Nobel Prize in Physics

• 1. Introduction

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  The Nobel Prize in Physics went, for the first time in 1901, to the German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen, honored for his discovery of X-rays. Since then the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has handed the award to 229 people. The prize's own language honors "the most outstanding contributions to mankind" in physics. It sits alongside four other prizes that Alfred Nobel created in his will. The others are the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Nobel Peace Prize, and the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Every laureate leaves the ceremony with a medal, a diploma, and a certificate for a cash award. Each of those objects carries its own history of design and value. How did a will written by one industrialist survive enough doubt to fund the prizes it promised? Why does the physics committee keep its shortlists secret for so long? And why do some of the most important discoveries in the field wait years, sometimes decades, before anyone recognizes them?

• 2. The Will Behind The Prize

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  Alfred Nobel signed his final will at the Swedish-Norwegian Club in Paris on the 27th of November 1895, a year before his death. In it he directed that his fortune should fund prizes for whoever conferred the "greatest benefit on mankind." He had drafted several earlier wills, but this last one committed 94 percent of his total assets, 31 million Swedish kronor, to the project. Norwegian lawmakers did not rush to accept it. Only on the 26th of April 1897 did the Storting approve the will, after considerable skepticism about whether it would hold. Ragnar Sohlman and Rudolf Lilljequist, named as executors, formed the Nobel Foundation to manage the fortune and organize the prizes. The Norwegian Nobel Committee, tasked with the Peace Prize, was seated soon afterward. The other award-granting bodies followed within days of one another. Karolinska Institutet acted on the 7th of June and the Swedish Academy on the 9th of June. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the body that would choose the physics laureates, followed on the 11th of June. By 1900 King Oscar II had signed off on the Foundation's new statutes. That signature cleared the way for the Academy to begin choosing physics laureates under its own rules.

• 3. A Confidential Vote

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  No more than three scientists, sharing credit for at most two separate discoveries, can receive the physics prize in a single year. The Nobel Committee for Physics, five members elected by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, runs the process that decides who qualifies. Each September the committee mails confidential nomination forms to roughly 3,000 people, a mix of university professors and past Nobel Laureates in Physics and Chemistry. Completed forms must reach the committee by the 31st of January of the following year. From that pool, experts scrutinize the nominees and narrow the list to about fifteen names. The committee then reports its recommendations to the Academy's Physics Class for further discussion, and the full Academy makes the final choice by majority vote. None of this happens in public. Nominees are never told they were considered, and the nomination records stay sealed for fifty years. Posthumous nominations are barred outright, though a laureate who dies between the committee's typical October decision and the December ceremony can still receive the award. Before 1974, the rule was looser still: a nominee who died after being nominated could be awarded posthumously. That earlier exception mattered because the rules also demand that a discovery prove its worth well before any committee ever votes on it.

• 4. Tested By Time

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  The prize's own rules require that an achievement be "tested by time" before it qualifies. In practice, the gap between a discovery and its prize can stretch to twenty years or more. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar received half of the 1983 physics prize for work on stellar structure and evolution. He had completed that work in the 1930s, decades before the ceremony honored it. Not every physicist survives long enough to see that gap close. Some major discoveries are simply never awarded, because the person who made them has died before anyone recognized the impact. The medal every laureate takes home carries symbols chosen deliberately, starting with a goddess engraved on its reverse side.

• 5. The Face Of Isis

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  Erik Lindberg designed the Nobel Prize in Physics medal, and Svenska Medalj in Eskilstuna still manufactures it. Its obverse carries the same profile of Alfred Nobel used on the medals for Chemistry and Literature. The reverse is different. It is identical to the Chemistry medal, showing the Goddess of Nature in the form of Isis, emerging from clouds and holding a cornucopia. Beside her, the Genius of Science lifts the veil covering Nature's "cold and austere face." Around the figures runs a Latin phrase, "Inventas vitam iuvat excoluisse per artes." It means, roughly, that it is beneficial to have improved human life through discovered arts. The line adapts a phrase from book six of the Aeneid, line 663, written by the Roman poet Virgil. A plate beneath the scene carries the recipient's name. The reverse also bears the initials "REG. ACAD. SCIENT. SUEC.," standing for the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. That engraved plate is the medal's last touch before it ever reaches Stockholm, where the King of Sweden hands each laureate something else entirely.

• 6. What Laureates Carry Home

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  The King of Sweden places a diploma directly into each physics laureate's hands at the ceremony. Every diploma is unique, designed individually by the awarding institution for that specific recipient. It carries a picture, the laureate's name, and a citation spelling out exactly what they achieved. The cash award that follows depends on how well-funded the Nobel Foundation is in a given year. In 2009 the total cash prize came to 10 million Swedish kronor, about US$1.4 million. By 2012, in the aftermath of the Great Recession, that figure had fallen to 8 million kronor, roughly US$1.1 million. When two laureates share a category, the committee splits the money evenly between them. When three share it, the committee can either divide it equally or give half to one recipient and a quarter each to the other two. None of it changes hands until the names are made public first, in a ritual with its own fixed calendar.

• 7. Naming The Laureates

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  During the first week of October each year, the selecting committee makes the laureates' names public for the first time. Two months later, on the 10th of December, the formal ceremony takes place in Stockholm Concert Hall, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel's own death. Each new class of laureates joins a prize still widely regarded as the most prestigious a scientist can receive in physics.