Three Nobel Laureates in Physics. From left to right: Albert A. Michelson, Albert Einstein and Robert A. Millikan. Wikimedia, Smithsonian InstitutionThe Nobel committees’ cap of three winners per prize will unavoidably leave out critical contributors to profound discoveries as more scientists work in diverse teams, according to a handful of editorials and opinion pieces released this week (October 8).
An editorial in Scientific American, published Monday (October 8), argued that the days of the lone, brilliant scientist are over. “Whereas a century ago a patent clerk famously divined the theory of relativity in his spare time, discovering a Higgs boson requires decades of planning and the efforts of 6,000 researchers,” the editors wrote. “No one person—no troika, even—can legitimately claim all the credit.”
The editorial directly recounts the argument that Athene Donald, an experimental physicist at the University of Cambridge, made in a commentary in the Telegraph last month (September 17), also citing the Higgs boson discovery as an exemplary challenge to the Nobel committee’s three-awardee limit. “It’s not just theorists who contributed to the ‘discovery’ of the Higgs Boson,” she wrote. “None of ...
