Nobel Prize in Physics, in case you hadn't heard, went to Kao for Fiber Optics and Boyle and Smith for developing the fundamental CCD technology.
Some people, naming no names, seem a little unhappy about this.
Well, ol' Alfred had his purpose when he endowed the Nobel Foundation with his ill gotten gains, and such things are somewhat binding.
Further, pushing the Swedish Academy on these things, to do the "right thing" and give the Prize to one of your pet subfields, however more "fundamental" it may be, tends to backfire.
Think of the Academy as a very proper and very small club, about equal measure of Norwegian Bachelor Farmers, and Herr Doktor Professors in the best German tradition.
Stubborn lot, and very, very proper.
So, here is the deal:
The prizes for physics and chemistry shall be awarded by the Swedish Academy of Sciences; that for physiological or medical work by the Caroline Institute in Stockholm; that for literature by the Academy in Stockholm, and that for champions of peace by a committee of five persons to be elected by the Norwegian Storting.
It is my express wish that in awarding the prizes no consideration whatever shall be given to the nationality of the candidates, but that the most worthy shall receive the prize, whether he be a Scandinavian or not.
Note that one major divergence from the original intent of the Prize, is the effective abandonment of the "...during the preceding year..." bit.
A year is too little time to make a rational judgement on whether a discovery or invention is really important. This was figured out fairly early on.
Very occasionally the discovery is clear enough, but it is rare, and early missteps lead to the Academy giving discoveries a decade or few to show their lasting importance.
The Academy also, fairly quickly, figured out that the "Scandinavian OR NOT" part was important.
The Prize is not intended for "lifetime achievement", or even "most cited" discovery.
Nor is there a condition of "fundamental importance", if anything the bias is towards practical discoveries or inventions.
In theory anyway.
A look at the list of awards (yes, I'm a physicist...), shows, in fact, a lot of prizes awarded for inventions that provide "enabling technologies", and a fair amount of "metric" prizes - improvement in metrology in some sense.
Theory and fundamental prediction prizes are relatively rare, though discoveries of innovative properties of nature did get a good rash of prizes. All that quantum stuff back in the mid-20thC, dontcha know.
Of course that makes the fundamental theory prizes just that much better!
Oh, and fellow SciBling, James Hrynshyn wants the Nobel Prizes used to leverage the cause du jour - adding or expanding prizes to cover environment and push climate change issues.
BAD IDEA.
You don't get to do that - the Foundation has a charter and some associated legal obligations, they are not free to do whatever, though clearly they can, and have, timed and angled prizes in particular fields to make Statements.
But they can't add prizes. They can't change the field of award for a prize.
Alfred made his choices, and with Arrhenius a close contemporary and winner of the Nobel Prize in chemistry!, it is not like Alfred didn't know of the issue!
It is possible to found new, large, independent prizes for other fields, you can even affiliate them with the original Nobels, like the Bank of Sweden did for economics.
If you ask nicely, maybe.
If they'll let anyone ever do that again...
Then you just have to pick mostly very good scientists for a few decades, with as little bias or trend chasing as you can structurally manage, to cement the reputation of these prizes to give them the gravitas and public profile of the Nobel.
- note that some of the early Nobel Prizes were for work of, shall we say, less than lasting significance.
PS: a Pet Peeve:
The Internet has nothing to do with fiber optics.
Fiber optics happens to be a good way to get very large bandwidth, including IP traffic.
But the structure if the Internet Protocols and Transmission Control Protocols are completely independent of the use of fiber optics, and almost independent of the transmission medium in general - you can use passenger pigeons, or graduate students in jeans and sneakers, or microwaves, or semaphores, or smoke signals and tree bark.
This is not an "internet" Nobel Prize. At all.
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Could Verizon's advertising campaign be so clever (or already so effective) as to get all the news writers in the world to equate fiber optics with the internet?
Hear! Hear!
This whining is getting annoying. There's a stench of ... entitlement to those demands. As I just said elsewhere - and as you said much more eloquently - stop crying and do the work your bloody self!
The Fields Medal seems to be doing its job admirably. It's not the Nobel Foundation's fault that other prizes can't do proper publicity for themselves.
Economics?
@ryano - don't recall the Verizon ads.
But then M$ managed to persuade much of the public that they invented e-mail and "the Net"...
The Internet has some weaknesses, but cutting fiber is not one of them - and even major domain server losses ought to be self-repairing on a time scale of hours-to-days.
If images and sound are stripped, even very narrow bandwidth can route almost all interesting information in anything short of a topologically disconnected network with only local dynamic routing.
@confused - the Economics Prize is In Memory of Alfred Nobel and is funded by the Swedish Central Bank, not the Nobel Foundation.
They essentially persuaded the Swedish Academy to celebrate the occasion jointly.
The Nobelprize.org website carefully distinguishes the Economics Prize - even in name.
It is possible to found new, large, independent prizes for other fields, you can even affiliate them with the original Nobels, like the Bank of Sweden did for economics.
Ah but it's not about the independent prizes, but the marketing. Everyone wants space on the Nobel bandwagon because it's pre-hyped.
If the academic world wanted a say in the "biggest" prize around they should have known better than to hype up something voted on by an opaque Scandinavian committee rather than giving themselves the vote.
For tips on self-congratulation see Oscars and college football. Any actor turned director must get the community vote and any retiring Nebraska coach must be handed a championship by fellow coaches.
Griping notwithstanding the science Nobels do by and large do good job picking out some fine achievements. For politicized rubbish wait for the peace and to some extent literature prizes.
They will alert us to more peace loving central American dictators, coup loving Secretaries of State, and gun loving middle Eastern leaders I am sure. It's a good thing they never promoted that violent Gandhi fellow either. Mentioning him would have raised some uncomfortable questions about what some European countries were up to in their colonies.
Well, India just got a chemistry Nobel!
As for Gandhi - the 1948 Peace Prize was withheld, for a reason, I suspect. At least they didn't give to Mountbatten...
The Swedish Academy is not opaque - neither the regular one nor the Science one - in 1900 the Norwegian Academy would have been obscure and opaque... but at the time the fellows would have been well known within the German, French and UK Science communities.
The reason the Prize became so prestigious is very simple: the amount of money was, and is, quite large.
The notion that Poor Old Alfred's will is inviolable is bunk. The economics prize (as dubious as it is) isn't an "official" Nobel prize, but there it is, attracting lots of attention solely because it's got the Nobel name attached.
Without question, WE CAN add new categories in the same manner. I don't think we disagree on this. So what's the problem?
Besides, what's more important: taking advantage of the cachet that comes with the Nobel name to promote science and policy associated with the most pressing challenge of our time, or pretending one of several lesser-known prizes are up to the task? We all know they aren't, regardless of whether they deserve to be.
Nobel prizes get the attention. There simply isn't a way around that fact.
Well, ultimately it is up to the Norwegian and Swedish legal systems - charitable foundations are not unrestricted in repurposing.
As for the Economics Prize, it is discussed extensively right here: the money is endowed separately by a different institution - It Is Not From The Nobel Foundation!
It is NOT listed as a Nobel Prize - it is a Prize in the Memory of Nobel.
The smart thing was the Swedish Bank getting the Academy on board and letting them share publicity, announcing it concurrently and having a joint award dinner.
It is quite possible that if someone comes up with $50-100 million for an endowment for an Environmental Prize In the Memory of ... or other equivalent, that the Foundation would go along. Or not.
But they are not going to hand over the money or take it from another Prize.
Then you also need to get people to come to some agreement on what the most pressing problems are...
Oh I was hardly making a Gandhi or India specific comment. But since you bring up 1948 I will note that Gandhi was 78 at the time. It's not like he was unknown, or overly aggressive before then... If they couldn't possibly give him the prize before the Brits left what does that say about it being a "peace" prize? The Nobel Committee is well aware that it blew it and has been doing a lot of backside covering since then to explain it along the lines you quote.
For what it's worth the one Indian peace prize winner, Mother Teresa, was very controversial in India, and especially so in Calcutta (Kolkata). And note how
Solzhenitsyn fell off the radar completely once the cold war point scoring ended. Surely the only worthwhile Chinese literature is not that penned by dissidents living in France.
The science Nobels have generally worked well but for most other things it is a pretty narrow, opaque committee for a worldwide prize. Any Environmental prize for example will likely be driven largely by politics.
The Nobel prizes shouldn't be seen as some sort of canonical "best of the best" credential, they're just a prize, only with extraordinarily good press.
I guess you could add prizes to join in on the name recognition, but I think we're already running into the limits of the general attention span---I know plenty of people who refer to the "Nobel Peace Prize in Physics" which represents a certain level of confusion. Add a few more, and it might start meaning nothing at all to many.
As a postscript, the Nobel Foundation has a substantial discussion online about why Gandhi did not get the Peace Prize and the circumstances of his nomination, and the Eurocentric process of the early years.
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/articles/gandhi/index.html
Eurocentric in the early years? Only? Do you think Obama would have been named if this were awarded anywhere other than Europe? Okay Kenya excepted.
Was well aware of that link and is precisely what I meant by their attempted backside covering. The funny thing is that Gandhi is hardly seen as an unblemished hero in India and is often blamed for creating a variety of problems. Pretty ambivalent myself. Objectively though not a bad choice for Peace wouldn't you say? Realistically as for Obama it really would have little effect on his reputation. The Nobels needed him more than he needed it.