Nobel Prize Controversies - Physics

Physics

The 2009 prize was awarded to Willard Boyle and George E. Smith for developing the CCD. However, Eugene I. Gordon and Michael Francis Tompsett claimed that it should have been theirs for figuring out that the technology could be used for imaging.

Half of the 2008 prize was awarded to Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa for their 1972 work on quark mixing. This postulated the existence of three additional quarks beyond the three then known to exist and used this postulate to provide a possible mechanism for CP violation, which had been observed 8 years earlier. Their work expanded and reinterpreted research by the Italian physicit Nicola Cabibbo, dating to 1963, before the quark model was even introduced. The resulting quark mixing matrix, which described probabilities of different quarks to turn into each other under the action of the weak force, is known as CKM matrix, after Cabibbo, Kobayashi, and Maskawa. Cabibbo arguably merited a share of the award.
The recipient of the other half of the 2008 prize was Yoichiro Nambu for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics. The foundamental step in this field is the Nambu–Jona-Lasinio model (NJL model), developed together with the Italian theoretical physicist Giovanni Jona-Lasinio, who was left out of the prize like Cabibbo. In recognition to his colleague's work, Nambu asked Jona-Lasinio to hold the Nobel Lecture at the Stockholm University in his place.
As the prize is awarded each year to at most three people for no nore than two different research works, the committee was forced to skip one member each from both the CKM and the NJL workgroups (incidentally, both of them Italians), a sort of apparently unfair omissions that will probably become more and more frequent given the larger number of people involved with key roles in modern scientific research projects.

The 2006 prize was won by John C. Mather and George F. Smoot (leaders of the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite experiment) for "the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR)." However, in July 1983 an experiment launched aboard the Prognoz-9 satellite, studied CMBR via a single frequency. In January 1992, Andrei A. Brukhanov presented a seminar at Sternberg Astronomical Institute in Moscow, where he first reported on the discovery. However, the Relikt team claimed only an upper limit, not a detection, in their 1987 paper.

Half of the 2005 prize was awarded to Roy J. Glauber "for his contribution to the quantum theory of optical coherence". This research involved George Sudarshan's relevant 1960 work in quantum optics, which was allegedly slighted in this award. Glauber—who initially derided the former representations, later produced the same P-representation under a different name, viz., Sudarshan-Glauber representation or Sudarshan diagonal representation—was the winner instead. According to others, the deserving Leonard Mandel and Daniel Frank Walls were passed over because posthumous nominations were not accepted.

The 1997 prize was awarded to Steven Chu, Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William Daniel Phillips "for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light." The award was disputed by Russian scientists who questioned the awardees' priority in the acquired approach and techniques, which the Russians claimed to have carried out more than a decade before.

The 1983 prize went to William Alfred Fowler "for his theoretical and experimental studies of the nuclear reactions of importance in the formation of the chemical elements in the universe". Fowler acknowledged Fred Hoyle as the pioneer of the concept of stellar nucleosynthesis but that was not enough for Hoyle to receive a share. Hoyle's obituary in Physics Today notes that "Many of us felt that Hoyle should have shared Fowler's 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics, but the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences later made partial amends by awarding Hoyle, with Edwin Salpeter, its 1997 Crafoord Prize".

The 1979 prize was awarded to Sheldon Glashow, Abdus Salam and Steven Weinberg for the electroweak interaction unification theory. However, George Sudarshan and Robert Marshak were the first proponents of the successful V-A (vector minus axial vector, or left-handed) theory for weak interactions in 1957. It was essentially the same theory as that proposed by Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann in their "mathematical physics" paper on lthe structure of the weak interaction. Actually, Gell-Mann had been let in on the Sudarshan/Marshak work on Sudarshan's initiative, but no acknowledgment appeared in the later paper—except for an informal allusion. The reason given was that the originators' work had not been published in a formal or 'reputable enough' science journal at the time. The theory is popularly known in the west as the Feynman-Gell-Mann theory. The V-A theory for weak interactions was, in effect, a new Law of Nature. It was conceived in the face of a series of apparently contradictory experimental results, including several from Chien-Shiung Wu, helped along by a sprinkling of other evidence, such as the muon. Discovered in 1936, the muon had a colorful history itself and would lead to a new revolution in the 21st century. This breakthrough was not awarded a Nobel Prize. The V-A theory would later form the foundation for the electroweak interaction theory. Sudarshan regarded the V-A theory as his finest work. The Sudarshan-Marshak (or V-A theory) was assessed, preferably and favorably, as "beautiful" by J. Robert Oppenheimer, only to be disparaged later on as "less complete" and "inelegant" by John Gribbin.

The 1978 prize was awarded for the chanced "detection of Cosmic microwave background radiation". The joint winners, Arno Allan Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson, had their discovery elucidated by others. Many scientists felt that Ralph Alpher, who predicted the cosmic microwave background radiation and in 1948 worked out the underpinnings of the Big Bang theory, should have shared in the prize or received one independently. In 2005, Alpher received the National Medal of Science for his pioneering contributions to understanding of nucleosynthesis, the prediction of the relic radiation from the Big Bang, as well as for a model for the Big Bang.

The 1974 prize was awarded to Martin Ryle and Antony Hewish "for their pioneering research in radio astrophysics: Ryle for his observations and inventions, in particular of the aperture synthesis technique, and Hewish for his decisive role in the discovery of pulsars". Hewish was not the first to correctly explain pulsars, initially describing them as communications from "Little Green Men" (LGM-1) in outer space. David Staelin and Edward Reifenstein, of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia, found a pulsar at the center of the Crab Nebula. The notion that pulsars were neutron stars, leftovers from a supernova explosion, had been proposed in 1933. Soon after their 1968 discovery, Fred Hoyle and astronomer Thomas Gold correctly explained it as a rapidly spinning neutron star with a strong magnetic field, emitting radio waves. Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Hewish's graduate student, was not recognized, although she was the first to notice the stellar radio source that was later recognized as a pulsar. While Hoyle argued that Bell should have been included in the prize, Bell said, "I believe it would demean Nobel Prizes if they were awarded to research students, except in very exceptional cases, and I do not believe this is one of them." Prize-winning research students include Louis de Broglie, Rudolf Mössbauer, Douglas Osheroff, Gerard 't Hooft, John Forbes Nash, Jr., John Robert Schrieffer and H. David Politzer.

The 1969 prize was won by Murray Gell-Mann "for his contributions and discoveries concerning the classification of elementary particles and their interactions" (essentially, discovering quarks). George Zweig, then a PhD student at Caltech, independently espoused the physical existence of aces, essentially the same thing. The physics community ostracized Zweig and blocked his career. Israeli physicist Yuval Ne'eman published the classification of hadrons through their SU(3) flavor symmetry independently of Gell-Mann in 1962, and also felt that he had been unjustly deprived of the prize for the quark model.

The 1956 prize went to John Bardeen, Walter Houser Brattain and William Bradford Shockley "for their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect". However, the committee did not recognize numerous preceding patent applications. As early as 1928, Julius Edgar Lilienfeld patented several modern transistor types. In 1934, Oskar Heil patented a field-effect transistor. It is unclear whether Lilienfeld or Heil had built such devices, but they did cause later workers significant patent problems. Further, Herbert F. Mataré and Heinrich Walker, at Westinghouse Paris, applied for a patent in 1948 of an amplifier based on the minority carrier injection process. Mataré had first observed transconductance effects during the manufacture of germanium diodes for German radar equipment during World War II. Shockley was part of other controversies—including his position as a corporate director and his self-promotion efforts. Further, the original design Shockley presented to Brattain and Bardeen did not work. His share of the prize resulted from his development of the superior junction transistor, which became the basis of the electronics revolution. He excluded Brattain and Bardeen from the proceeds of this process, even though the idea may have been theirs. Another controversy associated with Shockley was his support of eugenics. He regarded his published works on this topic as the most important work of his career.

The 1950 prize went to Cecil Powell for "his development of the photographic method of studying nuclear processes and his discoveries regarding mesons made with this method". However, Brazilian physicist César Lattes was the main researcher and the first author of the historical Nature journal article describing the subatomic particle meson pi (pion). Lattes was solely responsible for the improvement of the nuclear emulsion used by Powell (by asking Kodak Co. to add more boron to it—and in 1947, he made with them his great experimental discovery). This result was explained by the Nobel Committee policy (ended in 1960) to award the prize to the research group head only. Lattes calculated the pion's mass and, with USA physicist Eugene Gardner, demonstrated the existence of this particle after atomic collisions in a synchrotron. Gardner was denied a prize because he died soon thereafter.

The 1938 prize went to Enrico Fermi in part for "his demonstrations of the existence of new radioactive elements produced by neutron irradiation". However, in this case, the award later appeared to be premature: Fermi thought he had created transuranic elements (specifically, hesperium), but had in fact unwittingly demonstrated nuclear fission (and had actually created only fission products—isotopes of much lighter elements than uranium). The fact that Fermi's interpretation was incorrect was discovered shortly after he had received his prize.

The 1936 prize went to Carl D. Anderson for the discovery of the positron. While a graduate student at Caltech in 1930, Chung-Yao Chao was the first to experimentally identify positrons through electron-positron annihilation, but did not realize what they were. Anderson used the same radioactive source, 208Tl, as Chao. (Historically, 208Tl was known as "thorium C double prime" or "ThC", see decay chains.) Late in life, Anderson admitted that Chao had inspired his discovery: Chao's research formed the foundation from which much of Anderson's own work developed. Chao died in 1998, without sharing in a Nobel Prize acknowledgment.

The 1923 prize went to Robert Millikan "for his work on the elementary charge of electricity and on the photoelectric effect". Millikan might have won in 1920 but for Felix Ehrenhaft's incorrect claim to have measured a smaller charge. Some controversy, however, still seems to linger over Millikan's oil-drop procedure and experimental interpretation, over whether Millikan manipulated his data in the 1913 scientific paper measuring the electron charge. Allegedly, he did not report all his observations.

The 1903 prize was awarded to Henri Becquerel (along with Pierre and Marie Curie) "in recognition of the extraordinary services he has rendered by his discovery of spontaneous radioactivity". However, critics alleged that Becquerel merely rediscovered a phenomenon first noticed and investigated decades earlier by the French scientist Abel Niepce de Saint-Victor.