Nobel Prize controversies

Nobel Prize
Awarded forOutstanding contributions in physics, chemistry, literature, peace, and physiology or medicine.

The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, identified with the Nobel Prize, is awarded for outstanding contributions in Economics.

Country
Presented by
First awarded1901; 123 years ago (1901)
Websitehttps://www.nobelprize.org/

Since the first award in 1901, conferment of the Nobel Prize has engendered criticism[1] and controversy.[2] 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 is awarded along with the Nobel Prizes.[3]

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: up to 2004, 77 per cent of Nobel Prizes in physics have been given to discoveries, compared with only 23 per cent to inventions.[4][5] In addition, the scientific prizes typically reward contributions over an entire career rather than a single year.[citation needed]

No Nobel Prize was established for mathematics and many other scientific and cultural fields.[6] An early theory that envy or rivalry led Nobel to omit a prize to mathematician Gösta Mittag-Leffler[7][8] was refuted because of timing inaccuracies. Another myth that states that Nobel's spouse had an affair with a mathematician (sometimes attributed as Mittag-Leffler) has been equally debunked: Nobel was never married.[9][10] A more likely explanation is that Nobel did not consider mathematics as a practical discipline, and too theoretical to benefit humankind, as well as his personal lack of interest in the field and the fact that an award to mathematicians given by Oscar II already existed at the time.[9][10][11][12] Both the Fields Medal and the Abel Prize have been described as the "Nobel Prize of mathematics".[13][14]

The most notorious controversies have been over prizes for Literature,[15][16][17][18] Peace,[19] and Economics.[20][21] Beyond disputes over which contributor's work was more worthy, critics most often discerned political bias and Eurocentrism in the result.[22][23][24][25] The interpretation of Nobel's original words concerning the Literature prize has also undergone repeated revisions.[citation needed]

A major controversies-generating factor for the more recent scientific prizes (Physics, Chemistry, and Medicine) is the Nobel rule that each award can not be shared by more than two different researches and no more than three different individuals each year.[26] While 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, in more recent times science research has increasingly become a matter of widespread international cooperation and exchange of ideas among different research groups, themselves composed of dozens or even hundreds of researchers, spread over the years of effort needed to hypothesize, refine and prove a discovery. This has led to glaring omissions of key participants in awarded researches: as an example see below the case of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Physics, or the case of the Atlas/CMS Collaboration that produced the scientific papers that documented the Higgs boson discovery and included a list of researchers filling 15 single-spaced pages.[27][28][29]

  1. ^ Nobel population 1901–50: anatomy of a scientific elite. 5 November 2001. physicsworld.com. Retrieved 20 March 2011.
  2. ^ "A Nobel calling: 100 years of controversy Archived 24 December 2007 at the Wayback Machine", The Independent, 14 October 2005.
  3. ^ "Winners of the Nobel Prize for Economics | Britannica". www.britannica.com. Retrieved 23 March 2023.
  4. ^ Christoph Bartneck & Matthias Rauterberg (2007). "Physics Nobels should favour inventions". Nature. 448 (7154): 644. Bibcode:2007Natur.448..644B. doi:10.1038/448644c. PMID 17687300.
  5. ^ Christoph Bartneck & Matthias Rauterberg (2008). "The asymmetry between discoveries and inventions in the Nobel Prize in Physics" (PDF). Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research. 6 (1). doi:10.1386/tear.6.1.73/1.
  6. ^ John E. Morrill (1995). "A Nobel Prize in Mathematics". American Mathematical Monthly. 102 (10): 888–892. doi:10.2307/2975266. JSTOR 2975266.
  7. ^ "Fields Institute – Mittag-Leffler and Nobel". Fields Institute. 23 March 2010. Retrieved 20 January 2010.
  8. ^ "Magnus Gösta Mittag-Leffler" (PDF). Robert Knowlan. Archived from the original (PDF) on 30 June 2016. Retrieved 21 January 2010.
  9. ^ a b López-Ortiz, Alex (20 February 1998). "Why is there no Nobel in mathematics?". University of Waterloo. Retrieved 28 June 2022.
  10. ^ a b Firaque, Kabir (16 October 2019). "Explained: Why is there no mathematics Nobel? The theories, the facts, the myths". The Indian Express. Retrieved 28 June 2022.
  11. ^ Mikkelson, David (4 October 2013). "No Nobel Prize for Math". Snopes. Retrieved 28 June 2022.
  12. ^ Lars Gårding & Lars Hörmander (1985). "Why is there no nobel prize in Mathematics?". The Mathematical Intelligencer. 7 (3): 73–74. doi:10.1007/BF03025815. S2CID 123295837.
  13. ^ "Fields Medal – from Wolfram MathWorld". MathWorld. Retrieved 20 January 2010.
  14. ^ "Abel Prize Awarded: The Mathematicians' Nobel". Mathematical Association of America. April 2004. Archived from the original on 19 February 2007. Retrieved 20 January 2010.
  15. ^ Nasar 1998, pp. 368–369
  16. ^ Controversial Turkish Writer Wins Nobel Prize – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty 2011. Rferl.org (12 October 2006). Retrieved 20 March 2011.
  17. ^ First Arab Nobel Prize Winner in Literature Dies at 94 – International News|News of the World|Middle East News|Europe News. FOXNews.com (30 August 2006). Retrieved 20 March 2011.
  18. ^ Amartya Sen (28 August 2001) Tagore and His India. nobelprize.org
  19. ^ "Nobel Prize – Prizes". Encyclopædia Britannica. 2007. Retrieved 15 January 2009. The Nobel Prizes for Physics, Chemistry, and Physiology or Medicine have generally been the least controversial, whereas those for Literature and Peace have been, by their very nature, the most exposed to critical differences. The Peace Prize has been the prize most frequently reserved or withheld.
  20. ^ Samuel Brittan (19 December 2003) "The not so noble Nobel Prize Archived 30 June 2009 at the Wayback Machine", Financial Times.
  21. ^ Burton Feldman (2000) The Nobel Prize: A History of Genius, Controversy and Prestige, Arcade Publishing, ISBN 1-55970-537-X
  22. ^ Adam Kirsch (3 October 2008). "The Nobel Committee has no clue about American literature". Slate Magazine.
  23. ^ Irwin Abrams (2001). The Nobel Peace Prize and the laureates: an illustrated biographical history, 1901–2001. Science History Publications/USA. pp. xiv. ISBN 0-88135-388-4.
  24. ^ Burton Feldman (2001). The Nobel prize: a history of genius, controversy, and prestige. Arcade Pub. p. 65. ISBN 1-55970-537-X.
  25. ^ Anna Ringstrom, Sven Nordenstam & Jon Hurdle (13 October 2008). "Bush critic wins 2008 Nobel for economics". Reuters. Retrieved 31 March 2010.
  26. ^ "Statutes of the Nobel Foundation". NobelPrize.org. 9 August 2018. Retrieved 7 December 2022.
  27. ^ "Solve the Nobel Prize Dilemma". Scientific American. 307 (4): 12. 2012. doi:10.1038/scientificamerican1012-12.
  28. ^ "The Absurdity of the Nobel Prizes in Science". The Atlantic. 3 October 2017.
  29. ^ "Why Nobel prizes fail 21st-century science". The Guardian. 30 September 2018.