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The 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.or
by schoen 9y ago
The 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.
- greeneggs 9y ago> 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.
- schoen 9y agoThanks for presenting this counterpoint.
- Bromskloss 9y agoI think it's unreasonable that everyone involved is considered an author of the article.