In any case I think they could have given Nambu & Goldstone the prize one year, and Cabibbo Kobayashi and Maskawa another. I don’t see the rush, and it would have avoided them having to split hairs about precisely what the prize was for when all these ideas are so closely connected.

I can’t speak about their choice of splits this year since I’m not on the committee but I do think it’s strange to break up a group of people who made a discovery if they want to fit two accomplishments into one nobel. It sure does sound like they have more people than nobels recently. Maybe their standards for prizes have lessened over the years.

the Nobel charter places a strict limit…

This seems like an anachronism that should be changed; in this day and age, the number of people involved in individual innovations and lines of research, like the LHC, has become extremely large. Correct me if I’m wrong, but if the Higgs Boson is found, won’t it be by a good-sized team of people? That discovery will be a Nobel, just like the Bose-Einstein condensate. As such, if the prize only goes to the supervisor and the one or two people who just happened to be processing the right dataset, it is a jip for everyone else on the project who absorbed all the inevitable not-right datasets. At that point, the reward isn’t about skill and innovation; it’s just a lottery.

I think the Nobel committee is dangerously close to judging twenty-first century science with a nineteenth century eye.

I think the point being made is that such careful reading should not be necessary when picking the Nobel winners vs. the ones left out. But this is obviously hard (impossible?) in the modern age when lots of people come up with bits and pieces of an idea simultaneously.

“What is most amazing is that all this was done in the context of dynamical spontaneous symmetry breaking [ie. the effective quasiparticles are dynamically generated composites, not toy scalar fields inserted by hand, as in all the other contemporary work].”

Wow, that is indeed quite remarkable.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/07/healthscience/07nobel.php

They should start awarding the prize to a larger group of people: why not 20 or even 50? Its not like the general public is going to remember the names of these scientists after a few years, but it would be extremely encouraging for the scientists concerned.

There are plenty of scientists doing really good work. And they should start awarding the prize to the ‘Team(s) led by Dr. … ‘. Seems really unfair to be categorized in the also-ran group. Team members may not get a big share of the prize money, but maybe a medal or a note – they could always say that they were a member of ‘The team led by … that was awarded the Prize’.

Just a thought. In the age of cloud computing, swarm robotics, particle-wave dualities – at least when these concepts are becoming common knowledge, a system that awards prizes to individuals seems archaic – then again, these brilliant minds ARE reaaaallly old .

If you read the citations and background material carefully, you will note that Nambu is being awarded the Nobel prize for “spontaneous symmetry breaking” in both the ungauged case ["Nambu-Goldstone symmetry realization"], and the gauged case [the "Higgs" mechanism], both of which he worked out and published in 1960-61 [actually he did them in reversed order; first he wrote BCS superconductivity as a non-relativistic field theory and worked out the gauge invariance of the Meissner effect = "Higgs Mechanism" [work redone in the relativistic case by Anderson, Higgs, Brout-Englert, and Guralnick-Hagen-Kibble]. Then he wrote relativistic effective theories [with Jona-Lasinio] and worked out the effects of spontaneous symmetry breaking in the ungauged case, with the resulting massless quasi-particles [Nambu-Goldstone bosons], and in particular with Lurie worked out the low-energy theorems for soft N-G Boson emission, which were the first examples of the “soft pion emission” theorems which are the content of chiral dynamics. What is most amazing is that all this was done in the context of dynamical spontaneous symmetry breaking [ie. the effective quasiparticles are dynamically generated composites, not toy scalar fields inserted by hand, as in all the other contemporary work]. I’m amazed the he could understand the underlying symmetry arguments in such a full dynamical context; his depth of physical insight is truly extraordinary.

…the Nobel charter places a strict limit of three Laureates per Prize…

Is this why Freeman Dyson missed out on a share of the prize that was awarded for QED?