Definitely no, given how many Nobel laureates are just batshit crazy by the time they pick up their prizes.

The other interesting thing about the notification process is that they contact the laureate directly, and go to great lengths to do so, without telling anyone else. Bill Phillips got the call in his California hotel room at 3 am; the rest of NIST found out when the phone started ringing off the hook. Even Bill’s wife wife heard about it first on the radio in the car on her way to work.

Before he went to Sweden, when the award of his Nobel Prize was first announced, he made disparaging remarks about the prize and about the formal ceremonies that he would have to endure in Stockholm. He said that he had made up his mind to refuse the prize, until his wife told him that refusing it would bring him even more unwelcome publicity than accepting it. He detested formal ceremonies, and he especially detested the snobbery associated with kings and queens and royal palaces. But then, after he went to Stockholm and experienced the warmth of a Swedish welcome, he wrote a note that is as close as he ever came to expressing his emotions in public. He describes how the prize had led to a deluge of messages:

Reports of fathers turning excitedly with newspapers in hand to wives; of daughters running up and down the apartment house ringing neighbors’ door bells with news; victorious cries of “I told you so” by those having no technical knowledge—their successful prediction being based on faith alone; from friends, from relatives, from students, from former teachers, from scientific colleagues, from total strangers….
In each I saw the same two common elements. I saw in each, joy; and I saw affection (you see, whatever modesty I may have had has been completely swept away in recent days).
The Prize was a signal to permit them to express, and me to learn about, their feelings….
For this, I thank Alfred Nobel and the many who worked so hard to carry out his wishes in this particular way.
And so, you Swedish people, with your honors, and your trumpets, and your king—forgive me. For I understand at last—such things provide entrance to the heart. Used by a wise and peaceful people they can generate good feeling, even love, among men, even in lands far beyond your own. For that lesson, I thank you.

Ah. Fair enough. But Prizes are there not just for the physicists : it’s a chance for the general public to learn about science. And therein, I believe, lies the their greatest value : they are a wonderful instrument of outreach. A certain amount of hero worship goes into it of course, but the public loves this sort of things, whether we (as scientists) like it or not.

I agree with the “alive” thing though. But the Swedes like their winners breathing and it’s their money!

I know that we don’t pursue physics for the chance of winning a prize (perhaps I hadn’t made that obvious). My whole point is that I think it’s overblown, is all (and also that, if there really were any people waiting by their telephone hoping for the call, they shouldn’t be so wrapped up in it, not that I believe that people really were like that, not sensible ones, at least).

I also don’t fully understand why the recipients have to be alive. Sure, it’s probably a bit late to be awarding one to Newton, but if, say, Higgs died before the Higgs particle was discovered, it’ll be a bit odd to give it to (say) Goldstone, Anderson and Kibble and no Higgs, even if the money won’t be awarded. Pretty soon, as a theorist, just living long enough to be in the running for a Nobel prize might be reward enough in itself.

It turns out that he was from a family of people who had all suffered from ulcers before the role of H. pylori was discovered, and he was crowing about the prize and talking about how Marshall had had to fight conventional wisdom for so long: “They all told him ‘No, no, no! ‘The world is flat! Go away!’ You know, Galileo got excommunicated for saying the world is round,” etc. And he started saying that everything that science says is wrong, that scientists don’t know what they’re talking about and that this story proves it.

This is one of my pet peeves: reflexive disbelief. It’s just as intellectually lazy as reflexive belief, but people think it makes them rebels or something. So I objected:

Me: If you believe this guy is right, then obviously you think some scientists do know what they’re talking about.
Him: Well, okay, but a lot of it…
Me: The thing is, at any time a lot of what we think we know is wrong. The problem is that we don’t know which parts are wrong and which are right. We just have to work with the knowledge that we have now.
Him: [looking suspicious] I guess….
Me: But the whole point of science is that when we get new evidence, we can throw out ideas that have been proven wrong.
Him: [still not convinced] Well, you know, people used to believe that cherries and milk were poison….

Then somehow we were onto the subject of the Meirs appointment.

I never did bother to correct him about Galileo….

Sorry for replying again Adam, but that is not the point of them. We are not doing physics to get the prize, any more than someone who runs for a bus, or for their health, is hoping that there’ll be a press conference and an Olympic gold medal waiting for them when they finish their run!

“It’s chocolate, it does not have to have a point”, to quote Charlie in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”. The Tim Burton film. I don’t know it it’s in the book. Never read it. (I’m a philistine.)

-cvj