Scientists who never won a Nobel Prize

Empedocles (c. 490–430 BC) was the first to propose a theory of light, and claimed that light has a finite speed. In 1021, Alhazen (Ibn al-Haytham) published his Book of Optics, in which he presented a series of arguments dismissing Empedocles emission theory of vision in favour of the now accepted intromission theory, in which light moves from an object into the eye. This led Alhazen to propose that light must have a finite speed. Also in the 11th century, Ab Rayhn al-Brn agreed that light has a finite speed, and observed that the speed of light is much faster than the speed of sound. In the 13th century, Roger Bacon argued that the speed of light in air was not infinite, using philosophical arguments backed by the writing of Alhazen and Aristotle. In the 17 century, Pierre de Fermat also argued in support of a finite speed of light. In 1629, Isaac Beeckman proposed an experiment in which a person observes the flash of a cannon reflecting off a mirror about one mile (1.6 km) away. In 1638, Galileo Galilei proposed an experiment, with an apparent claim to having performed it some years earlier, to measure the speed of light by observing the delay between uncovering a lantern and its perception some distance away. He was unable to distinguish whether light travel was instantaneous or not, but concluded that if it were not, it must nevertheless be extraordinarily rapid. The first quantitative estimate of the speed of light was made in 1676 by Rømer. From the observation that the periods of Jupiter's innermost moon Io appeared to be shorter when the Earth was approaching Jupiter than when receding from it, Rømer concluded that light travels at a finite speed, and estimated that it takes light 22 minutes to cross the diameter of Earth's orbit. Christiaan Huygens combined this estimate with an estimate for the diameter of the Earth's orbit to obtain an estimate of speed of light of 220000 km/s, 26% lower than the actual value. In his 1704 book Opticks, Isaac Newton reported Rømer's calculations of the finite speed of light and gave a value of "seven or eight minutes" for the time taken for light to travel from the Sun to the Earth (the modern value is 8 minutes 19 seconds). Newton queried whether Rømer's eclipse shadows were coloured; hearing that they were not, he concluded the different colours travelled at the same speed. In 1729, James Bradley discovered stellar aberration, and from this effect he determined that light must travel 10210 times faster than the Earth in its orbit (the modern figure is 10066 times faster) or, equivalently, that it would take light 8 minutes 12 seconds to travel from the Sun to the Earth. In the 19th century Hippolyte Fizeau developed a method to determine the speed of light based on time-of-flight measurements on Earth and reported a value of 315000 km/s. His method was improved upon by Léon Foucault who obtained a value of 298000 km/s in 1862. In the year 1856, Wilhelm Eduard Weber and Rudolf Kohlrausch measured the ratio of the electromagnetic and electrostatic units of charge, 1/00, by discharging a Leyden jar, and found that its numerical value was very close to the speed of light as measured directly by Fizeau. The following year Gustav Kirchhoff calculated that an electric signal in a resistanceless wire travels along the wire at this speed. In the early 1860s, Maxwell showed that, according to the theory of electromagnetism he was working on, electromagnetic waves propagate in empty space at a speed equal to the above Weber/Kohlrausch ratio, and drawing attention to the numerical proximity of this value to the speed of light as measured by Fizeau, he proposed that light is in fact an electromagnetic wave. In 1865, James Clerk Maxwell had proposed that light was an electromagnetic wave, and therefore travelled at the speed c appearing in his theory of electromagnetism. The well-designed experiment performed by Albert A. Michelson and Edward W. Morley in 1887 failed to detect a luminiferous aether medium through which electromagnetic waves travelled. Essential to Einstein's theories, irregardless of still clinging to the notion of aether, and really because of the Michelson-Morley experiment, Hendrik Lorentz proposed that the motion of the apparatus through the aether may cause the apparatus to contract along its length in the direction of motion, and he further assumed, that the time variable for moving systems must also be changed accordingly ("local time"), which led to the formulation of the Lorentz transformation. Based on Lorentz's aether theory, Henri Poincaré (1900) showed that this local time (to first order in v/c) is indicated by clocks moving in the aether, which are synchronized under the assumption of constant light speed. In 1904, Poincaré speculated that the speed of light could be a limiting velocity in dynamics, provided that the assumptions of Lorentz's theory are all confirmed. In 1905, Poincaré brought Lorentz's aether theory into full observational agreement with the principle of relativity. To be clear, the modern origin of Relativity is rooted in Poincaré's work, and it's deeper origins first appears nearly 300 years earlier in the 1632 Galilean Invariance, aka Galileo's Theory of Relativity.

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It is well-known that Einstein was notoriously bad at mathematics. The sole reason for the decade of delay between his 1905 Special Theory of Relativity and his 1915 General Theory of Relativity is that Einstein did not have the mathematics to calculate the formulas. He needed some of the work done by Hermann Minkowski. By 1908 Minkowski realized that the special theory of relativity, introduced by his former student Albert Einstein in 1905 and based on the previous work of Lorentz and Poincaré, could best be understood in a four-dimensional space, since known as the "Minkowski spacetime," in which time and space are not separated entities but intermingled in a four-dimensional space–time, and in which the Lorentz geometry of special relativity can be effectively represented using the invariant interval x^2 + y^2 + z^2 -c^2*t^2. So even the notion of space-time was not Einstein's idea. Although Einstein is credited with finding the field equations for General Relativity, the German mathematician David Hilbert published them in an article before Einstein's article. This has resulted in accusations of plagiarism against Einstein, although not from Hilbert, and assertions that the field equations should be called the "Einstein–Hilbert field equations". However, Hilbert did not press his claim for priority.

Albert Einstein's friendship with Marcel Grossmann began with their school days in Zurich. Grossmann's careful and complete lecture notes at the Federal Polytechnic School proved to be a salvation for Einstein, who missed many lectures. Grossmann's father helped Einstein get his job at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern, and it was Grossmann who helped to conduct the negotiations to bring Einstein back from Prague as a professor of physics at the Zurich Polytechnic. Grossmann was an expert in differential geometry and tensor calculus; just the mathematical tools providing a proper mathematical framework for Einstein's work on gravity. Thus, it was natural that Einstein would enter into a scientific collaboration with Grossmann.

It was mathemetician Marcel Grossmann who emphasized the importance of a non-Euclidean geometry called Riemannian geometry (also elliptic geometry) to Einstein, which was a necessary step in the development of Einstein's general theory of relativity. Abraham Pais's book on Einstein suggests that Grossmann mentored Einstein in tensor theory as well. Grossmann introduced Einstein to the absolute differential calculus, started by Christoffel and fully developed by Ricci-Curbastro and Levi-Civita. Grossmann facilitated Einstein's unique synthesis of mathematical and theoretical physics in what is still today considered the most elegant and powerful theory of gravity: the general theory of relativity. The collaboration of Einstein and Grossmann led to a ground-breaking paper: "Outline of a Generalized Theory of Relativity and of a Theory of Gravitation," which was published in 1913 and was one of the two fundamental papers which established Einstein's theory of gravity.

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This same reasoning kind of applies to everyone on this list though. If they'd just lived longer a lot of them could have eventually won a prize.

I think the implicit argument this list is making is that it's not fair to exclude people just because they died. We are after all recognizing actual discoveries, which live on following the death of the discoverer. Many other awards are awarded posthumously and there's no good reason this one couldn't be either.

I'd add Emmy Noether to this list : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether

I will second “The Eighth Day of Creation” (which despite its cool title, has nothing to do with religion).

I can’t agree with your conclusion, though. It’s very clear she should have been awarded the prize, not Wilkins (who I think should not have received the prize even “in place of” Franklin). The book paints a picture of Wilkins not doing much more than management work and training Raymond Gosling (Franklin’s PhD student who did the actual work and probably should have won in her place, if not Chargaff or someone else).

Of course, the book also makes it very clear that John Randall told Wilkins one thing and Franklin something very different about their working relationship that caused their relationship to be very tense and Franklin to largely cut Wilkins out of her work. Why Randall did this and never clarified or why Wilkins or Franklin never sought clarification from him is unclear.