I was a collaborator on the SNO project. I worked with Art McDonald, who co-won the 2015 Nobel prize in physics for the project.<p>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.<p>i.e. A <i>competent</i> 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.<p>Even if he didn't win based on something he mathematically proved, there's no question he's one of the top physicists around.<p>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.<p>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.<p>So yeah, the article isn't theoretically wrong, but it's wrong for practical purposes.
I 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.ligo.org/magazine/LIGO-magazine-issue-11.pdf#page=36" rel="nofollow">http://www.ligo.org/magazine/LIGO-magazine-issue-11.pdf#page...</a>
I visited Sweden once, during the Nobel Prize award ceremony.<p>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.<p>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.<p>For this brief time, scientists eclipsed actors, athletes, and the other pop culture stars.<p>'Course that could have been just me. I do like a bit of absurdism.
I 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.<p>I don't know about what to do about this unfair distribution of credit. Probably nothing.
For me Nobel prices in Science are one of the things that work better the way they are that most alternatives.<p>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.<p>For me this article is absurd. If you have a better way of giving to science, create your own price with your own money.
The abstract of the 5,154-author paper that this article mentions:<p><a href="https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.114.191803" rel="nofollow">https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.11...</a><p>I first thought it was this one<p><a href="http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2008JInst...3S8003A" rel="nofollow">http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2008JInst...3S8003A</a><p>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).<p>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.
This 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.
It 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.<p>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.
I 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.
This is a fabulous article. Touches on everything from large groups of people, obviously missing attributions due to death, and even the sexist outcomes.
Typical 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.<p>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.
If 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.
If 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.<p>It does give visibility to science, which hopefully, motivates a few more people to grow up to want that achievement.<p>Personally, I think we need more prizes and “sports” for these endeavors:<p><a href="https://www.xprize.org" rel="nofollow">https://www.xprize.org</a><p><a href="http://roborace.com" rel="nofollow">http://roborace.com</a>
A 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?
Alfred 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 <i>correct</i>, so someone else who did just as important work on another theory that showed that it was <i>not</i> correct will never be rewarded.)<p>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.
This 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.
Why 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.
Personally I find peace prizes abominable:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_Peace_Prize_laureates" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_Peace_Prize_laur...</a><p>They just got way too political.
The Absurdity of the Academy Awards in the Arts.<p>Blah, blah, blah, I disagree with some perceived unfairness so it's all crap.<p>End of the day nothing is perfect, but encouraging people in awards like these push forwards the areas.<p>You want to push forward Science the Nobel Prize is amazing to encourage people.<p>You want your own new age everyone gets a prize award, create one.
I think this is what you get when the participation trophy generation wants to rework the Nobel Prize.<p>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.
They 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.
Want 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.<p>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.<p>You can read more about it in the somewhat sanitized Wikipedia article which only hints at the dispute that lies beneath: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Economic_Sciences" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Econom...</a><p>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.