The Big Winner Was All of Science
U.S. scientists won big in this year’s Nobel prizes, garnering six of the nine awards recognizing discoveries in natural science. Scientists at UC Santa Barbara led the academic pack, winning prizes in both chemistry and physics.
As usual, the fact that most of this year’s science prizes went to researchers at well-funded U.S. universities inspired grousing from various groups of scientists who felt shut out.
Perhaps the most credible complaint came from physicists who excoriated the Royal Swedish Academy on Tuesday for again denying the Nobel Prize in physics to Stephen Hawking, who is widely respected for his current, brilliant theories about how the universe and black holes formed--and who has struggled for years with a progressive, paralyzing illness.
Hawking is understood to have been ruled out because his work is deemed to be purely theoretical and remains unproven. The dispute underscores an enduring dilemma for members of the academy: whether to award theorists whose work has been verified experimentally and widely accepted, or whether to also recognize cutting-edge research conducted by living scientists that has inspired a discipline, even if it may later be proved wrong.
The controversy over Hawking aside, this year’s prizes went a long way toward recognizing just the sort of scientists who have historically felt rebuffed by the academy.
For example, engineers have long complained that the Nobel prizes slight their hands-on field in favor of more imposing Ivory Tower disciplines like physics; that’s why they created the biennial Draper Prize in 1988, now worth $500,000. But on Tuesday, engineers were roundly hailing the academy’s decision to give a physics prize to UC Santa Barbara engineer Herbert Kroemer, who figured out how an ultra-fast transistor could guide laser light in CD players and bar-code readers.
Kroemer shared the award with Zhores Alferov, a Russian scientist who developed the transistor’s technology in St. Petersburg. Alferov’s recognition pleased Russian scientists, who have increasingly complained that the academy has overlooked their impoverished labs in favor of well-equipped ones in the West.
Finally, all of this year’s Nobel prizes in natural science recognized academics whose work spans many different disciplines, showing that the academy is not, as critics have charged, biased toward those whose research is limited to one single, well-accepted discipline. UC Santa Barbara’s Alan Heeger, who won a chemistry prize for developing a kind of plastic that could create everything from better solar panels to paper-thin television screens, even said he will use his share of the prize money to support the interdisciplinary collaboration between natural scientists that, as he rightly says, is key to scientific discovery.
