"The Nobel Prize Is Really Annoying"
Writing on his blog, Preposterous Universe, theoretical physicist Sean Carroll gets something off his chest about an often-discussed problem with the Nobel Prize - namely that the tradition of awarding it to a maximum of three people is just no decent reflection of modern science.
The most annoying of all the annoying aspects is, of course, the rule in physics (and the other non-peace prizes, I think) that the prize can go to at most three people. This is utterly artificial, and completely at odds with the way science is actually done these days. In my book I spread credit for the Higgs mechanism among no fewer than seven people: Philip Anderson, Francois Englert, Robert Brout (who is now deceased), Peter Higgs, Gerald Guralnik, Carl Hagen, and Tom Kibble. In a sensible world they would share the credit, but in our world we have endless pointless debates (the betting money right now seems to be pointing toward Englert and Higgs, but who knows). As far as I can tell, the “no more than three winners†rule isn’t actually written down in Nobel’s will, it’s more of a tradition that has grown up over the years. It’s kind of like the government shutdown: we made up some rules, and are now suffering because of them.
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The worst thing about the prizes is that people become obsessed with them â€" both the scientists who want to win, and the media who write about the winners. What really matters, or should matter, is finding something new and fundamental about how nature works, either through a theoretical idea or an experimental discovery. Prizes are just the recognition thereof, not the actual point of the exercise.
Fabiola Gianotti, the particle physicist who was head of the Atlas collaboration at Cern when the Higgs boson discovery was announced last year, spoke to the Guardian's Ian Sample about the Nobel win for Peter Higgs and Francois Englert. We'll have more on this (and the other Nobel Prizes too) in next week's podcast.
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Science isn't just about lone geniuses
Prof Jon Butterworth, head of physics at UCL and a member of the Atlas experiment at the LHC, sends his congratulations to Peter Higgs and François Englert …
But (and there is a "but") prizes only give one view of how science is done. They encourage the idea that the typical manner of progress in science is the breakthrough of a lone genius. In reality, while lone geniuses and breakthroughs do occur, incremental progress and collaboration are more important in increasing our understanding of nature. Even the theory breakthrough behind this prize required a body of incrementally acquired knowledge to which many contributed.
The discovery of a Higgs boson, showing that the theoretical ideas are manifested in the real world, was thanks to the work of many thousands. There are 3,000 or so people on Atlas, a similar number on CMS, and hundreds who worked on the LHC. While the citation gives handsome credit for all this, part of me still wishes the prizes could have acknowledged it too.
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Congratulations for the many British scientists also involved in finding the boson
Particle physicist Professor John Womersley, who heads up the UK's Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), paid homage to the scientists at Cern, who built and operated the Large Hadron Collider, partly in order to find the Higgs boson. A total of 19 research groups in the UK were involved in the work.
I'm extremely proud that this huge honour has been given to Peter Higgs and François Englert for their work in predicting the existence of the Higgs boson. Today is a celebration of their genius, and it's something everyone in the UK can share in.
It took several decades and the construction of the world's largest science experiment to prove them right â€" and that investment didn't just teach us something new about the universe, it transformed our everyday lives. Particle physics has brought us the World Wide Web, touchscreens, superconducting magnets and medical imaging detectors, and it's an area of science where the UK is world-leading. STFC congratulates the winners of this well-deserved award, together with all of the scientists, engineers and industry partners involved in the worldwide collaborations that confirmed that their insight was correct.
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Science minister David Willetts has weighed in with his congratulations for Higgs and Englert.
I congratulate Professor Peter Higgs on his Nobel prize. Higgs’s contribution to scientific discovery in the UK is enormous. Our Nobel laureate thoroughly deserves this prestigious award.
We should also celebrate the efforts of the thousands of scientists and engineers all over the world who have worked on the Large Hadron Collider and the long search for the Higgs boson.
This is the 23rd Nobel Prize for Physics to come to the UK â€" we should all be very proud of this wonderful achievement. It’s an incredible endorsement of the quality of UK science.
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Peter Higgs statement
In a statement released through Edinburgh University, where Peter Higgs, 84, is an emeritus professor, he said:
I am overwhelmed to receive this award and thank the Royal Swedish Academy. I would also like to congratulate all those who have contributed to the discovery of this new particle and to thank my family, friends and colleagues for their support. I hope this recognition of fundamental science will help raise awareness of the value of blue-sky research.
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Professor Tom Kibble reacts
In 1964 Professor Tom Kibble developed the theory of the mass-giving field, which later became known as the Higgs field, just a month after Peter Higgs and François Englert. Kibble was widely tipped to be one of the
I am glad to see that the Swedish Academy has recognised the importance of the mass-generating mechanism for gauge theories and the prediction of the Higgs boson, recently verified at Cern.
My two collaborators, Gerald Guralnik and Carl Richard Hagen, and I contributed to that discovery, but our paper was unquestionably the last of the three to be published in Physical Review Letters in 1964 (though we naturally regard our treatment as the most thorough and complete) and it is therefore no surprise that the Swedish Academy felt unable to include us, constrained as they are by a self-imposed rule that the prize cannot be shared by more than three people.
My sincere congratulations go to the two prizewinners, François Englert and Peter Higgs. A sad omission from the list was Englert’s collaborator Robert Brout, now deceased.
Read our profile of the brilliant Prof Kibble.
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Reaction from Peter Higgs' colleagues in Edinburgh
Alan Walker at Edinburgh University's Higgs Centre for Theoretical Physics says of the announcement:
A huge cheer went up. The delay was tantalising. The forecast was correct, but we had no indication. I have tears in my eyes.
Peter has had a bout of bronchitis and then had a nasty fall outside his house. He looked as though he'd been mugged. The pressure was so much he decided to go on holiday without a phone to avoid the media storm. He's not available and good for him. He didn't tell even me.
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The UK Prime Minister congratulates Peter Higgs (what, no François Englert too?)
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Ben Allanach, a theoretical physicist at the University of Cambridge, says:
This is the recognition of a triumph for fundamental physics that will stay in the history books for millennia to come. I am thrilled about the prize, and Englert and Higgs both deserve it well. I cannot over-stress the importance of the discovery. The mass mechanism that the Higgs boson is a signal for has had a huge impact on particle physics over the last 50 years. I think many of us felt that it had to be correct, although we were willing to let data dissuade us.
Congratulations to Francois and to Peter!
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Full citation from Nobel committee
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2013 was awarded jointly to François Englert and Peter W Higgs "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the Atlas and CMS experiments at Cern's Large Hadron Collider".
François Englert, Belgian citizen. Born 1932 in Etterbeek, Belgium. PhD 1959 from Universite Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium. Professor Emeritus at Universite Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium.
Peter W Higgs, UK citizen. Born 1929 in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. PhD 1954 from King’s College, University of London, UK. Professor emeritus at University of Edinburgh, UK.
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Winners announced
The 2013 physics Nobel Prize goes to Peter Higgs and François Englert. Congratulations to them both.
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Live from Stockholm
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Further delay
The Nobel organisers have reset the countdown clock once again â€" an announcement is now expected around 11.45 BST (12.45 CET).
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Cern physicist and Guardian blogger Jon Butterworth is with the Atlas team in Morocco. They drink their tea sweet there â€" good for stress.
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Missed call from Sweden?
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Thank you for the music (not)
While we wait for the announcement this morning, let's consider the music choices for the live video feed. Alternating between "heartbreaking" piano and "romantic-comedy" folk guitar, surely the world's most prestigious scientific prizes should come with better hold music? Your suggestions please!
Here's a couple already...
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The announcement is now expected at 11.30 BST (12.30 CET).
Media on tenterhooks
The Higgs boson explained
While we’re waiting, it’s time to bring back Ian Sample’s fabulous explanation (using nothing but Blue Peter equipment) of what the Higgs field is and how its associated boson does its thing.
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Announcement delayed
Mia Shanley, a Reuters correspondent in Sweden, says the announcement will be delayed by 30 minutes (so that's 11.15 BST, 12.15 CET).
Livestream from Stockholm
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A physicist writes...
Guardian blogger and Cern physicist Jon Butterworth has sent in his prediction/wish for today's prize.
It should be Higgs, Englert and Cern. Nobel prizes are for discovery, Higgs and Englert discovered the theory, Cern (many people) discovered the reality. If the Nobel Committee decide to stick to their arbitrary precedent of not awarding the prize to collaborations, they are just denying how great science (sometimes) works.
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The other runners and riders
To quote Ken Peach, an Oxford physics professor, it would be “a scandal†if Higgs (and his colleagues) were not honoured this year. But what else is on the slate?
Predictions from Thomson Reuters (who examines these things by looking at citations to important papers in the scientific literature) reckon that Hideo Hosono of the Materials Research Center for Element Strategy, at the Tokyo Institute of Technology might be honoured for his discovery of iron-based superconductors.
Alternately, the Thomson Reuters predictions include Geoffrey W. Marcy of University of California, Berkeley, Michel Mayor of the University of Geneva and Didier Queloz of the University of Cambridge - for their discoveries of the first exoplanets.
I say this every year and I’m going to repeat myself because I think he really should win some time soon: another possibility is John Pendry at Imperial College London, for his theoretical work on metamaterials (invisibility cloaks to you and me). Not only because he thought up an entire new field of physics but he's also a wonderful chap.
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The most anticipated Nobel announcement for a long, long time...
This is the second Nobel Prize of 2013 and, let’s face it, the most eagerly awaited prize announcement for some time. Has so much ever been written by so many before the award of a prize for physics? The stand-out prediction for this year's Nobel has to be an award for last year’s completion of the Standard Model of particle physics, with the disovery at Cern that the Higgs field is indeed real. But who gets the prize for that?
Theoretical physicists François Englert and Peter Higgs are the clear favourites. Englert was first to publish the idea, in 1964, of a field that interacted with fundamental particles and gave them mass; Higgs was the first to point out, merely a few weeks later, the potential existence of the eponymous boson. There are others who did similar work at around the same time, including Tom Kibble, Gerald Guralnik and Carl Richard Hagen. But the prize can only be split a maximum of three ways. Never mind the many thousands of deserving scientists who designed, built and carried out experiments at Cern's Large Hadron Collider.
In case you need a quick reminder of the situation, read my colleague Ian Sample’s many, many guides to the headache being faced by the Nobel committee when it comes to the Higgs discovery.
The committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences will put us all out of our misery some time after 10:45am (BST). Watch this space.
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The 2012 winners
Serge Haroche, a professor at the Collège de France and Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, and David J Wineland of the US National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado, Boulder, won last year's physics prize. The citation from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said they won “for groundbreaking experimental methods that enable measuring and manipulation of individual quantum systemsâ€.
They worked out a way to trap, manipulate and study the fundamental particles of light and matter without destroying them. Their work is a crucial step towards building superfast quantum computers and could lead to ways of measuring time with a hundred times greater precision than is possible using atomic clocks. To prevent yourself from biting your nails clean off while waiting for the 2013 announcement, why not re-live the excitement of last year’s prize announcement here while you wait?
The last time the prize went to scientists working in the UK was in 2010, when Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, both based at the University of Manchester, won the physics prize for their “groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material grapheneâ€.
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Peter Higgs and his boson explained
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The legacy of the physics Nobel
Thanks to the lavish Nobel Prize website, you can read all about the history of the physics prize. It has been awarded since 1901 and winners have included some of the most famous scientists of all time, such as Max Planck, Marie Curie, Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger, Richard Feynman and, leading the fame pack, Albert Einstein. Not a bad group of people to be immortalised alongside.
A total of 106 physics prizes have been awarded since their inception and 47 prizes have gone to single recipients. Only two women (Maria Goeppert Mayer and Marie Curie) have ever been awarded this prize and only one person (John Bardeen) has been awarded the prize twice. The youngest laureate ever was 25-year-old Lawrence Bragg, who was awarded the Nobel, together with his father, Sir William Henry Bragg, in 1915.
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