Thursday, January 28, 2010

The Post-Humous Nobel Prizes in Phyiscs



Note to The Royal Swedish Academy: Although the following people are quite dead, we your adoring public, and in great appreciation of the great man that Alfred Nobel was and in your good service thereof, and in great respect to his Last Will and Testament and the intent of his Prizes, humbly request you extend tradition and give post-humous Nobel Prizes in Physics to the following people for their extraordinary accomplishments in Physics:

- Nikola Tesla, of  Austrian Empire/United States, and Thomas Edison, of United States, for multiple contributions in Electromagnetism

- Lise Meitner, of Austria/Sweden and Fritz Strassmann, of Germany, for contributions to nuclear fission

- Albert Einstein, of Germany/Switzerland/United States, for The Special Theory of Relativity

- Albert Einstein, of Germany/Switzerland/United States, for The General Theory of Relativity

- Albert Einstein, of Germany/Switzerland/United States, for Brownian Motion

- Satyendra Nath Bose, of India, for Bose-Einstein Condensates

- Albert Einstein, of Germany/Switzerland/United States, for Bose-Einstein Condensates

- Albert Einstein, of Germany/Switzerland/United States, for EPR

Einstein already won for the Photoelectric Effect, but most would agree he deserved 5 more.

- Wolfgang Pauli, of Austria/United States, for Neutrinos

Pauli already won for his Exclusion Principle which launched Chemistry into the stratosphere, but he deserves another in our humble opinion

- Chung-Yao Chao, of China, for experiments leading to the recognition of the positron

- Boris Poldolsky, of Russia/United States, for EPR

- Nathan Rosen, of United States/Israel, for EPR

- Cesar Lattes, of Brazil, and Eugene Gardner, of United States, for discoveries regarding the pion for which their boss Cecil Powell won the award

- Julius Edgar Lilienfeld, of Austria/United States, and Oskar Heil of Germany/United States, for the groundwork that led to the invention of the transistor

- Chien-Shiung Wu, of China/United States,  for disproving the law of conservation of parity and numerous contributions

- Ennackal Chandy George Sudarshan, of India/United States, and Robbert Marshak, of United States, for the V-A Theory of Weak Interactions  (Sudershan is still alive)

- Ennackal Chandy George Sudarshan, of India/United States, for the Sudarshan diagonal representation (also known as Sudarshan-Glauber representation ) in quantum optics (Sudershan is still alive)

George Sudarshan currently holds the record of the most nominated Nobel Prize candidate alive who has yet to receive any Nobel Prize

- Yuval Ne'eman, of Israel, for his 1961 discovery of the classification of hadrons through the SU(3) flavour symmetry

- Jocelyn Bell Burnell, of United Kingdom,  who discovered the first radio pulsars, with her thesis supervisor Antony Hewish, for which Hewish shared the NPP with Martin Ryle.

Burnell is still alive.


- George Gamow, of Russia/United States, for Quantum tunneling

- George Gamow, of Russia/United States, for Big Bang Cosmogony

- John Stewart Bell, of Northern Ireland, for Bell's Inequality Theorem

- Ralph Alpher, of United States, for predicting the cosmic microwave background radiation and working out in 1948 the underpinnings of the Big Bang theory

keep your eye on Horava gravity and therefore:
- David Bohm, of United States/Israel, for Hidden Variables Theory

We can think of dozens of others who are also deserving, but those are the ones who come first to mind.

We are open to discussion, and we humbly thank you Royals for your kind consideration.

10 comments:

Phil Warnell said...

Hi Steven,

As you are most likely aware you can only be awarded the prize once and while still alive. Also what is being awarded for if a theory has to be supported by experiment, so that is how Bohm gets shut out since there is no experiment (yet) that can differentiate his theory from the standard treatment. As for Emmy Noether her theorem was a mathematical one which is not exclusive in application to physics and Nobel excluded pure mathematics as rumour has it he didn’t like them much as his wife once ran off with one :-)

Best,

Phil

Steven Colyer said...

Good points, Phil. Actually I just discovered the following page on Nobel Prize Controversies:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize_controversies

Sartre turned down the Literature award because he didn't accept honors. lol, like a Feynman-plus!

I'll have to add a few from that page I see. Meitner at least.

I'm aware of the controversy over hidden variables and should have mentioned that. I'm not a fan but it did lead to some incredible advances in Entanglement by NOT being found. So I guess I should remove David Bohm, darn. Otherwise, the SUSY guys could use that argument if/when/likely SUSYs aren't found! :-)

Steven Colyer said...

I just found the perfect word for Lubos, btw. From Wiki:

A polemic (pronounced /pəˈlɛmɪk/) is an argument or controversy made against one opinion, doctrine, or system, in support of another, or a person who engages in such disputes. A polemic usually addresses serious matters of religious, philosophical, political, or scientific importance. A polemic is often written specifically to dispute or refute a position or theory that is widely accepted. The word is derived from the Greek word polemikos (πολεμικός), which means "warlike," "hostile".[1]

Jérôme Chauvet said...

So many rocket scientists, but only one moon in the sky...

Steven Colyer said...

Trust me, before I'm done, I'll probably double this list. I have 6 more to add already that I don't have the time to at the moment.

Andrew Thomas said...

"Polemic"? That is soooooo not the best word to describe Lubos Motl. Most of the words I can think of to describe him have only four letters.

He treats Bee atrociously badly. It's absolutely shocking an unacceptable. People treat it like it's a joke, but it's not. I'll read his posts on his blog, but he's a seriously nasty piece of work. Just a sad bully.

Steven Colyer said...

Andrew! As Mrs. Kensington said to Austin Powers: Oh DO beHAVE! lol

I'm just trying to be diplomatic, Andrew. My English-bred American mother always said "You'll go farther with a spoonful of sugar than with a gallon of vinegar." Yes, that will work, except in battle. Is there a battle? I guess. Two of them, no three. The three I see are:

1) SuperString (Lubos, Susskind, Distler) Quantum Mechanical-based Quantum Gravity Theory vs General Relativity-based Quantum Gravity Theories.

2) SuperString Civil War over The Anthropic Principle.

3) SuperStrings vs OTHER Quantum Mechanical-based Quantum Gravity Theories.

That 3rd one gets little press, in fact I don't even know if there are other QM-QG theories, the Stanford mafia (Susskind, Lubos) shout any competition down so hard.

But you are correct, Andrew. Lubos is quite rude, and unnecessarily so. He could use better words. However, as we also know, he is not always right. So if he attacks people like Sabine Hossenfelder (bee), Petr Horova, or Erik Verlinde ... maybe there is something to their theories?

Steven Colyer said...

Oh good grief, how could I forget Satyendra Nath Bose and the whole Bose-Einstein Condensate theory! I have corrected my obvious ommission, and added one more for good old Albert again. That makes 6 NPP's Einstein should have won.

Jérôme Chauvet said...

I always thought Bose has had the Nobel Prize, but I discover with your listing that it was not so.

Surely, he had no friend in the jury...

Bye,

prof prem raj pushpakaran said...

prof premraj pushpakaran (male) writes -- 2018 marks the 100th birth year of Martin Ryle!!!