Nobel Prize

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A Nobel Prize is a really cool thing you get for being a scientist, a humanitarian, or someone else who adds significantly to the lives and knowledge of humanity — unless you're a mathematician or computer scientist.[1]

The prize was founded by the inventor of dynamite, Alfred Nobel.[2] After reading an obituary of himself, prematurely published by a French newspaper in 1884 and terming him a "merchant of death," he had a mild attack of conscience and sought to make amends. No, not by giving up the dynamite business, but instead using his wealth earned from manufacturing dynamite to endow the creation of the prizes upon his death in 1896.[3]

There are prizes for the main sciences, medicine, economics, and the controversial Peace Prize.

Notably, no young earth creationist "scientist" has ever managed to get any of these. However, hated liberals Al Gore and Jimmy Carter have. Although, since Henry Kissinger and Yassar Arafat also got them, the Nobel Peace Prize can be viewed as something of an insult, no matter who you are. In 2009, United States President Barack Obama was randomly selected from among just under seven billion people to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, which was being awarded that year to anyone who was not George W. Bush.

Contents

[edit] Current Prizes

Sometimes cited as a reason for the lack of a Prize in mathematics is a story about Nobel's wife having an affair with a mathematician. It's just a story.[5]

The Prizes in Physics, Chemistry and Economics are awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Prize in Physiology or Medicine — by the Karolinska Institutet (the top-ranking Swedish medical university), the Prize in Literature — by the Swedish Academy (but not "of Sciences"), and the Peace Prize — by a committee elected by the Norwegian Parliament.[6] The last point is often missed.

Since 2012,[7] each prize is worth +7,500,000 Swedish kronor (1,100,000 USD).

[edit] Only controversial when your brain isn't engaged

The Nobel Prizes in Science, particularly who is and who is not awarded one, sometimes generates controversy. The Science prize is accused of sexism by the fact that Jocelyn Bell and Rosalind Franklin didn't receive a prize (although these accusers won't mention Dorothy Hodgkin), and that Charles Darwin never received the award is often used by creationists to question the validity of evolution by natural selection.

Even though the Prize is often awarded many years after the event or the original research was done, it cannot be awarded posthumously. Thus, both Franklin and Darwin didn't receive a Nobel Prize on account of being a corpse at the time, rather than a woman or wrong, respectively. In the case of Jocelyn Bell, who certainly was alive at the time, she had made observations of pulsars (and was credited as a second author of the relevant paper) but it was her academic supervisors who had put in the great amount of work in developing aperture-synthesis technique. Prizes in science are often given to individuals with the broadest scope of contributions, rather than just initial discoveries, so while Bell's lack of a prize was controversial and widely criticized by the astronomy community, it wasn't the worst assumptions at play.

[edit] Nominations

The fact that the nomination process is pretty free and easy has led to some rather strange nominations, particularly for the Peace Prize. These include Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini and Fidel Castro.[8]

Nevertheless, some deserving nominees never received the Prize, such as Mahatma Gandhi and Jorge Luis Borges. However, note that, in Gandhi's case, the Nobel Committee's decision to not award a prize in 1948, as "there was no suitable living candidate," was, in effect, an award for Gandhi, as the prize is generally not given posthumously.[9]

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

[edit] Footnotes

  1. Mathematicians get the Fields Medal instead. As long as they're under 40. Computer scientists get the Turing Award.
  2. Alfred Nobel and the History of Dynamite
  3. Nobel Prizes, 107 Years Old, Progressive Policy Institute
  4. Strictly speaking, there is no Nobel Prize in Economics, it is actually The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. The other 5 prizes were established by Alfred Nobel in 1895 and first awarded 1901, the economics prize was established in 1968, the 300th anniversary of the foundation of Sveriges Riksbank (the Swedish Central Bank), and first awarded in 1969.
  5. Snopes says so. And Nobel never married.
  6. The Nobel Organizations, Nobelprize.org
  7. For Nobel Winners, a Smaller Cash Prize, The New York Times
  8. Who Doesn't Have a Nobel Prize Nomination?, LA Times
  9. Mahatma Gandhi, the Missing Laureate, Nobelprize.org
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