Published September 30, 2024last updated October 7, 2024
The Nobel Prize is considered the "Mount Everest of science." But it faces criticism over how winners are chosen, and may give a warped idea of scientific progress.
Science has changed since the Nobel Prize was first awarded in 1901. Is it time to forge a new way of recognizing outstanding science?Image: JONATHAN NACKSTRAND/AFP/Getty Images
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Every October, a handful of scientists get woken up by a phone call to find out they've won a Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine, physics or chemistry.
Startled and bleary-eyed, they throw a shirt on over their pajamas, join a video call to Stockholm and try to explain a lifetime's worth of research to the world's media in a few short minutes.
Journalists then desperately try to understand what "quantum dots," or "entangled photons" are, file their reports, then breathe a sigh of relief that it's all over until next year. By the following week everyone's forgotten — another a flash in an endless news cycle.
Be honest, who really cares about Nobel Prizes? Are these prizes, first awarded in 1901, with all their high-class pomp and ceremony, still relevant today?
The Nobel Prizes do help to popularize scientific discoveries. But do they also give a false impression of how discoveries are made? Are they too biased in favoring science from the US, Europe and men?
Nobel's goal was to reward outstanding science to "those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind."
Nobel Prizes are meaningful milestones for scientific advances. They credit how millions of people were protected from severe COVID-19 infections from rapid vaccine development , the invention of energy-saving LED lights and gene-editing technologies which have cured previously untreatable diseases.
"Doubtless they're the Mount Everest of science. The Nobel Prizes show the pinnacle of scientific discoveries, and there's an emotive attachment to them," said Rajib Dasgupta, a physician and professor of public health based in New Delhi, India.
If anything, the prizes help remind us that we're fortunate to live in an age of new scientific advances, after DNA, after vaccinations, after theories of the big bang and sub-atomic particles.
Nobel Prize in Physics: Extraordinary phenomena
Invisible rays, fiery hot stars and atoms that'll make your hair fall out. Physics is the science of the unusual. Our gallery highlights the best of the best Nobel Prize winners.
Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech
1901: When bones became visible
The first Noble Prize in Physics was awarded to a German, Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, for the discovery of x-rays. To this day, his discovery continues to bring broken bones to light or to root out painful tooth inflammations. The energy-rich rays can even identify cancer. Röntgen himself christened his discovery "x-rays," but in German, they're known today as "Röntgen rays."
Image: Fotolia/Denis
1903: Decaying atoms
Frenchman Antoine Henri Becquerel figured out that the atomic nuclei of certain heavy metals - like uranium pictured here - spontaneously decayed, thereby releasing energy-rich rays. What Becquerel had discovered was radioactivity. Marie Curie and her husband Pierre delved further into the phenomenon, with the Nobel Prize later being awarded to all three.
Image: PD
1921: Beams of light
Amazingly, light is capable of dislodging tiny particles of metal. It was this photo-electric effect that Albert Einstein decided to look into further. Light and matter, he later said, are two sides of the same coin - and can even change from one to the other. Photons, in other words, can modify metal. Modern solar panels employ the same principle.
Image: Ramona Heim/Fotolia
1956: The origin of modern computing
Owners of smartphones, laptops and iPads can tip their caps to three Americans: William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. They built the first transistors: electronic circuits capable of lightning-quick changes from one condition to another. Computer processors such as this one here are comprised of millions of such circuits.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
1964: Bundling light
Aim a cluster of similar light rays in one direction and - voilà! - you've got a laser. Beyond light shows, lasers can cut metal and burn off skin lesions. For their contributions to laser technology, American Charles Townes and Russians Nikolai Bassov and Alexander Prokhorov received the Nobel Prize.
Image: Mehr
1967: Star fire
Why do stars actually produce as much heat as they do? American Hans Bethe, originally born in Strasbourg, France, took a look at our own sun to answer that question. What he found was that stars "melt" hydrogen atoms into larger helium atoms. Atomic fusion, as it's known, releases huge amounts of energy - bathing our planet, for example, in sunlight.
Image: AP/NASA
1971: Three-dimensional images
Holograms were the brainchild of a Hungarian engineer named Dennis Gábor. For the first time, he constructed images in three dimensions. The pictures appear to float in space and to change form at the blink of an eye. But they're not just beautiful to look at. They're a useful anti-counterfeiting measure on modern currencies.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
1986: Rendering the tiny visible
Glimpses into the realm of the teeny-tiny are thanks to Ernst Ruska of Germany, the inventor of the electron microscope. His microscope is what makes shots like this one (a flea) so vivid. The resolution is 1,000 times higher than that of a comparable light microscope.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
1988: Lightweight elementary particles
Yes, neutrinos exist. And with the help of a particle accelerator, Americans Leon Max Lederman, Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger found evidence that proved the existence of these extremely light buildings blocks of matter. Neutrinos almost never interact with particles on planet earth, making their experimental detection costly.
Image: AP
1989: Do you know exactly what time it is?
The foundation for extreme time-telling was laid by American Norman Ramsey. He helped to create the world's most exact time-piece: the atomic clock. Over the course of one year, such a clock's accuracy is compromised by only 25 billionths of a second. Four atomic clocks are located in Braunschweig, Germany, together setting the country's official time.
Image: Fotolia/Paylessimages
2007: Big hard drives in small places
Hard drives on laptops are getting smaller and smaller and smaller - and yet they manage to pack in ever-increasing data. The reason? Tremendous magnetic resistance. The effect was discovered by Peter Grünberg of Germany and Albert Fert of France, both of whom were awarded the Nobel Prize for it.
Image: DW/A. Bach
2009: No more dial-up modems
Charles Kuen Kao, an American physicist of Chinese descent, developed the fiber optic cable. Information from a website or a telephone conversation is converted into ultra-short flashes of light, which are then deciphered back into electric impulses on the other end. Kao's cables deliver information quickly and, crucially, do not bleed data along the way.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
2011: Our faster-expanding universe
That the universe will grow ever larger, ever faster was demonstrated by Americans Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess. The three scientists can't say why the universe will do so. But whoever manages to answer that question will surely have a good shot at the next Nobel Prize in Physics.
Image: Fotolia/miket
2013: The origins of mass
Theoretical physicists François Englert of Belgium and Peter Higgs of Britain received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics for their contributions to particle physics. Theories they proposed independently of one other in the 1960s were confirmed in 2012 at the Large Hadron Collider. The Higgs boson particle explains the origin of mass and fills a hole in the Standard Model of particle physics.
Image: 2011 CERN
2014: Let there be (blue) light!
Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura were awarded the Physics Nobel for their development of blue light-emitting diodes (LEDs). This made white LEDs possible as bright and above all energy-saving light sources.
Image: Ansgar Pudenz/Deutscher Zukunftspreis
2018: Ultra-short laser pulses and optical tweezers
Lasers have become an indispensable part of our lives. With their research, Donna Strickland and Gerard Mourou laid the foundation for ultra-short pulse lasers. This allows materials to be processed more finely than with any other tool. The two shared the Nobel Prize for Physics with Arthur Ashkin, who had developed optical tweezers for investigating biological samples.
Image: Bosch
2019: The discovery of exoplanets
James Peebles, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz have been awarded the Prize for their research on exoplanets and cosmology. In a statement, the Academy said the trio received the award for their "new understanding of the universe's structure and history." Since Mayor and Queloz discovered the first planet outside our solar system in October 1995, more than 4,000 exoplanets have been discovered.
Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech
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Do Nobel Prizes really inspire people about science?
The Nobel Prizes are certainly a useful way to capture the public imagination about science when they are elevated to the platform of mass media.
The extent to which media outlets cover the Nobel Prizes varies by country, but Dasgupta said the prizes are closely followed by the Indian media — and that in detail, rather than just for the news.
"The interest comes from an educational tilt towards STEM subjects in India, particularly among the middle class," Dasgupta told DW, referring to science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
Teaching children about the Nobel Prizes is embedded in the Indian school curriculum to get people interested in science, as it is around the world.
Lily Green, a biology teacher at a high school for 11-to-18-year-olds in Newbury, UK, said she taught a historical perspective of the Nobel Prizes in her science classes, but didn't follow the prize announcements every October.
"We use them to teach the more fundamental concepts of science. The best discoveries are those that capture kids' imagination with scandals or great stories — like [Barry Marshall] who infected himself with bacteria to show how they cause ulcers," said Green.
But Green doubted whether the Nobel Prizes played much of a role in inspiring students to study science at university.
"They're generally captivated and interested in science, not because they want to win a Nobel Prize," she told DW.
Myth of the genius scientist
In the first years of the Nobel Prizes, they were mostly awarded to individual gentlemen scientists, such as Albert Einstein or Rutherford.
Marie Curie's gender — in terms of the ratio between male and female scientists — was, and still is, an exception. But Curie was also awarded two Nobel Prizes, so she was a double exception.
The prizes helped build the idea of the genius scientist — one who single-handedly drove science forward with their sheer brilliance.
Stories like that of Marie Curie, who died from radiation exposure through her work, tend to capture the imagination when it come to the Nobel PrizesImage: Bianchetti/Leemage/picture alliance
But in reality, scientific progress operates very differently, especially in contemporary research.
Scientific discoveries are born from collaborations between hundreds of researchers around the world from different research fields. Science is a community — it is multidisciplinary and diverse.
Now, Nobel Prizes are commonly split between groups of scientists. But for every Nobel laureate, there are thousands of other scientists, Ph.D students and technicians who were part of the research — and did the experiments — but remain uncredited, at least among the general public.
Green agreed there was a tendency to overplay the work of individual scientist at the Nobel Prizes, but also felt that the idea of the solo genius scientist is waning.
"We're teaching more and more that science is a collaborative effort. It helps the kids to see the amount of work that goes into scientific discoveries," she said.
Lack of diversity in Nobel Prizes
The biggest criticisms of the Nobel Prizes relate to their lack of diversity and bias toward Western scientific institutions.
In the sciences, less than 15% of Nobel laureates are women.
And very few people from countries outside Europe and the US have won a Nobel Prize. The US, UK and Germany dominate the rankings for the number of Nobel laureates, totaling 663 among them. China has eight and India has 12 Nobel laureates.
The 2022 Physics Nobel Prize was one of the most anticipated for years: It had been expected that Aspect, Clauser and Zeilinger would be recognized for their work with 'entangled photons.' But what of the hundreds of other scientists who contributed to their field?Image: Ren Pengfei/Xinhua/IMAGO
"Most prizes are very deserving, but they're not without politics. Institutions in many countries are being overlooked, including India. And certainly, Nobel Prize committees are not as inclusive as they need to be," said Dasgupta.
Nobel Prizes can also exacerbate this inequality by diverting more funding to institutions which have already won prizes and the recognition that follows.
But Dasgupta said the reality was that institutions in India and elsewhere had to get stronger to compete with the US or Europe — only then would those countries be able to hold onto the talent they have created.
