This is a small and quaint group that has piqued my interest for some time. Of course, it is not a total surprise when a physicist is awarded the Nobel for chemistry. For one thing, physicists have won Nobels in various other categories [Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins (structure of DNA), Max Delbruck (genetics), Allan Cormack (CT scanning) and Peter Mansfield (MRI), all for Physiology and Medicine; Philip Dybvig for Economics; Joseph Rotblat and Andrei Sakharov for Peace; Alexander Solzhenitsyn for Literature]. Also, it is well known that physics has some nontrivial overlap with chemistry, witnessed by the disciplines of physical chemistry and chemical physics. Nonetheless, going just by the numbers, it is still a little bit unusual for a physicist to be awarded the chemistry Nobel.
Let's look at the exceptions that proved the rule:
Ernest Rutherford (1908) This is probably the most ironic case, considering that i) Rutherford famously said 'all science is either physics or stamp collecting' and ii) he avoided chemistry in school. In his defense, he was nominated more often for the Physics Nobel than for Chemistry. But he finally won in Chemistry for his investigations of radioactivity. Considering the topic of the work, the Chemistry prize was perhaps not surprising: Rutherford basically performed experiments on the transmutation of one element into another.
Marie Curie (1911) Surely one of the all time greats, the first person to win two Nobel prizes and the only person to win them in two different scientific fields (Physics and Chemistry). She shared her Physics prize with two other people (Henri Becquerel and her husband Pierre); but she did not share her Chemistry prize - awarded for the discovery of radium and polonium - with anybody.
Lars Onsager (1968) An astonishingly versatile theoretician who made world-class contributions in a number of areas. His exact solution of the two-dimensional Ising model is famous as a mathematical tour-de-force and was said by Pauli to be the only thing of consequence in theoretical physics that was accomplished during the second World War. His ideas on turbulence continue to guide that field of study. Any physicist would be happy with his resume thus far. But he made deeply original contributions to chemistry as well: to thermal diffusion, colloids, and electrolytes, for example. He was awarded the Chemistry Nobel for his work on the thermodynamics of irreversible processes, the same work that had earlier been considered inadmissible for earning him a PhD!
Walter Kohn (1998) A theoretical physicist, who had never had a course in chemistry, his work on density functional theory laid the ground for much of modern chemistry as well as solid state physics. Check out this interview: there is a hilarious story around 17:16 where he recounts walking around on campus the day after his prize was announced. Two students recognize him as a Chemistry Nobel laureate and want to ask him questions about their upcoming Chemistry exam. This makes him very nervous. To learn what follows, you need to view the clip.
Alan Heeger (2000) A physicist who was dissuaded from doing pure theory, and a first generation PhD from his family, he worked closely with experiment and discovered conductive polymers leading to topological insulators - materials which are insulating inside their bulk and conducting on their surface - these are a hot topic in physics currently.
Venki Ramakrishnan (2009) An amazing story, this one. As a high school student he took and failed the Joint Entrance Exam to the prestigious and highly competitive Indian Institutes of Technology. Undeterred, he joined the University of Baroda, and proceeded to receive a PhD in theoretical solid state physics from Ohio University. Then he spent two years studying biology as a graduate student at UC San Diego, eventually transitioning full time to chemistry with a postdoctoral position at Yale. Here he began working on the structure of ribosomes, a subject which led him to the Chemistry Nobel many years later.
Eric Betzig, Stefan Hell and William Moerner (2014) - all three of them physicists! They won the Chemistry Nobel for devising a super-improved form of microscopy. Each of their stories is remarkable; Betzig was an unemployed house husband for a while, for example. To learn more, please follow the links.
I'm curious to see if the number of cross- subject Nobels will increase in the coming years, as many interesting and important interdisciplinary problems in science are now being tackled as priorities.
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