Re:The Nobel Prize in Physics 2020
by DiogenesKynikos on Tuesday October 06, 2020 @09:12AM
(#24697303)
There's a huge backlog of people who deserve Nobel prizes. The committee is also conservative, and doesn't want to give out a prize for something that turns out to be wrong. Both factors mean that it takes years from discovery to the awarding of a Nobel prize.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Re:The Nobel Prize in Physics 2020
by throwaway890369 on Tuesday October 06, 2020 @10:15AM
(#24697838)
It's one thing to allow enough time to pass before a given theory/experiment can be considered as "accepted" by science, and therefore eligible to the award.
However, the Nobel committee's rules can be considered archaic to a fault: 3 winners at most, all winners must be living at the time of the award.
If you want an egregious example of exclusion, look at the 2013 Nobel prize for the discovery of the Higgs boson. The prize was given to Higgs and Englert [0], but by any measure it should have been awarded to the five living scientists who made the discovery [1].
Was there really any reason to exclude Guralnik, Hagen and Kibble, who were all alive at the time of the award, other than a strict adherence to the "rule of three"?
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20131008193310/http://www.nobelp...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_PRL_symmetry_breaking_pap...
Even increasing it to 5 people wouldn't solve the problem. The Nobel prize could be awarded at the institution level rather than invidually but I'm sure there'll be objections to that as well.