How the Nobel Prizes could be significantly improved
It’s Nobel Prize week! And you might think that someone like myself, a book-reading, peace-loving fellow with a scientific background would be delighted. But on the whole, you’d be wrong (yes, it’s true, I’m afraid: I’ve reverted to cranky type after last week’s uncharacteristic foray into unbridled optimism; but who wants to read upbeat essays all the time?).
In fact, if you look closely, you’ll discover that there are many reasons to be irritated by the Nobel Prizes. For starters, there’s the wantonly politicized decision to award the 2009 Peace Prize to Barack Obama—principally, one can only assume, for not being George W. Bush (a characteristic he shared with roughly 7 billion people at the time); there’s the fact that mathematics was inexplicably regarded as not being sufficiently worthy of our attention as science, literature or the promotion of “fraternity among nations”; there’s the smarmy way a Swedish bank successfully managed to elevate Economics to the status of a bonafide science in the public consciousness by bankrolling its own Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel that just so happens to be awarded at the same time, and in the same way, as the other Prizes, and there’s Bob Dylan’s notorious 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature (Really? In a planet filled with dedicated, highly accomplished and often cruelly under-appreciated writers, that’s the most suitable example of “the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work of an idealistic tendency” you could come up with?).
But well beyond all of that is the subtly pernicious influence that the existence of the Nobel Prize has on the daily practice of science, with many routinely being so distracted by the prospect of winning a Nobel Prize, or overawed by the authority of those who have won them, that it affects the way they do research in the first place. Years ago, I had the pleasure of getting to know an insightful and personable physicist who had spent over a decade on the Physics Nobel Committee, and while her confidential dinner-time anecdotes of intense behind the scenes Nobel lobbying were both amusing and revealing, they were also not a little depressing.
These days, for a variety of reasons (not the least of which being the recent establishment of similar, even more lucrative prizes, in a palpable effort to rival the prestige of the Nobel through financial clout – see here, for example), physics is perhaps the least likely area of science to be negatively impacted by the existence of the Nobel Prize. At present, I’m convinced that the greatest potential for Nobel-related scientific harm lies with biomedical research.
When I was working on my film and book project on the coronavirus pandemic, I naturally went out of my way to encounter a large number of medical researchers to get their views on things; and it was particularly striking, and not a little depressing, to see how often the vast majority of them were invoking the authority of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine at every possible turn: declaring how such and such must be an incontrovertible fact because its famous proponent had won a Nobel Prize, or trumpeting the merits of some particular line of inquiry by citing that it would surely lead to a Nobel Prize one day (or rejecting one by smugly concluding that it surely wouldn’t).
As I remarked at the time, “If you parachuted down from a distant planet and listened to a bunch of biologists talking for any length of time, you’d likely conclude that the main point of their enterprises was to win Nobel Prizes rather than simply figuring stuff out.”
Now, you might well think that I’m getting a bit carried away here (and if you are a regular reader of Howling at the Moon, you might also think that’s par for the course). After all, when all’s said and done, surely all of that is a small price to pay for the enormous societal benefit provided by the Nobel Prize, which vastly increases global awareness of hugely important achievements that would otherwise get relegated to the back pages, well behind the sports pages and latest political skirmish, if at all.
Well, yes and no. The proper question to ask isn’t simply a take-it-or-leave-it one of whether we’d all be better off with or without the Nobel Prizes as currently constituted (clearly we’re much better off with them), but rather if we can imagine a world with annual high-profile awards of deeply significant human accomplishments that do a much better job at conveying the excitement of scientific discovery without the usual distorting side-effects.
I specify “scientific discovery” here, because I don’t think that the criticisms outlined here apply to the Nobel Peace Prize or the Nobel Prize for Literature (so long as they are judiciously chosen—which, as mentioned above, they sometimes clearly aren’t). My core concern here is the misleading effect that the Nobel Prizes have on the public understanding of what science is (such as, perhaps most perniciously, the view that economics is actually a science) and how it actually works, often going a considerable distance towards reinforcing the stereotypical—and all too often false—view of a single, clearly identifiable breakthrough occurring solely through the efforts of an inspired solitary genius.
Thoughtful people have long commented on the dangers of this and the importance of taking a much more nuanced view of things. In his beautiful acceptance speech for the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics entitled The Dilemma of Attribution, Caltech’s David Politzer tells us,
As teachers of the next generation of scientists, we always seek to compress and simplify all of the developments that have come before. We want to bring our students as quickly as possible to the frontier of current understanding. From this perspective, the actual history, which involves many variants and many missteps, is only a hindrance. And the neat, linear progress, as outlined by the sequence of gleaming gems recognized by Nobel Prizes, is a useful fiction. But a fiction it is.
“The truth is often far more complicated. Of course, there are the oft-told priority disputes, bickering over who is responsible for some particular idea. But those questions are not only unresolvable, they are often rather meaningless. Genuinely independent discovery is not only possible, it occurs all of the time. Sometimes a yet harder problem in the prize selection process is to identify what is the essential or most important idea in some particular, broader, context. So it’s not just a question of who did it, i.e. who is responsible for the work, but what “it” is. In other words, what is the significant “it” that should stand as a symbol for a particularly important advance.”
Meanwhile, another celebrated scientist, Princeton’s Paul Steinhardt, once lamented to me (see Inflated Expectations: A Cosmological Tale) that scientific prizes typically reinforce the knee-jerk view of a single, pioneering genius that runs through most standard scientific biographies.
This focus on heroes also leads to other phenomena, like prize-giving to individuals. Personally, I’ve always thought that prizes should be for ideas, not people. And you should use the prizes to fund people who are working on the follow-up to that idea. That would be a real contribution to the science, I think, if you would award things in that way. The scientists who contributed to the idea would still have the honor, but instead of money being put into their bank account, it would be put directly into the field to push the idea even further forward. I think that’s a better way of doing things.”
Ironically, perhaps, among his many impressive scientific insights, Paul was the principal driving force behind our present understanding of quasicrystals (see Indiana Steinhardt and the Quest for Quasicrystals and Paul’s quasicrystal memoir The Second Kind of Impossible)—an accomplishment that was inexplicably unrecognized by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences when they awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry solely to Dan Shechtman for his pioneering quasicrystal work that Paul and others later successfully interpreted.
Well, as long as quasicrystal research continues to thrive, he likely won’t care very much. But the rest of us missed out on a golden opportunity to learn about the remarkable tale of how we stumbled upon a new form of matter that is, in some cases at least, literally out of this world.
What a shame.
Howard Burton, October 6, 2024
Howard is the author of six non-fiction books on various topics and the creator of Pandemic Perspectives (2022), Through the Mirror of Chess: A Cultural Exploration (2023), Raphael: A Portrait (2024) and Botticelli’s Primavera (2025) which is the first film in our Renaissance Masterpieces Series.
