The Best Nobel Prize Winners in Physics of the 21st Century

Matin Durrani, writing in Physics World, analyzes the 25 Nobel Prizes awarded during the 21st century and selects those that he believes to be the five best. His criteria are based on looking for prizes that meet the following conditions:

·         It must be easy to understand.

·         The awarded theoretical or experimental work was an exceptional effort (a tour-de-force).

·         It opened new paths for science.

·         It was the result of an effort with long historical links.

·         It was awarded to well-known people.

·         It is of interest to non-physicists.

The five prizes selected are as follows, in order of importance:

1.      Detection of gravitational waves: 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics to Barry Barish, Kip Thorne, and Rainer Weiss for their 2015 discovery.

2.      The expansion of the universe is accelerating: 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics to Brian Schmidt, Adam Riess, and Saul Perlmutter for their 1998 discovery.

3.      Discovery of the Higgs boson: 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics to François Englert and Peter Higgs, the latter for having predicted the existence of the boson, which was detected in 2012, almost 60 years earlier.

4.      Creation of the first Bose-Einstein condensate: 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics to Eric Cornell, Wolfgang Ketterle, and Carl Wieman for confirming in 1995 the prediction made by Satyendra Nath  Bose and Albert Einstein in 1924.

5.      Neutrino Oscillation: 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics to Takaaki Kajita and Art McDonald for demonstrating in 1998 and 2001 that neutrinos oscillate between their three forms, which explained the mystery of the missing neutrinos in solar radiation.

My comments:

Durrani labels his second selection Discovery of Dark Energy. I disagree. Dark energy has not been discovered. It is a possible theoretical explanation for the fact that the universe is in accelerated expansion. The latter is what the laureates discovered. Some physicists and popularizers have a tendency to confuse the discovery of a phenomenon with a possible explanation, not yet confirmed, although the latter has been incorporated into the standard cosmological model.

In general, very recent discoveries have been awarded, with only 2, 13, 1, 6, and 14-17 years of delay, except in the case of Higgs, which received the prize 59 years after his prediction. Three of the discoveries, in fact, took place at the end of the 20th century.

Peter Higgs

I doubt that the winners (perhaps except for Higgs) were well known before receiving the prize, except among physicists. One of the discoveries was talked about quite a bit after it occurred (the accelerated expansion of the universe, which was a surprise), or in the other four cases even before they occurred. But I don't think the names of the winners were public knowledge, as Einstein was in his day.

As for the interest of the discoveries for non-physicists, I have my doubts. It's true that the mainstream press talked a lot about gravitational waves and the Higgs boson before their discovery, and that the accelerated expansion of the universe was widely discussed after their discovery, but I don't recall there being much press coverage of the other two shortlisted prizes, either before or after.

Finally, regarding the first point (ease of understanding), I think it applies especially to the second prize selected, but much less to the other four. 

The same post in Spanish

Thematic Thread about Science in General: Previous Next

Manuel Alfonseca