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Scientists who never won a Nobel Prize

wondersofphysics.com

11–20 of 110 posts

Re: Scientists who never won a Nobel Prize

#11

Sticking Hawking and Tesla in with Bose and Poincare is .... eccentric. It's not a popularity contest. Fun fact: one of Bose's grandsons worked as a bartender at Triple Rock in Berkeley for a while.

Yeah, I sort of felt the same. But everyone is going to disagree with another's list so.....

Re: Scientists who never won a Nobel Prize

#12

It is easy to look at this list and say gender and ethnicity played a role (which wouldn't be surprising particularly in that era). But five people on the list are white men. Physicists were more likely to be white men (at least in those times). So no matter what list you make of physicists, they will end up on that list. My point is, it is not possible to deduce any bias from such a list. For any coveted prize there…

> My point is, it is not possible to deduce any bias from such a list. Is it? In at least two (three?) of those cases the male colleagues were recognized with the Nobel prize and their female colleagues were not.

That's a good point.

Re: Scientists who never won a Nobel Prize

#13
Freeman Dyson is a glaring miss here.

Feynman and Schwinger shared the 1965 Nobel in Physics for their respective perspectives on Quantum Electrodynamics. But it was Dyson who unified Feynman's diagram approach with Schwinger's field model.

Re: Scientists who never won a Nobel Prize

#14
post #3

For me, the most notable absence is Gandhi for Nobel for peace.

He effectively won in 1948. They don't do posthumous awards, so they abstained from giving out the prize that year, stating directly that: "there was no suitable living candidate".

And he didn't get one a decade prior because he was reportedly a tad racist, giving other candidates the edge.

Re: Scientists who never won a Nobel Prize

#15
post #4

You wouldn't believe how proper, non-racist and balanced this comment was before being seized upon by a mob, half of whom have deleted their messages now. Lesson to fellow Europeans: Don't ever comment on anything that involves race. The Americans are going through something special at the moment and they're lashing out at pretty much anything. I wish I could delete this comment, but alas I can not.

> this Indian-run website says...

It looks like Vedang Sati is just a regular guy on the internet who happens to be of Indian origin and his pick of his favorite people don't show any obvious bias[0].

On the other hand, I shouldn't even be defending him. The implied bias/nationalism here is in poor taste. This is no different from saying

> this Jew-run website says...

[0] https://www.vedangsati.com/p/about-me.html

Re: Scientists who never won a Nobel Prize

#16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My point is, it is not possible to deduce any bias from such a list. Is it? In at least two (three?) of those cases the male colleagues were recognized with the Nobel prize and their female colleagues were not.

That's a good point.

[deleted]

Re: Scientists who never won a Nobel Prize

#17
post #4

You wouldn't believe how proper, non-racist and balanced this comment was before being seized upon by a mob, half of whom have deleted their messages now. Lesson to fellow Europeans: Don't ever comment on anything that involves race. The Americans are going through something special at the moment and they're lashing out at pretty much anything. I wish I could delete this comment, but alas I can not.

> this Indian-run website says... It looks like Vedang Sati is just a regular guy on the internet who happens to be of Indian origin and his pick of his favorite people don't show any obvious bias[0]. On the other hand, I shouldn't even be defending him. The implied bias/nationalism here is in poor taste. This is no different from saying > this Jew-run website says... [0] https://www.vedangsati.com/p/about-me.html

[deleted]

Re: Scientists who never won a Nobel Prize

#18
post #4

You wouldn't believe how proper, non-racist and balanced this comment was before being seized upon by a mob, half of whom have deleted their messages now. Lesson to fellow Europeans: Don't ever comment on anything that involves race. The Americans are going through something special at the moment and they're lashing out at pretty much anything. I wish I could delete this comment, but alas I can not.

[deleted]

Re: Scientists who never won a Nobel Prize

#19
Personally, I think the Nobel in Chemistry should have gone to Harry Noller (UCSC), who established that the core function of the ribosome is implemented by RNA, not proteins. After 20+ years of making his case and generally not being believed (even though he had excellent data), a competitor did a crystal structure proving him right and won the prize.

https://reports.news.ucsc.edu/breakthrough/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2009/10/08/nobel-committee-skips... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2821081/ https://blogs.sciencemag.org/books/2018/11/19/gene-machine/

Harry was my advisor and helped me start my career in computational biology back in the mid 90s. I asked him recently about the Nobel and he said it didn't bother him since one the Nobel was awarded, nobody ever doubted he was wrong about the ribosome again.

Re: Scientists who never won a Nobel Prize

#20
> Poincaré was nominated a record 51 times for the Nobel Prize but never won.

I feel Poincaré did a lot of good work in physics but he was not... a closer, I guess. He (along with other people) had the basics of relativity on their hands in the early 1900s, but for whatever reason it was Einstein who published the fully-formed conclusions of that whole collective process of exploration.

Poincaré did a lot of great work in math. I think of him as primarily a mathematician.

> Tesla

Great engineer, but I don't see how he belongs here.

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