Imagine the outcry if, at the 2016 Summer Olympics, the legendary United States swim team –â?? Michael Phelps, Ryan Lochte, Conor Dwyer and Townley Haas –â?? still obliterated the competition, coming first in the men's 4 x 200m freestyle relay, but only Haas, Lochte and Dwyer received medals, with nothing, not even a silver, for Phelps. ‘Unfair!' you'd cry. And you'd be right.
The Nobel committee seems not to recognise how collaborative science is today; their paradigm remains the lone genius, or a duet or troika at most. Year after year, they perform their arbitrary and often cruel calculus, leaving deserving physicists shivering in the pool without any medal to show for it. Even those few modern experimentalists who have won unshared Nobel prizes owe their success to numerous collaborators – especiallyâ?? in particle physics and astronomy, which require massive data sets and large teams to analyse them. No scientist gets to Stockholm alone.
The 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics, which was given to Peter Higgs and François Englert for the theoretical prediction of what was later called the Higgs boson, exemplifies four key problems in the selective awarding of the prize. First, it went to only two scientists (even though the committee allows three winners), when there were six other physicists, working in several teams, who independently introduced the idea and could rightfully claim joint custody of the Higgs mechanism. Higgs himself calls the it ‘the ABEâ??Gâ??Hâ??Hâ??â??K'tHâ?? mechanism', standing for Philip Anderson, Robert Brout, Englert, Gerald Guralnik, Carl Richard Hagen, Higgs, Tom Kibble and Gerard 't Hooft. All except Brout were still living in 2013.
Second, none of the more than 6,200 experimentalists who helped make the detection at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will ever win a Nobel Prize. If the committee would even allow itself the indulgence of four laureates per prize, at least the two leaders of the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the LHC might have had a share. In stark contrast, the 2017 Nobel Prize was awarded only to the instrumentalists who'd built the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) experiment, which was designed to detect cosmic gravitational waves – ripples in space-time caused whenever massive objects move. Of course, the theorist who had predicted the existence of the gravitational waves that LIGO detected, Albert Einstein, had died 62 years earlier. Even I, who believe the Nobel should be awarded posthumously, think that's stretching it.
Third, the award of the prize to Higgs and Englert blocked everyone else associated with the Higgs boson, whether experimentalists or theorists, from winning one. Even in clear-cutâ?? cases where historians agree that the Nobel committee made a mistake, never has more than one Nobel Prize been awarded per discovery or invention. Doing so would be tacit condemnation of earlier prize committees.
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