Controversy Regarding Nobel Prize
Sudarshan has been passed over for the Physics Nobel Prize on more than one occasion, leading to controversy in 2005 when several physicists wrote to the Swedish Academy, protesting that Sudarshan should have been awarded a share of the Prize for the Sudarshan diagonal representation (also known as Sudarshan-Glauber representation) in quantum optics, for which Roy J. Glauber won his share of the prize.
Sudarshan and others physicists sent a letter to the Nobel Committee claiming that the P representation had more contribuitions of “Sudarshan” than “Glauber.” The letter goes on to say that Glauber criticized Sudarshan’s theory—before renaming it the “P representation” and incorporating it into his own work. In an unpublished letter to the New York Times, Sudarshan calls the “Glauber-Sudarshan representation” a misnomer, adding that “literally all subsequent theoretic developments in the field of Quantum Optics make use of” Sudarshan’s work— essentially, asserting that he had developed the breakthrough.
In 2007, Sudarshan told the Hindustan Times, "The 2005 Nobel prize for Physics was awarded for my work, but I wasn’t the one to get it. Each one of the discoveries that this Nobel was given for work based on my research." Sudarshan also commented on not being selected for the 1979 Nobel, "Steven Weinberg, Sheldon Glashow and Abdus Salam built on work I had done as a 26-year-old student. If you give a prize for a building, shouldn’t the fellow who built the first floor be given the prize before those who built the second floor?"
Read more about this topic: George Sudarshan
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