JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
Yesterday I found a fine resource that lives within another fine resource—somehow I missed it, entirely, and for years I suspect of using the one without noticing the other.
The new-to-me find is the history of nomination process for the Nobel Prize on the Nobel Prize site. What this searchable database holds are all those nominated for the prize in all of the Academy’s fields, who nominated whom, what year, and for what area, with biographical links for all involved, an then cross-referenced so you can search by year and name.
- Nobel Prize Nomination Archive: https://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/redirector/?redir=archive
- Nobel Prize site: https://www.nobelprize.org/
I came upon the site looking to see the proof of nomination of Gustave Le Bon for the Physics Award in 1903–and indeed, he was there. I’m not very sure about what Le Bon had done to achieve this level of recognition as he seems in his polymathic way to be around the peripheries of a lot of interesting things in a number of different fields without being at the core (?)–but there he was. One nomination for that year and then for all time. He didn’t stand a chance for the prize for that year, with Becquerel and Poincare receiving it for 1903.
I didn’t check to see how many others received one and only one nomination, though I did find who received the most nominations and never receive the award–that distinction belongs to the great Arnold Sommerfeld, who was one of the last of those people who “knew everything”, and who over the years received 184 nominations. (#2 by the way was microbiologist Gaston Ramon with 155.)
Just for the fun of it I looked up Richard Feynman and found that he was nominated 48 times, receiving multiple votes in 1956, 1957, 1960, 1962, 1963, 1954, and finally 1965 when we was awarded the prize. Einstein received 62 nominations between 1922 and 1922, receiving them in every year but 1911 and 1915–he was finally awarded the prize (for 1921) in 1922.
The story of Einstein’s Nobel (that, is, the getting-it and not-getting-it part) is a bit complex, but is fabulously told by Abraham Pais in his paper “How Einstein Got the Nobel Prize: Why did the Nobel Committee for Physics wait so long before giving Einstein the Prize, and why did they not award it for relativity?” found in American Scientist, Vol. 70, No. 4 (July-August 1982), pp. 358-365 (and also in a section of his book Einstein Lived Here). Suffice to say here that the seemingly very long time for him not to receive the award (that he ultimately was given in 1922 for the photoelectric effect and not for relativity) is a “story which has neither heroes nor culprits” according to Pais, but rather seems one where the delayed recognition was due to very conservative appreciation for the proofs of the work.
Here’s a table from the Pais paper outlining the history of the Einstein nominations:
Again, Pais points out that the Academy warded Einstein the prize for the photoelectric effect, and not for relativity. We can see in the graph below from the Lecat bibliography of relativity (published 1925) that there was an enormous increase in publications on the theory beginning at the end of WWI. Then came the experimental verification in 1919 that made Einstein into Einstein. Of course this is just a quantitative display of the numbers of papers published on the subject for that year–the members of the Academy certainly had some reservation on the theory of relativity even into 1920, citing what Pais refers to as not-unreasonable hesitations on the interpretation of the eclipse data.
In any event, it was a very interesting and somewhat shocking experience to find the nomination archive. I recommend a tour.
