Czernobog
Gold Member
I don't normally post in the Science forum, but this story rather caught my attention.
The Absurdity of the Nobel Prizes in Science
Now, the method for choosing the recipient of the Nobel Prize is, to some degree, set forth in the Will of Alfred Nobel:
The problem is that the Prize Committee has already played a little loose with that restriction:
The linked article makes an excellent case for the problems with how the prize is currently awarded, and I would highly recommend reading it. So, what do you guys think? Should the Nobel Prize change how it is awarded to more accurately portray how scientific discoveries are made?
The Absurdity of the Nobel Prizes in Science
The wider problem, beyond who should have received the prize and who should not, is that the Nobels reward individuals—three at most, for each of the scientific prizes, in any given year. And modern science, as Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus write in Stat, is “the teamiest of team sports.” Yes, researchers sometimes make solo breakthroughs, but that’s increasingly rare. Even within a single research group, a platoon of postdocs, students, and technicians will typically be involved in a discovery that gets hitched to a single investigator’s name. And more often than not, many groups collaborate on a single project. The paper in which the LIGO team announced their discovery has an author list that runs to three pages. Another recent paper, which precisely estimated the mass of the elusive Higgs boson, has 5,154 authors.
Now, the method for choosing the recipient of the Nobel Prize is, to some degree, set forth in the Will of Alfred Nobel:
Defenders of the prize note that the Nobel committee is bound to the conditions laid out in Alfred Nobel’s will—the document that established the awards. But the will calls for the recognition of “the person”—singular—who has made the important discovery in their respective field “during the preceding year.”
The problem is that the Prize Committee has already played a little loose with that restriction:
The Nobel committee, by contrast, recognizes up to three people, for work that could have been done decades prior. If they are already bending the original rules, why not go further? As the editors of Scientific American suggested in 2012, why not award the scientific prizes to teams and organizations, just like the Peace Prize can be?
The linked article makes an excellent case for the problems with how the prize is currently awarded, and I would highly recommend reading it. So, what do you guys think? Should the Nobel Prize change how it is awarded to more accurately portray how scientific discoveries are made?