The 2020 Nobel Prize for Physics will be announced on Tuesday 6 October. In the run-up to the announcement, Physics World editors have picked some of the people who they think have been overlooked for a prize in the past
The announcement of the 2013 Nobel Prize for Physics is memorable for the hour-long delay in announcing the winners – François Englert and Peter Higgs – and for the long citation.
The pair won “for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider”.
Theory, experiment or both?
I can vividly remember the morning of 8 October 2013 while I sat at my desk at Physics World headquarters waiting for the prize announcement. The Higgs boson had been discovered at CERN in July 2012, and it was pretty obvious that the 2013 prize would be related to the discovery. The big question was would it go to the theorists who predicted the Higgs back in 1964 or to the experimentalists who discovered it – or both?
Now when it comes to announcing the winners of each year’s Nobel prize, the Nobel Committee usually does so precisely at the scheduled time. But as the minutes ticked by, and no news was forthcoming, I started to wonder if 2013 was going to be the year when the committee finally dispensed with the rule that no more than three people can share the prize.
I imagined that, in an opulent, portrait-lined room at the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences, a huge row had broken out about whether or not to give at least a portion of the award to the thousands of physicists working on ATLAS, CMS and the LHC. After all, the Higgs was not found by accident at CERN – there had been a decades-long sustained and focussed effort to detect the particle. Furthermore, modern science is highly collaborative, so recognizing the CERN physicists, I felt, would be the perfect way to update a prize that is more than a century old.
Out-and-about in Edinburgh
But alas, it wasn’t to be. The hour-long delay in announcing the prize merely occurred because the committee could not contact Peter Higgs. He was out-and-about in Edinburgh and in the end only heard about his win after lunch, several hours later, when he was congratulated in the street by a former neighbour.
Inside the Nobels: Lars Brink reveals how the world’s top physics prize is awarded
What is more, I don’t think any scientific collaboration will be winning the Nobel Prize for Physics any time soon. Last year I interviewed Lars Brink – a Swedish particle theorist who served on the Nobel Committee for Physics on eight separate occasions and who served as chair for the 2013 award. Brink says that the Academy is hesitant to open the physics prize up to organizations or collaborations such as CERN. “We don’t want 5000 people calling themselves Nobel laureates,” he told me.
What the Nobel Committee did do, however, was to beef up that year’s citation. By mentioning ATLAS, CMS and the LHC, the committee did go at least some way to recognise the legion of experimentalists who confirmed calculations done by Higgs and independently by Englert and Robert Brout – the latter having died in 2011 and who therefore also missed out on the prize.
But given that the Higgs prediction and subsequent discovery is a classic example of how theory and experiment work hand in hand, I still think it is a shame that all those hard-working experimentalists were unable to share the prize. My fantasy citation for the 2013 prize would therefore have been “to François Englert, Peter Higgs and to all the physicists working on ATLAS, CMS and the LHC for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles and the experimental discovery of the predicted fundamental particle”.
Still, who knows, perhaps the experimental discovery of the Higgs will be honoured this year after all – or in years to come.
