Anticipating the Nobel Prize

It's almost that time of the year again - the Nobel prizes will be announced 7-14 October (the physics prize on October 8)!! In anticipation, and to build the mood, I will post some of my favorite stories about anticipating the Nobel prize.

i) Raman: My favorite story is about the case of the Indian physicist C. V. Raman, who was awarded the Nobel prize for Physics in 1930. Always an ebullient person, Raman had been so confident of winning the Nobel that year, he had booked tickets on the ship to Stockholm for the December 10 (Nobel's birthday) ceremony several months in advance (the tickets would have probably sold out if he had waited for the October announcement of the prize).

ii) Phillips: The day before the awards were announced for 1997, William Phillips, a researcher from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, was attending a conference on atomic physics on the west coast of the United States. That evening, after the presentations were over, some colleagues and he met and were discussing physics. The topic of the Nobel prizes arose naturally and everyone, including Bill, gave out their guesses for the probable winners. No one mentioned Bill as a possibility. The next day he received a call from Sweden.

iii) Venki: Venki Ramakrishnan had discovered the atomic structure of the ribosome in a close race with other competitors. After their results were published, a sort of jockeying started, where everyone would try to attend an annual conference in Stockholm to, in effect, present their best case to the relevant members of the Swedish Academy of Sciences (who would be in the audience among other people).

During one of these conferences, after his talk, Venki, who does not mince words, got embroiled in a heated argument about his work with one of the Academy members, and they had to be separated by a third party. He thought he had pretty much blown his chances of getting the Nobel as this member was a key person on the selection committee. But eventually the call came from Stockholm, and Venki later acknowledged the ability of the member to put his personal opinions aside in making the judgement.

iv) Hansch: I consider Theodor Hansch to be one of the giants of our field and one of the most creative scientists alive. After he was awarded the Nobel, shared with Jan Hall and Roy Glauber, they were interviewed together. One question that the interviewer asked all of them was if they had anticipated receiving the Nobel. Both Hall and Glauber said it was a surprise to them.

I found Hansch's answer revealing. He said - and I believe with the complete modesty so typical of him - that since his postdoctoral advisor (Art Schawlow) had received the Nobel (in 1981) for work that they had done together, he thought he was not that far from doing that type of research (talk about anticipation). He added that of course the reason for doing science was not winning prizes, but discovering new things and understanding nature.

Bonus

This is a story that a German scientist (not a Nobel laureate, but see below) told me. He was the founding director of one of the big institutes in Germany, and had just retired when I met him. He said when he had started his career he had hoped that the retirement age (around 65) in Germany would be removed (as it had been in the US) by the time his retirement came around. It was not.

In an effort to prolong his career, he called up the local politician to see there were any options for staving off retirement. Not wanting to say no directly, the politician said he would have no problem extending the appointment if he got a call from Stockholm about the scientist in question. 'And that was when,' the ex-director joked, 'I made the biggest mistake of my life. The politician never said he wanted the call to be about the Nobel prize. I have lots of friends in Stockholm who could have made that call for me!'