AP
Question of credit: The boson is named after Higgs, who along with five
others proposed the mechanism that suggested the particle. A team of
6,000 people proved them right.
Every year around this time, when the Nobel prizes are awarded, debates
start about who missed out, whether the ones who got them deserved them
and so forth. This year, such debates started a month ahead, with
columns by well known scientists in journals and newspapers. Professor
Athene Donald of Cambridge asked in the 17 September 2012 issue of The Telegraph
“how many scientists does it take to make a discovery?” and that the
era of the lone genius, as epitomised by Albert Einstein, has long gone.
Well, while Alfred Nobel himself had stipulated that the prize be given
to an outstanding discovery made during the year, prizes are today given
for discoveries and inventions made much earlier, and their importance
realised in time. Also, while it was generally given earlier for a
single individual, the Foundation expanded it to three, and no more than
three, to share the prize.
Debate is not restricted to the issue of single versus multiple alone.
Several more issues concerning the prize have been raised, each worthy
of consideration in itself. Not accounting for, or addressing these
concerns, has made the journal Scientific American state in its
editorial page of October 8, 2012 that, in many ways, the Nobel Prize is
a charming anachronism. In other words, it has not kept up with the
changed, and changing, landscape and practices of sciences and how it is
done.
Some of the issues are: (1) is it for a lone genius, or even a
threesome, or should a team not be awarded? (2) Is the stipulation for
disciplines (physics, chemistry, medicine) relevant any longer? (3) Why
are the rules different for different categories of prizes? (4) Do we
have to stick to the “year of discovery” as Nobel wanted? (5) Do we add
any more scientific disciplines for recognition? Some of these issues
are interlinked.
Many had expected the Higgs Boson (and Peter Higgs) to be recognized by
the Prize this year. It was not, and that highlights some of the above
issues. The boson is named after Higgs who — along with R. Brout and F.
Englert, and with G. S. Guralnik, C. R. Hagen and T. W. B. Kibble —
proposed the mechanism that suggested the particle, as early as 1964.
And it took a team of 6,000 people, working as the Atlas Collaboration
and the CMS Collaboration, at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland,
to prove them right. Do we then give the six of them or the 6005 of
them?
Teamwork
This is not just with the Boson experiment. Many other such grand ideas
are done as teamwork. Today’s science has moved from that of a scientist
ploughing the lone furrow, into a group, team or consortium of
collaborators. The Human Genome project is an excellent example. But
then, as a scientist commented on the Scientific American
editorial, perhaps awarding organisations, not just individuals, might
be an option to consider (which in turn raises its own debate), just as
in the case of the Nobel Peace Prize.
Discipline categorisation is another issue that is being debated. During
the last 12 years, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry has gone only in four
years to ‘card-carrying’ chemists, the rest eight have gone to molecular
biologists, structural biologists and biophysicists, and several
chemists have wondered about this.
Then again, last year’s prize went to Dr. Schechtman for his discovery
of quasicrystals, a topic that could have been just as well included in
physics. But, the 2010 Prize for discovering and identifying an
allotropic form of the chemical element, graphene, was in physics, not
chemistry! This brings the other issue of merging of disciplines
blurring of boundaries and the birth of new disciplines. The charm in
graphene lies less in its chemistry but far more in its use as a
material — and in the new fusion-discipline material science.
Then again, the Nobel people started to award in soft-science areas such
as economics. This has made one ask whether there should not be Nobels
in time-honoured areas such as biology (as distinct from chemistry) and
mathematics.
Other awards
Granted there are other agencies that award much coveted prizes such as
the Fields and Abel Prizes in mathematics, Dan David prizes (which are
three annual prizes of US$ 1 million each for achievements having an
outstanding scientific, technological, cultural or social impact on our
world), and the Lasker awards in medicine. Indeed, more often than not, a
Lasker awardee ends up getting the Nobel as well; Drs. John Gurdon and
Shinya Yamanaka who got the Nobel this year in medicine won the Lasker
in 2009 (and Martin Evans won the Lasker in 2001, and the Nobel in
2007). But the esteem that the Nobel has earned over the last century
still is its trump card, which is why there is much discussion about its
various facets.
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