More women physicists will *eventually* mean more Nobel prizewinners.
Why don’t more women win the Nobel Prize in Physics? Wait twenty years, suggests one juror. Committee member Borje Johansson delivered a lecture on “How to Get a Nobel Prize.” And the topic of women came up:
Why there are few women in the list of Nobel physics laureates? Johansson said that there was usually a time lag of about 20 years between a discovery or invention and the recognition with a Nobel. “So, the awards now reflect the field of physics 20 years ago. With the number of women physicists increasing, this fact (of a handful women Nobel laureates) may change two decades from now,” he stated.
He also said a surefire way to win is to be related to a Nobel Prize winner (as in the case of Marie Curie, who won with her husband, and whose daughter also won a Nobel with her own husband.) And he pointed out that Indian physicist S.N. Bose never got a Nobel for his work on quantum mechanics in the 1920s, but Nobel prizes have gone to people who based their work on Bose’s.
In other words, the Nobel committee is just a tad slow sometimes…
October 4th, 2007 at 3:46 am
And these are the people who are supposed to be qualified to decide who some of the brightest people of our times are??? Not that I had a lot of faith in them before, but, oi…
October 4th, 2007 at 7:04 pm
Leaving aside the Nobel peace prize (won by such luminaries as Yasser Arafat), the Nobel prizes in science are customarily awarded to people after the effects of their discoveries have had time to be felt. It’s not that it takes them a decade to notice that Mather and Smoot published some paper about the cosmic microwave background; it’s that they’re waiting to see if that discovery turns out to be an error or dead end, or whether it opens up a whole new field. Since Mather and Smoot’s work turned cosmology from a speculative theoretical field into a field in which quantitative predictions could be made and statistically tested, their work was recognized as extremely valuable by the physics community itself.
That’s not to say there aren’t foolish slips. As I understand it, Einstein won the Nobel prize not for his theories of relativity - they were too revolutionary and unsettling - but for his research on the photoelectric effect (which was important but seemed less likely to overturn the foundations of physics). Of course, Einstein’s work on the photoelectric effect led directly to quantum mechanics and its children, which were more revolutionary than his theories of relativity…