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The Nobel committee has many sins to answer for. Fortunately, if immortality is what you're after (rather than just the money), there are other, surer ways to

The Nobel committee has many sins to answer for. Fortunately, if immortality is what you're after (rather than just the money), there are other, surer ways to get that. Being the first experiment to verify the defining property of one of the four forces of nature will do it. It's impossible to learn about weak parity violation without learning about Madame Wu. So everyone who matters will remember her :)

leereeves 6y ago
> The Nobel committee has many sins to answer for. According to Magdolna Hargittai, it's not clear that this is one of them. She wrote that there were actually three experimental groups that verified parity violation, with unclear priority, and none of them were eligible for the Nobel in 1957 because all published after the deadline for that year. And so we arrive at the question at the heart of this story: was it a fair decision not to award Wu a share of the prize? After all, there was an “empty slot” – according to the statutes of the Nobel Foundation a maximum of three people can share a prize in a given category. The NBS experiment was the first to verify parity violation on 27 December and Wu had suggested and was actively involved with the experiment. But Friedman and Telegdi, who also started their experiments in the late summer of 1956 and were already doing measurements in October, may have had some preliminary results by December too. However, what really counts is publications, and in that the NBS group and the Garwin–Lederman–Weinrich group were side by side, with Garwin and Lederman actually finishing their report days before the NBS group did. Whichever way success is measured, it would have been hard to pick one particular experimentalist for the prize. As it turns out, this discussion is superfluous for legalistic reasons. As Bárány pointed out, “The awarded work must have been published before the year of the prize, in this case before 1 January 1957.” Since all three experimental studies were published in early 1957, none of the experimentalists could have been considered for the prize that year. The Nobel Committee could have decided to wait another year to award the prize for parity violation, but with the three experiments and the large number of physicists involved, the decision would always have been a hard one. Also, the committee needed strong candidates in 1957 and it is by no means certain that they had any as strong as Lee and Yang to put forward. https://physicsworld.com/a/credit-where-credits-due/ https://physicsworld.com/a/credit-where-credits-due/

leereeves 6y ago

> The Nobel committee has many sins to answer for. According to Magdolna Hargittai, it's not clear that this is one of them. She wrote that there were actually three experimental groups that verified parity violation, with unclear priority, and none of them were eligible for the Nobel in 1957 because all published after the deadline for that year. And so we arrive at the question at the heart of this story: was it a fair decision not to award Wu a share of the prize? After all, there was an “empty slot” – according to the statutes of the Nobel Foundation a maximum of three people can share a prize in a given category. The NBS experiment was the first to verify parity violation on 27 December and Wu had suggested and was actively involved with the experiment. But Friedman and Telegdi, who also started their experiments in the late summer of 1956 and were already doing measurements in October, may have had some preliminary results by December too. However, what really counts is publications, and in that the NBS group and the Garwin–Lederman–Weinrich group were side by side, with Garwin and Lederman actually finishing their report days before the NBS group did. Whichever way success is measured, it would have been hard to pick one particular experimentalist for the prize. As it turns out, this discussion is superfluous for legalistic reasons. As Bárány pointed out, “The awarded work must have been published before the year of the prize, in this case before 1 January 1957.” Since all three experimental studies were published in early 1957, none of the experimentalists could have been considered for the prize that year. The Nobel Committee could have decided to wait another year to award the prize for parity violation, but with the three experiments and the large number of physicists involved, the decision would always have been a hard one. Also, the committee needed strong candidates in 1957 and it is by no means certain that they had any as strong as Lee and Yang to put forward. https://physicsworld.com/a/credit-where-credits-due/ https://physicsworld.com/a/credit-where-credits-due/