.
- Koshkin 9y ago> uses 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).
- dpcx 9y agoNot yet, maybe. But eventually, I'm sure they'll be used directly in some other scientific discovery.
- firethief 9y agoIt seems early to conclude that. No one had a use for X-rays until over a century after people started messing around with them.
- colemannugent 9y agoAs 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.
- openasocket 9y agoNot 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.
- Blackthorn 9y agoThis is a fabulous article. Touches on everything from large groups of people, obviously missing attributions due to death, and even the sexist outcomes.
- empath75 9y agoI 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.
- d33 9y agoPersonally I find peace prizes abominable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_Peace_Prize_laureates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_Peace_Prize_laur... They just got way too political.
- rhcom2 9y agoBecause it can't be awarded posthumously I think it is impossible to divorce it from politics.
- dragonwriter 9y agoBecause 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.
- gggdvnkhmbgjvbn 9y agoIt 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"
- mmanfrin 9y agoHow is it abominable? And how do you propose advocation of peace to be divorced from politics? It is necessarily intertwined.
- throwawayknecht 9y ago"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.)
- adekok 9y agoI 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.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Draco_Au 9y agoCertainly not the case with Einstein or Dirac.
- cooper12 9y ago> On top of that, the Nobel committee is limited by the rules of their foundation The article address this argument though and says that the Foundation has already stretched the rules.
- SEMW 9y ago> 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. [0] https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_organizations/nobelfoundation/statutes.html https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_organizations/nobelfoundati...
- lutorm 9y agoAlfred 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.
- ordu 9y agoHmm... 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.
- likelynew 9y agoAre you aware that the rules can be and have been changed many times by the committee?
- spynxic 9y ago> 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.
- Top19 9y agoWant 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. You can read more about it in the somewhat sanitized Wikipedia article which only hints at the dispute that lies beneath: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Economic_Sciences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Econom... 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.
- yahelc 9y agoYou're close. The bank isn't "a" bank, it's a Central Bank. And it's Swedish, not Swiss.
- Top19 9y agoYou 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.
- icebraining 9y agoYou could have read your own link, though. Also, no, not all the bad banks are from Switzerland, that's just prejudice.
- 9y ago
- bkcreate 9y agoThis 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.
- gutnor 9y agoSport/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.
- jessriedel 9y agoThis 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.).
- schoen 9y agoThe abstract of the 5,154-author paper that this article mentions: https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.114.191803 https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.11... I first thought it was this one http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2008JInst...3S8003A http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2008JInst...3S8003A 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.
- saalweachter 9y agoIs it just alphabetical at that point, or is Aad both special and alphabetically advantaged? (If I want to go into physics, should I first change my name to Aaalweachter?)
- schoen 9y agoEvidently 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.)
- thiagotomei 9y agoHi, 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.
- schoen 9y agoIt's amazing to have someone just drop by on HN with appropriate expertise to clarify this. Thanks!
- Glyptodon 9y agoI keep hoping they'll give one to SciHub.
- dyukqu 9y ago..or to Alexandra Elbakyan; for a lifetime† achievement (in supporting hundreds of thousands of scientists/researchers around the globe). †since she has helped so many researchers, affected their lives, it shall count as well-beyond-lifetime
- dna_polymerase 9y agoOr Aaron Swartz who had to die for the very same thing.
- jlg23 9y agoA 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?
- melling 9y agoIf 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: https://www.xprize.org https://www.xprize.org http://roborace.com http://roborace.com
- dna_polymerase 9y agoTypical 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.
- alkonaut 9y agoAlso: 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.
- pipio21 9y agoFor 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.
- VHRanger 9y ago> 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".
- mkl 9y agoThere 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. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Economic_Sciences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Econom...
- VHRanger 9y agoSure, 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.
- sleavey 9y agoI 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. [1] http://www.ligo.org/magazine/LIGO-magazine-issue-11.pdf#page=36 http://www.ligo.org/magazine/LIGO-magazine-issue-11.pdf#page...
- KGIII 9y agoWell 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.
- aquadrop 9y ago
- bjourne 9y agoI 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.
- ams6110 9y agoOn 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.
- BurningFrog 9y agoYeah, the did something very important for those projects. But what do we call it?
- lstyls 9y agoBDFL?
- Draco_Au 9y agoBecause you’ve never won one, I kid. It meant a plethora of things in the 20th century, for one, it could be your ticket to tenure and a lifetime of scientific pursuit without dying of hunger.
- eesmith 9y agoI 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.
- KGIII 9y agoWhen 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.
- felipemnoa 9y ago>>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.
- Retric 9y agoIt could be a feedback loop. Kids may not dream of being a banker etc. because they don't have anything to tie it to.
- BurningFrog 9y ago
- c3534l 9y agoThey 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.
- aaron695 9y agoThe Absurdity of the Academy Awards in the Arts. Blah, blah, blah, I disagree with some perceived unfairness so it's all crap. End of the day nothing is perfect, but encouraging people in awards like these push forwards the areas. You want to push forward Science the Nobel Prize is amazing to encourage people. You want your own new age everyone gets a prize award, create one.
- projectant 9y agoDo people not want to especially reward the small numbers of organisers for their efforts?
- projectant 9y agoWhat's wrong with rewarding the project leaders? 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.
- circlefavshape 9y agoI 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
- projectant 9y agoI 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?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- microcolonel 9y agoWhat about Nobel prizes in peace, those are plenty absurd too.
- alkonaut 9y agoIt 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.
- usrusr 9y agoIt 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.
- alkonaut 9y agoI 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.
- usrusr 9y agoBut 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.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- j7ake 9y agoIf 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.
- lokerfoi 9y agoIf European Union got the Nobel peace prize, then so can an organization behind LIGO experiments.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- superasn 9y agoThis 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.
- duncan_bayne 9y agoI 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.
- Tloewald 9y agoThe only problem I foresee is that Berkeley will quickly run out of parking spaces.