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Scientists who never won a Nobel Prize
- lisardo 6y agoIt's missing Carlos Chagas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize_controversies#1921 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize_controversies#1921
- Rochus 6y agoInteresting list. After all, there is also the opposite case, where it is difficult to understand why a certain prize was awarded. I once attended a lecture by Nobel Laureate Richard Ernst, where he presented a good dozen Nobel Prizes for which there was a corresponding Russian publication, which had been published earlier than the honored work.
- x3c 6y agoFor me, the most notable absence is Gandhi for Nobel for peace.
- IvyMike 6y agoTechnically this is a list of top greatest scientists who never won a Nobel Prize.
- ninjinxo 6y agoHe effectively won in 1948. They don't do posthumous awards, so they abstained from giving out the prize that year, stating directly that: "there was no suitable living candidate". And he didn't get one a decade prior because he was reportedly a tad racist, giving other candidates the edge.
- yumraj 6y agoand Kissinger won.. go figure.. But I digress..
- tpmx 6y agoYou wouldn't believe how proper, non-racist and balanced this comment was before being seized upon by a mob, half of whom have deleted their messages now. Lesson to fellow Europeans: Don't ever comment on anything that involves race. The Americans are going through something special at the moment and they're lashing out at pretty much anything. I wish I could delete this comment, but alas I can not.
- xvedejas 6y agoMy comment no longer seems to have any relevance to the parent, which was edited. I do like to point out this (in)famous case though: Nate Lewis was denied the prize in Chemistry by being the most junior in a group of four (the prize can be shared at most three ways).
- tpmx 6y agoI think you're going to want to edit/remove that; it was tainted.
- dilippkumar 6y ago> this Indian-run website says... It looks like Vedang Sati is just a regular guy on the internet who happens to be of Indian origin and his pick of his favorite people don't show any obvious bias[0]. On the other hand, I shouldn't even be defending him. The implied bias/nationalism here is in poor taste. This is no different from saying > this Jew-run website says... [0] https://www.vedangsati.com/p/about-me.html https://www.vedangsati.com/p/about-me.html
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- tpmx 6y agoYou should be ashamed for your cherrypicking and barely masked accusations of racism and for (sort of) causing Godwin's law to be invoked. Did you learn the technique at your workplace, btw? I can very easily imagine that.
- globuous 6y ago"Poincaré was nominated a record 51 times for the Nobel Prize but never won." Damn !
- scottlocklin 6y agoSticking Hawking and Tesla in with Bose and Poincare is .... eccentric. It's not a popularity contest. Fun fact: one of Bose's grandsons worked as a bartender at Triple Rock in Berkeley for a while.
- JKCalhoun 6y agoYeah, I sort of felt the same. But everyone is going to disagree with another's list so.....
- rxhernandez 6y agoI mean, Tesla was as ubiquitous (if not more) in my EE degree as Bose and Poincare were in my Physics degree. I don't think I heard Hawking mentioned once during my Physics degree but I also didn't care to take any astronomy coursework.
- monster_group 6y agoIt is easy to look at this list and say gender and ethnicity played a role (which wouldn't be surprising particularly in that era). But five people on the list are white men. Physicists were more likely to be white men (at least in those times). So no matter what list you make of physicists, they will end up on that list. My point is, it is not possible to deduce any bias from such a list. For any coveted prize there are many well deserving people that don't get it simply because there's only one prize to be awarded per year and there's no sure and objective way to know if one who got it was indeed more deserving than the others who didn't.
- JKCalhoun 6y ago> My point is, it is not possible to deduce any bias from such a list. Is it? In at least two (three?) of those cases the male colleagues were recognized with the Nobel prize and their female colleagues were not.
- monster_group 6y agoThat's a good point.
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- btilly 6y agoScientists in the 20th century were overwhelmingly white and male. Therefore if biases were not at work, you'd expect the list of people who didn't get a Nobel and arguably should have to likewise be overwhelmingly white and male. That it is only half white and male suggests that top quality research by non-whites and non-males was systemically not rewarded.
- krnsll 6y agoFreeman Dyson is a glaring miss here. Feynman and Schwinger shared the 1965 Nobel in Physics for their respective perspectives on Quantum Electrodynamics. But it was Dyson who unified Feynman's diagram approach with Schwinger's field model.
- ChrisLomont 6y agoShinichirō Tomonaga also shared the 1965 Nobel for this work, and his work was much more fundamental to QED than Dyson. The Nobel Prize can go to at most three people.
- dekhn 6y agoPersonally, I think the Nobel in Chemistry should have gone to Harry Noller (UCSC), who established that the core function of the ribosome is implemented by RNA, not proteins. After 20+ years of making his case and generally not being believed (even though he had excellent data), a competitor did a crystal structure proving him right and won the prize. https://reports.news.ucsc.edu/breakthrough/ https://reports.news.ucsc.edu/breakthrough/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2009/10/08/nobel-committee-skips-over-ucsc-chemist/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2009/10/08/nobel-committee-skips... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2821081/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2821081/ https://blogs.sciencemag.org/books/2018/11/19/gene-machine/ https://blogs.sciencemag.org/books/2018/11/19/gene-machine/ Harry was my advisor and helped me start my career in computational biology back in the mid 90s. I asked him recently about the Nobel and he said it didn't bother him since one the Nobel was awarded, nobody ever doubted he was wrong about the ribosome again.
- julienchastang 6y ago+1 for Noller. In a previous life, I worked as an undergrad in an RNA lab (remains the best job I have ever had) and we studied Noller's work closely.
- dekhn 6y agoHarry was a great teacher (I had him for Biochem 101 and a lab class). Very understated but quite good at communicating his enthusiasm for the biophysics underlying biology). The lab class, "Biology of Macromolecules" was challenging: you're handed a pile of microbial cells, told the species, and then you have to go to the primary literature and learn how to purify restriction endonuclease from it (using the original methods) and then map a plasmid. I remember he said something which sounded arrogant, but I later learned was excellent advice: "most of you are going to take the entire quarter to run your experiment. I would do all the lab work in 1 long day- the moment you crack those cells open, proteases are going to start eating your REs". He did say that if I wanted to be a successful scientist, I should never have a girlfriend or get married, or have kids, because those all eat into your ability to spend 18 hours in the lab every day (I married my college girlfriend, was a modest scientist, and transitioned to software engineering, and then had kids; there's no way I could handle being a successful scientist while having a family).
- Florin_Andrei 6y ago> Poincaré was nominated a record 51 times for the Nobel Prize but never won. I feel Poincaré did a lot of good work in physics but he was not... a closer, I guess. He (along with other people) had the basics of relativity on their hands in the early 1900s, but for whatever reason it was Einstein who published the fully-formed conclusions of that whole collective process of exploration. Poincaré did a lot of great work in math. I think of him as primarily a mathematician. > Tesla Great engineer, but I don't see how he belongs here.
- dplavery92 6y agoMaybe Vera Rubin belongs on this list as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_Rubin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_Rubin
- CalChris 6y agoAlong with Henrietta Leavitt.
- julienchastang 6y agoRosalind Franklin - X-ray crystallographer who helped decipher the structure of DNA. Carl Woese - Discoverer of the 3rd domain of life archaebacteria among other scientific accomplishments.
- btilly 6y agoRosalind Franklin definitely belongs on the list. However her not getting the prize has a simple reason. She died of ovarian cancer before the prize was awarded for DNA, so couldn't have been considered. Ironically her cancer could well have been caused by the research that she was not publicly recognized for.
- julienchastang 6y agoYes. That is true. She passed away before the Nobel. Anyone interested in this topic should read "The Double Helix" by Watson. It is a real page turner and discusses how Watson and Crick kind of stole Franklin's research.
- btilly 6y agoAbsolutely. Now there is an interesting question. How could Watson and Crick have figured out Franklin's data faster than she did? The answer turns out to be coincidence. There are 230 crystallographic groups. As a crystallographer, Franklin knew them all, and had to rule them all out. However Watson had done his PhD research on a protein that happened to have the same crystallographic group as DNA. So he knew one group really, really well and it turned out to be the right one. Sometimes luck is more important than skill.
- dekhn 6y agoI don't think what you said is accurate. First, the work was done in fibre diffraction (2d pattern), not crystal diffractionso I'm not certain that crystallographic groups even apply (typically for representing 3d symmetry groups). Second, nothing in the W&C paper has to do with determining the crystallographic group, rather they proposed a model which was consistent with the diffraction data, but also with a wide range of other observations, such as Chargaff's rules, which led to the modelling of base pairs with the correct eno/ketol forms. What Franklin did know was that the structural was helical, but not that it was a double helix with antiparallel strands (and that's what W&C posited, leading to the most wonderfully stated conclusion of all time ("it has not escaped our notice...") A few other important points: Franklin published a paper in the same journal edition as W&C with her own work. W&C thanked Franklin (she's in the acknowledgements). She got more credit than people today believe (mainly because of the misleading book "Dark Lady" and the terrible book "The Double Helix"). The best original source I've found on this is The Eighth Day of Creation, which is based on primary sources (Franklin's notebooks which she willed to Aaron Klug, along wiht interviews with most of the people involved). After reading that I concluded that the work Franklin did on this project did not warrant a Nobel Prize even if she had not died before it was awarded. (my PhD is on DNA structure, and I spent a huge amount of time researching its history)
- dnautics 6y agoClyde Hutchison. Worked on the wrong type of restriction enzyme (type I) which is devilishly hard because it's cutsite is stochastic (also makes it useless for bioengineering). Missed one Nobel prize there (went to his buddy Ham Smith, who worked on type ii which everybody knows and loves). Later proposed a theoretical mechanism for site directed mutagenesis (contingent on economical DNA synthesis). When that technology rolled around, he was on the paper - apparently he did the wet experiment himself - but it was Adams that got the prize. Missed two Nobel prizes. First one was bad luck, second one was all on the committee. Funny thing about biology, of you ask working biologists who discovered restriction enzymes or who invented site directed mutagenesis, or who discovered gfp, they will typically not be able to tell you.
- scott31 6y agoTesla is one of the most overrated persons in history. Edison is better in every regard, except for killing an elephant
- catmistake 6y agoexcept for killing an elephant Let that stand as a symbol for all the other horrible things Edison did, like electrocuting a number of dogs and cats, and killing his assistant. Tesla is not exactly overrated, but at least he never stole credit for inventions, and he never killed anyone, unlike Edison (his assistant, glassblower Clarence Madison Dally, who died a rather horrible death). "Relatively unknown," is a better description for Tesla. Edison invented a few things, the telegraph... no that was David Alter. Edison invented something to copy telegraphs, and he invented the phonograph, which was truly revolutionary, a way to record sound... but he did not invent the record player... he made lightbulbs practical... but he did not invent the electric lightbulb, of course. Edison did not invent the kinetoscope, or movie camera (that was Edward Muybridge) and he knew very little about it, but he took credit for it anyway. Edison took credit for wax paper, but he had absolutely nothing to do with that invention (invented by Gustav Le Gray). He did not invent storage batteries, but he made a lot of money with them. Edison did not invent the power generator, though he is credited for it (his assistants, Charles Batchelor and Francis Upton, were the true inventors of this). Nearly all the other great achievements attributed to Edison were actually invented by his rival inventors or unknown (to the masses) employees, the researchers he hired, (such as the electric chair, invented by Harold P. Brown). Tesla was a lot smarter than Edison. He never wrote anything down, and was able to keep his designs in his head. He invented the Tesla coil, the Tesla Turbine, The Shadowgraph, the Neon Lamp, The Niagra Falls Transformer House, the Induction Motor, the RC boat, Alternating Current, and Radio. Tesla held over 300 patents across 5 continents, and all of then were his innovations. God knows how many of Edison's 1000-some patents were actually his. I don't understand how you or anyone can believe what you wrote. Edison was a major douche bag, an obvious sociopath, which sort of overshadows what he actually invented, which actually number in the low double digits. Tesla's inventions number in the low-mid triple digits Tesla is not overrated, quite the opposite, apparently, and Edison certainly is not better in any regard than Tesla. But Tesla was weird, and not all that popular. Edison, like all successful sociopaths throughout history, was hugely popular.
- btilly 6y agoThe most glaring omission in my view is Fred Hoyle. Read https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fred-hoyle-missing-equation/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fred-hoyle-missin... for more.
- dejv 6y agoWell there are many great scientists that should won Nobel Price. My favorite was Antonin Holy [0]. Very humble guy who invented a lot of modern drugs, but who didn't like to go conference circus road which is required to get the prize (paraphrasing his words). He worked in the lab till his dead, lived in cheap house and commuted to work by public transport even after earning hundreds of millions, or more, in fees for his discoveries. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton%C3%ADn_Holý https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton%C3%ADn_Holý
- mvaliente2001 6y agoTop greatest writer who never won a Nobel prize: Jorge Luis Borges.
- DiabloD3 6y agoSurprised to see Kristian Birkeland missing from the list. Nominated 7 times, but never won. From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristian_Birkeland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristian_Birkeland "Birkeland organized several expeditions to Norway's high-latitude regions where he established a network of observatories under the auroral regions to collect magnetic field data. The results of the Norwegian Polar Expedition conducted from 1899 to 1900 contained the first determination of the global pattern of electric currents in the polar region from ground magnetic field measurements. The discovery of X-rays inspired Birkeland to develop vacuum chambers to study the influence of magnets on cathode rays. Birkeland noticed that an electron beam directed toward a magnetised terrella was guided toward the magnetic poles and produced rings of light around the poles and concluded that the aurora could be produced in a similar way. He developed a theory in which energetic electrons were ejected from sunspots on the solar surface, directed to the Earth, and guided to the Earth's polar regions by the geomagnetic field where they produced the visible aurora. This is essentially the theory of the aurora today." "In 1913, Birkeland may have been the first to predict that plasma was ubiquitous in space. He wrote: "It seems to be a natural consequence of our points of view to assume that the whole of space is filled with electrons and flying electric ions of all kinds. We have assumed that each stellar system in evolutions throws off electric corpuscles into space. It does not seem unreasonable therefore to think that the greater part of the material masses in the universe is found, not in the solar systems or nebulae, but in 'empty' space."[7]" "In 1916, Birkeland was probably the first person to successfully predict that the solar wind behaves as do all charged particles in an electric field: "From a physical point of view it is most probable that solar rays are neither exclusively negative nor positive rays, but of both kinds".[12][13] In other words, the Solar Wind consists of both negative electrons and positive ions."" Without him, the modern study of cosmology and planetary science would be a mess.
- ffggvv 6y agoThere’s also Henry Moseley who likely would’ve won the 1916 prize in physics but died in 1915 as a soldier in WW1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Moseley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Moseley his death sparked the government to change its policy of enlisting scientists
- mellosouls 6y agoEinstein. Yes, he won one - but as this discussion has expanded a bit from the original article it could be argued he was underserved... https://www.huffpost.com/entry/einstein-fantasy-physics_b_4948045 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/einstein-fantasy-physics_b_49...
- catmistake 6y agoPersonally, I think his work on the Photo-Electric Effect deserved the recognition that it received. But Albert Einstein is far more myth than man. Everyone idolizes Einstein, he was the quintessential mad scientist. And it is difficult to challenge the notion of this myth without being accused of anti-semetism. But I risk doing so... When one actually studies the History of Science, one discovers shocking things. None of the ideas attributed to Einstein were actually Einstein's. I don't want to bash Einstein. He was truly brilliant. So another way to put it is Einstein stood on the shoulders of giants. Though I can and will bash the notion that Einstein was so innovative that all the ideas were his. None of them were. Let's examine all the original insights traditionally attributed to Albert Einstein. Comment too long, I will reply to my own comment and continue...
- catmistake 6y agoEmpedocles (c. 490–430 BC) was the first to propose a theory of light, and claimed that light has a finite speed. In 1021, Alhazen (Ibn al-Haytham) published his Book of Optics, in which he presented a series of arguments dismissing Empedocles emission theory of vision in favour of the now accepted intromission theory, in which light moves from an object into the eye. This led Alhazen to propose that light must have a finite speed. Also in the 11th century, Ab Rayhn al-Brn agreed that light has a finite speed, and observed that the speed of light is much faster than the speed of sound. In the 13th century, Roger Bacon argued that the speed of light in air was not infinite, using philosophical arguments backed by the writing of Alhazen and Aristotle. In the 17 century, Pierre de Fermat also argued in support of a finite speed of light. In 1629, Isaac Beeckman proposed an experiment in which a person observes the flash of a cannon reflecting off a mirror about one mile (1.6 km) away. In 1638, Galileo Galilei proposed an experiment, with an apparent claim to having performed it some years earlier, to measure the speed of light by observing the delay between uncovering a lantern and its perception some distance away. He was unable to distinguish whether light travel was instantaneous or not, but concluded that if it were not, it must nevertheless be extraordinarily rapid. The first quantitative estimate of the speed of light was made in 1676 by Rømer. From the observation that the periods of Jupiter's innermost moon Io appeared to be shorter when the Earth was approaching Jupiter than when receding from it, Rømer concluded that light travels at a finite speed, and estimated that it takes light 22 minutes to cross the diameter of Earth's orbit. Christiaan Huygens combined this estimate with an estimate for the diameter of the Earth's orbit to obtain an estimate of speed of light of 220000 km/s, 26% lower than the actual value. In his 1704 book Opticks, Isaac Newton reported Rømer's calculations of the finite speed of light and gave a value of "seven or eight minutes" for the time taken for light to travel from the Sun to the Earth (the modern value is 8 minutes 19 seconds). Newton queried whether Rømer's eclipse shadows were coloured; hearing that they were not, he concluded the different colours travelled at the same speed. In 1729, James Bradley discovered stellar aberration, and from this effect he determined that light must travel 10210 times faster than the Earth in its orbit (the modern figure is 10066 times faster) or, equivalently, that it would take light 8 minutes 12 seconds to travel from the Sun to the Earth. In the 19th century Hippolyte Fizeau developed a method to determine the speed of light based on time-of-flight measurements on Earth and reported a value of 315000 km/s. His method was improved upon by Léon Foucault who obtained a value of 298000 km/s in 1862. In the year 1856, Wilhelm Eduard Weber and Rudolf Kohlrausch measured the ratio of the electromagnetic and electrostatic units of charge, 1/00, by discharging a Leyden jar, and found that its numerical value was very close to the speed of light as measured directly by Fizeau. The following year Gustav Kirchhoff calculated that an electric signal in a resistanceless wire travels along the wire at this speed. In the early 1860s, Maxwell showed that, according to the theory of electromagnetism he was working on, electromagnetic waves propagate in empty space at a speed equal to the above Weber/Kohlrausch ratio, and drawing attention to the numerical proximity of this value to the speed of light as measured by Fizeau, he proposed that light is in fact an electromagnetic wave. In 1865, James Clerk Maxwell had proposed that light was an electromagnetic wave, and therefore travelled at the speed c appearing in his theory of electromagnetism. The well-designed experiment performed by Albert A. Michelson and Edward W. Morley in 1887 failed to detect a luminiferous aether medium through which electromagnetic waves travelled. Essential to Einstein's theories, irregardless of still clinging to the notion of aether, and really because of the Michelson-Morley experiment, Hendrik Lorentz proposed that the motion of the apparatus through the aether may cause the apparatus to contract along its length in the direction of motion, and he further assumed, that the time variable for moving systems must also be changed accordingly ("local time"), which led to the formulation of the Lorentz transformation. Based on Lorentz's aether theory, Henri Poincaré (1900) showed that this local time (to first order in v/c) is indicated by clocks moving in the aether, which are synchronized under the assumption of constant light speed. In 1904, Poincaré speculated that the speed of light could be a limiting velocity in dynamics, provided that the assumptions of Lorentz's theory are all confirmed. In 1905, Poincaré brought Lorentz's aether theory into full observational agreement with the principle of relativity. To be clear, the modern origin of Relativity is rooted in Poincaré's work, and it's deeper origins first appears nearly 300 years earlier in the 1632 Galilean Invariance, aka Galileo's Theory of Relativity. continues in reply to my own comment...
- trimbo 6y agoRaymond Damadian. The Nobel for inventing MRI went to Lauterbur and Mansfield, even though Damadian played a major role and is recognized by many as "an inventor of MRI". Full page ads ran in newspapers at the height of the controversy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Damadian#Nobel_Prize_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Damadian#Nobel_Prize_c...
- SommerfeldNobel 6y agoAny list that doesn't include Sommerfeld is written by amateurs. But it's unsurprising. He's the best physicist no one has heard of. Aside his long list of accomplishments which span pioneering work in all of physics, from QM, relativity, to fluids, he also accomplished: - Arguably the father of QM, since the "founders" were all his students and built upon, or generalized his ideas. - Four of his students got Nobel prizes. Three of his post-docs got the nod. One of them, Pauling, got two Nobel prizes. His students include Heissenburg, Debye, Bethe, Pauli. - Nominated 84 times. - His work on Special Relativity helped it gain acceptance - Wrote some of the best physics books.
- roberto 6y ago> Nominated 84 times. Interesting, the article says that "Poincaré was nominated a record 51 times for the Nobel Prize but never won."
- vonmoltke 6y agoThe article is wrong on it being a record. According to the Nobel Foundation's nomination database, Arnold Sommerfeld was indeed nominated 84 times and won 0: https://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/archive/show_people.php?id=8661 https://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/archive/show_people.ph...
- bobmalone123 6y agoThe problem is: who cares about the Nobel price! A bunch of Swedes announced that they will be judging human achievements and give out a stupid prize, and everybody is now pending from their lips. The problem is not them, the fools who give them importance, and not the wack jobs that self-appointed themselves. Ignore them.
- iaw 6y agoEarly in my life I met a former nuclear physicist who had worked explicitly on nuclear counter-intelligence against the Russians during the cold war immediately post-WW2. The story was that he was being considered for a nomination but declined because publicizing who he was would've created a security issue.
- giloux314 6y agoI'd add Emmy Noether to this list : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether
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- rurban 6y agoI had the same thought. But mathematicians who just help physicists rarely get a nobel. Even if its work is invaluable, such as Emmy's work. You could call her one of the "fathers" if modern theoretical physics, if it wouldn't be too ironic. Thanksfully they didn't forget to mention Lise Meitner
- dnautics 6y agoto be fair, Mietner has an element named after her which is a far, far more exclusive club.
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- adharmad 6y agoGeorge Sudarshan Fred Hoyle
- hardtke 6y agoStephen Hawking did not have an important theory with an experimentally testable prediction, similar to the current crop of brilliant string theorists (Ed Whitten, for instance). Alan Guth should have the Nobel Prize, in my opinion, for his theory of inflation. It is widely accepted but does not have a specific experimentally verified prediction that can rule out all other scenarios. The Nobel committee does not want to be proven wrong later.