Since the first award in 1901, conferment of the Nobel Prizes, including the Nobel Prize in Physics, has engendered criticism and controversies.Nobel population 1901–50: anatomy of a scientific elite. 5 November 2001. physicsworld.com. Retrieved 20 March 2011."A Nobel calling: 100 years of controversy ", The Independent, 14 October 2005. After his death in 1896, the will of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel established that an annual prize be awarded for service to humanity in the fields of physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and peace. Similarly, the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, first awarded in 1969, is awarded along with the Nobel Prizes.
Nobel sought to reward "those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind". One prize, he stated, should be given "to the person who shall have made the most important 'discovery' or 'invention' within the field of physics". Awards committees have historically rewarded discoveries over inventions: , 77 percent of Nobel Prizes in Physics had given to discoveries, compared with only 23 percent to inventions.
A major controversy-generating factor for the more recent physics-related prizes is the Nobel rule that each award can not be shared by more than two different research areas and no more than three different individuals each year. This rule was adequate in 1901, when most of the science research was performed by individual scientists working with their small group of assistants in relative isolation. But in more recent times science research has increasingly become a matter of widespread international cooperation and exchange of ideas among different research groups. These groups are themselves composed of dozens or even hundreds of researchers - modern science has been described as "the teamiest of team sports". The three-person limit has led to glaring omissions of key participants in awarded research. As an example, the 2017 prize awarded for gravitational waves could not acknowledge the work of the huge LIGO consortium. Similarly, the 2013 prize for discovery of the Higgs boson did not reward the discovering ATLAS/CMS collaboration at CERN. The latter collaboration included a list of researchers filling 15 single-spaced pages.
The two area, three person limit, with no prizes to organizations, is mentioned nowhere in Nobel's will. These limitations were added by the award committee, and could be easily changed. The Nobel Peace Prize, for example, has long been granted to organizations as well as individuals. This would certainly have been appropriate in physics for cases such as ATLAS/CMS or LIGO.
Controversies per year
1923: Millikan The 1923 prize went to Robert Millikan "for his work on the elementary charge of electricity and on the photoelectric effect". Millikan might have won in 1920 but for Felix Ehrenhaft's incorrect claim to have measured a smaller charge. Some controversy, however, still seems to linger over Millikan's oil drop experiment and experimental interpretation, over whether Millikan manipulated his data in the 1913 scientific paper measuring the electron charge. Allegedly, he did not report all his observations."Subelectrons, Presuppositions, and the Millikan-Ehrenhaft Dispute" by G. Holton, Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, 1978, vol 9, pp. 166–224.
1938: Fermi The 1938 prize went to Enrico Fermi in part for "his demonstrations of the existence of new radioactive elements produced by neutron irradiation". His team's discovery of slow neutrons and different types of radioactivity were correct. But what he believed to be heavy transuranic elements created by neutron absorption of uranium (ausenium and hesperium) turned out to be something quite different. As part of replicating Fermi's experiments, Otto Hahn, Otto Robert Frisch, Lise Meitner, and Fritz Strassmann instead discovered, in late 1938, that Fermi had actually induced nuclear fission in the uranium, and that his identified "transuranics" turned out to be fission products, isotopes of much lighter elements than uranium. Fermi delivered his Nobel Prize lecture only a few weeks before this discovery; he added a footnote to the lecture afterwards, indicating that the discovery of fission products by Hahn et al., "makes it necessary to reexamine all the problems of the transuranic elements, as many of them might be found to be products of a splitting of uranium."
1950: Powell Another case of "scientific injustice" in the Nobel Prize in Physics is the exclusion of Brazilian physicist César Lattes from the 1950 prize, which was awarded solely to Cecil Frank Powell "for his development of the photographic method of studying nuclear processes and for the discoveries revealed by it with regard to cosmic rays and new particles". Lattes was a central member of Powell's group at the University of Bristol and played a decisive role in the discovery and characterization of the π meson (pion), a subatomic particle composed of a quark and an antiquark. He was also the principal researcher and first author of the landmark Nature paper describing the pion, but was excluded from the 1950 prize. The decision to award the prize only to Powell, and not to Lattes or other collaborators, has been interpreted as reflecting a tradition of the time in which the head of the group was the only name submitted for the Nobel, while younger members, even when essential experimentally, were systematically excluded.
There have been rumors that Niels Bohr left a letter entitled "Why César Lattes Did Not Win the Nobel Prize – Open 50 Years After My Death". However, during searches conducted at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark, no such document was found.Regis Cabral, The Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science, Oxford University Press. pp. 452-453, 2003
1974: Ryle and Hewish The 1974 prize went to Martin Ryle and Antony Hewish "for their pioneering research in radio astrophysics: Ryle for his observations and inventions, in particular of the aperture synthesis technique, and Hewish for his decisive role in the discovery of pulsars". Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who first detected the signal from the first radio pulsar, was not included among the laureates. Hewish had initially mistaken Bell's findings as 'radio interference'. While Fred Hoyle argued that Bell should have been included in the prize, Bell said, "I believe it would demean Nobel Prizes if they were awarded to research students, except in very exceptional cases, and I do not believe this is one of them."
Over four decades later, Bell was recognized with a three million dollar Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics of which she donated the entirety to assist female, minority, and refugee students in becoming physics researchers.
1978: Penzias and Wilson
The 1978 prize was awarded for the chance "detection of cosmic microwave background radiation" by Bell Labs physicists Arno Allan Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson. There was some controversy over the award for a serendipitous discovery since it did not include Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman, who predicted the cosmic microwave background radiation in 1948, or Princeton physicist Robert Dicke who was also searching for the same phenomenon and co-published with Penzias and Wilson, explaining their results.Burton Feldman, The Nobel Prize – A History of Genius, Controversy, and Prestige, Arcade, 2000, p. 293"Emily Levesque, The Race to Prove the Existence of Cosmic Microwave Background" , wondriumdaily.com, 8 May 2022
1983: Chandrasekhar and Fowler Half of the 1983 prize went to William Alfred Fowler "for his theoretical and experimental studies of the nuclear reactions of importance in the formation of the chemical elements in the universe". Fowler acknowledged Fred Hoyle as the pioneer of the concept of stellar nucleosynthesis but Hoyle did not receive a share in the prize. Hoyle's championing of many disreputable and disproven ideas may have damaged his overall reputation and invalidated him in the Nobel committee's view. Hoyle's obituary in Physics Today notes that "Many of us felt that Hoyle should have shared Fowler's 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics, but the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences later made partial amends by awarding Hoyle, with Edwin Salpeter, its 1997 Crafoord Prize".
1997: Chu, Cohen-Tannoudji and Philips
The 1997 prize went to Steven Chu, Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William Daniel Phillips "for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light". The award was disputed by Russian scientists who questioned the awardees' priority in the acquired approach and techniques, which the team of Vladimir Minogin and Victor Balykin claimed to have carried out more than a decade before.
2005: Glauber
Half of the 2005 prize went to Roy J. Glauber "for his contribution to the quantum theory of optical coherence". Several physicists wrote to the Swedish Academy, protesting that Indian theoretical physicist E. C. George Sudarshan should have been awarded a share of the Prize for the Sudarshan diagonal representation (also known as Glauber–Sudarshan representation) in quantum optics, for which Glauber won his share of the prize. Sudarshan and other physicists sent a letter to the Nobel Committee claiming that the P representation had more contributions of "Sudarshan" than "Glauber".
2008: Nambu, Kobayashi and Maskawa Half of the 2008 prize went to Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa for their 1972 work on quark mixing. This postulated the existence of three additional quarks beyond the three then known to exist and used this postulate to provide a possible mechanism for CP violation, which had been observed 8 years earlier.. nobelprize.org Their work expanded and reinterpreted research by the Italian physicist Nicola Cabibbo, dating to 1963, before the quark model was even introduced. The resulting quark mixing matrix, which described probabilities of different quarks to turn into each other under the action of the weak force, is known as CKM matrix, after Cabibbo, Kobayashi, and Maskawa. Cabibbo arguably merited a share of the award.Physics Nobel snubs key researcher – physics-math – 7 October 2008. New Scientist. Retrieved 20 March 2011. The recipient of the other half of the 2008 prize was Yoichiro Nambu for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics. The fundamental step in this field is the Nambu–Jona-Lasinio model (NJL model), developed together with the Italian theoretical physicist Giovanni Jona-Lasinio, who was left out of the prize like Cabibbo. In recognition to his colleague's work, Nambu asked Jona-Lasinio to hold the Nobel Lecture at the Stockholm University in his place. As the prize is awarded each year to at most three people for no more than two different research works, the committee was forced to skip one member each from both the CKM and the NJL workgroups.
2009: Kao, Boyle and Smith The 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics was divided between three recipients over two disciplines, fiber optics and charge-coupled devices. Combined with the limit of three awardees, this led to some omissions. Charles Kuen Kao's award for his work in fiber optics led to claims that Narinder Singh Kapany's previous work had been overlooked.
The second award topic was "for the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit—the CCD sensor". The awardees, Willard Boyle and George E. Smith, developed the CCD, but for use as a memory. This led to Eugene I. Gordon and Michael Francis Tompsett claiming that it should have been theirs for establishing that the technology could be used for imaging, especially as "imaging" is part of the award description.
2010: Geim and Novoselov