Nobel Prize

Barack Obama with his Nobel Prize medal and diploma

Poetry of reality
Science

We must know.
We will know.

* Physics
* Chemistry
* Biology
* Astronomy
* Geology

A view from the
shoulders of giants.

* Scientific law
* Proof
* Ig Nobel Prize
* Cornucopian vs. Malthusian debate
* Behavioral modernity
* Leap year
* Conflict thesis
* Eroom's law

v \- t \- e

“”I feel I've done very well out of not getting a Nobel prize. If you get a Nobel prize you have this fantastic week and then nobody gives you anything else. If you don't get a Nobel prize you get everything that moves. Almost every year there's been some sort of party because I've got another award. That's much more fun.

—Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who discovered pulsars but whose supervisor won the Nobel[1]

A Nobel Prize is a really cool thing you get for being a scientist, a humanitarian, or someone else who adds significantly to the lives and knowledge of humanity — unless you're a mathematician, geologist, or computer scientist.[note 1]

The prize was founded by the inventor of dynamite, Alfred Nobel (1833–1896).[2] After reading an obituary of himself, prematurely published by a French newspaper in 1884 and terming him a "merchant of death", he had a mild attack of conscience and sought to make amends. No, not by giving up the dynamite business, but instead using his wealth earned from manufacturing dynamite to endow the creation of the prizes upon his death in 1896.[3]

There are prizes for chemistry, physics, medicine, economics, and the controversial Peace Prize.

Notably, no young earth creationist "scientist" has ever managed to get any of these. However, hated liberals Al Gore (the only person ever to win an Oscar, a Presidential election, and a Nobel Peace Prize) and Jimmy Carter have.

People tainted by the foul aroma of nefarious deeds have also received Nobel Prizes: Henry Kissinger (a long list of war crimes, overthrowing of democratically elected governments, and complicity in various genocides and other crimes against humanity), Aung San Suu Kyi (Rohingya genocide), Mother Teresa (various), Yasser Arafat (terrorism), and Peter Handke (genocide denialism) also got them. The Nobel Peace Prize can be viewed as something of an insult, no matter who you are.

In 2009, United States President Barack Obama was randomly selected from among just under seven billion people to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, which was being awarded that year to anyone who was not George W. Bush.

## Contents

* 1 Current Prizes
* 2 The dismal science prize
* 3 Sexism
* 4 Peace Prize Nominations and the fringe
* 5 Politicization of the Peace Prize
* 6 See also
* 7 External links
* 8 Notes
* 9 References

## Current Prizes[edit]

The 5 prizes were established by Alfred Nobel in 1895 and first awarded in 1901. The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was created only in 1968, with the first prize in 1969; it was an idea originally conceived by Sweden's central bank (Sveriges Riksbank) to promote its tricentenary.[4][5]

* Nobel Prize in Chemistry — Awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
* Nobel Prize in Physics — Awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
* Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine — Awarded by the Karolinska Institutet (the top-ranking medical university in Sweden)
* Nobel Prize in Literature — Awarded by the Swedish Academy (but not "of Sciences")
* Nobel Peace Prize — Awarded by a committee elected by the Norwegian Parliament.[6] The last point is often missed.
* Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences — The Nobel Prize in Economics was established only in 1969, almost 70 years after the others, by Sweden's central bank. Nonetheless, the laureates are selected by The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (the same institution that selects the Nobel Prize in Physics and Chemistry[7]) according to the same principles as for the Nobel Prizes that have been awarded since 1901,[8] and the Nobel Foundation recognizes it as a Nobel Prize.[9]

Presumably the Norwegians got saddled with the Peace Prize task because, at the time Nobel came up with it, Norway was not a sovereign state and the Norwegian parliament was less likely to be entangled in foreign policy affairs that could influence the vote than the Swedish would have been. This is of course not the case anymore today, and cries about "political" votes are almost as common as Nobel prizes themselves. Since 2012,[10] each prize is worth +7,500,000 Swedish kronor (1,100,000 USD).

Sometimes cited as a reason for the lack of a Prize in mathematics is a story about Nobel's wife having an affair with a mathematician, but it's just a story. Nobel never married and didn't even have a wife.[11]

## The dismal science prize[edit]

Besides having been created by the Swedish National Bank as a birthday party favor,[4] the economics prize comes with substantial criticism. Unlike the other prizes in science (chemistry, physics, physiology), economics is not considered a "hard science", but is included among the social sciences, and consequently the field of economics is more subject to observer bias.

* Human rights lawyer Peter Nobel a great-grandnephew of Alfred Nobel, criticized the creation of the prize. He stated that the prize was "a PR coup by economists to improve their reputation" and that Alfred despised people who valued profits over societal well-being.[4]
* Friedrich Hayek criticized the prize even as he was awarded it in 1974, stating during his awards speech, "It is that the Nobel Prize confers on an individual an authority which in economics no man ought to possess. This does not matter in the natural sciences. Here the influence exercised by an individual is chiefly an influence on his fellow experts; and they will soon cut him down to size if he exceeds his competence. But the influence of the economist that mainly matters is an influence over laymen: politicians, journalists, civil servants and the public generally."[12] Hayek accepted the prize anyway because: Moolah!
* Several of the prize recipients have been criticized for various reasons:
* Hayek: several of the awards committee members belongs to the same society that Hayek had founded, the Mont Pelerin Society,[13]:104–105 Both former Swedish Minister for Finance Kjell Olof Feldt and former Swedish Minister of Commerce and Industry (and Nobel co-recipient with Hayek) Gunnar Myrdal wanted the award abolished because of Hayek's prize, whom they considered a reactionary[14]
* Milton Friedman received the award in 1976. Friedman had been rightfully accused of supporting Augusto Pinochet's military dictatorship in Chile after he spent a 6-day consulting trip to Chile in 1975. Four previous Nobel winners wrote to The New York Times protesting the award.[15]:166
* Robert Aumann, who was awarded the prize in 2005, was criticized for using game theory to argue against dismantling Israeli settlements in occupied Palestine.[16] Not surprisingly, Aumann is a Jewish Israeli citizen: self-fulfilling prophecy or confirmation bias?
* William Nordhaus won the 2018 for his economic models of climate change. Based on criticism of his methodology using smoothing (thus ignoring catastrophic events connected with climate change such as icecap melting) and other methodological issues, he has been accused of grossly underestimated the economic costs of climate change.[17][18][19] Apparently, unlike with the physical science prizes, scientific consensus is not necessary for the economics prize.
* Three winners have been libertarians: Hayek, Friedman, and James M. Buchanan (1986), all of whom had close ties to the Cato Institute,[20] an institute that promotes ideas that would have been contrary to Alfred Nobel's intent (as per Peter Nobel),[4] i.e., promoting profits over societal well-being (specifically, Cato opposes the welfare state, universal healthcare, public schools, environmental regulation)
* In 1994, following the awarding of the prize for work in game theory (John Nash), the scope of the economics prize was expanded to include all of the social sciences, which just increases the problematical nature of the prize since both economics[21] and psychology[note 2] have a reproducibility problem.

## Sexism[edit]

See the main article on this topic: Sexism

There has been an issue with sexism in determining who gets a Nobel Prize, regardless of actual merit. For instance, Jocelyn Bell, the discoverer of the pulsar, didn't win the Nobel Prize, but her supervisor did. Bell herself has viewed sexism as playing a part in why she didn't receive the Prize:

> The fact that I was a graduate student and a woman, together, demoted my standing in terms of receiving a Nobel prize.[22]

While Bell was "only" a graduate student at the time she discovered a pulsar, other people have won the Prize for discovering things, such as Koichi Tanaka, who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2002 while only possessing a bachelor's degree.[23]

## Peace Prize Nominations and the fringe[edit]

Unlike something like the Oscars, a nomination for Nobel Peace Prize is pretty meaningless - only winning it counts. This is because the the list of people who can nominate candidates is enormous,[24] including any current member of any national assembly, just about any university professor, and many others.

The fact that the nomination process is pretty free and easy has led to some rather strange nominations for the Peace Prize. These include Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Fidel Castro,[25] Hugo Chávez, and Vladimir Putin.[26] Oh, and Donald Trump.

The secretive nature of the nomination process[27] has also opened up for willing cranks[28] to fraudulently claim that they've been nominated, when clearly, they have not been.

## Politicization of the Peace Prize[edit]

Some deserving nominees never received the Prize, such as Mahatma Gandhi (for the Peace Prize) and Jorge Luis Borges (for literature). In Gandhi's case, the Nobel Committee's decision to not award a prize in 1948, as "there was no suitable living candidate," was, in effect, an award for Gandhi, as the prize is generally not given posthumously.[29] It was a rather lame excuse since Gandhi had been previously nominated in 1937, 1938, 1939, and 1947.[29] Just to rub in the hypocrisy of the Nobel committee, they had already a awarded a prize in literature to Sweden's Erik Karlfeldt in 1931, and would later award a posthumous peace prize to Dag Hammarskjöld in 1996.[30]

It has been alleged that the Peace Prize has been highly-politicized, particularly by the Catholic Church which has a keen interest in it.[31]:361-373 The committee has shown bias in favor of evangelical Christians by awarding peace prizes to people to people that few others had even heard of or did nothing to deserve it (self-promoting monk Dominique Pire in 1958 and Archbishop of Uppsala Nathan Söderblom in 1930).[31]:367 The committee also has a history of appeasing the United States with what have been considered inappropriate awards (Theodore Roosevelt, George Marshall, Henry Kissinger).[31]:364-366[32] The subsequent protests against Kissinger's award resulted in what might have been the first appearance of the phrase "Ignobel Prize" in 1973.[31]:366

## See also[edit]

* Ig Nobel Prize
* Nobel disease
* Templeton Foundation

## External links[edit]

* Time magazine's top 10 list of Nobel Prize controversies

## Notes[edit]

1. ↑ Mathematicians get the Fields Medal instead as long as they're under 40. Geologists get the Vetlesen Prize, while computer scientists get the Turing Award.
2. ↑ Daniel Kahneman in 2002 for integrating psychology into economics

## References[edit]

1. ↑ British astrophysicist overlooked by Nobels wins $3m award for pulsar work by Ian Sample (6 Sep 2018 00.01 EDT; Last modified on Thu 6 Sep 2018 05.01 EDT) The Guardian.
2. ↑ Alfred Nobel and the History of Dynamite
3. ↑ Nobel Prizes, 107 Years Old, Progressive Policy Institute
4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 Nobel descendant slams Economics prize (28th September 2005 12:24 CET) The Local (archived from October 14, 2007).
5. ↑ The Riksbank’s Prize in Economic Sciences Sveriges Riksbank (archived from March 5, 2013).
6. ↑ The Nobel Organizations, Nobelprize.org
7. ↑ https://www.nobelprize.org/the-nobel-prize-organisation/prize-awarding-institutions/ The Nobel Prize awarding institutions]
8. ↑ The Sveriges Riksbank Prize In Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel
9. ↑ Who we are and what we do
10. ↑ For Nobel Winners, a Smaller Cash Prize, The New York Times
11. ↑ No Nobel Prize for Math, Snopes, March 2 2001
12. ↑ Friedrich von Hayek: Banquet speech The Nobel Prize.
13. ↑ The Nobel Factor: The Prize in Economics, Social Democracy, and the Market Turn by Avner Offer & Gabriel Söderberg (2016) Princeton University Press. ISBN 069116603X.
14. ↑ The not so noble Nobel Prize by Samuel Brittan (19/12/03) The Financial Times (archived from June 30, 2009).
15. ↑ "Letters to the Editor: The Laureate" (24 October 1976) The New York Times.
16. ↑ Anti-Israel protests against Nobel prize award (11/Dec/2005 16:43) European Jewish Press (archived from December 15, 2010).
17. ↑ The Appallingly Bad Neoclassical Economics of Climate Change by Steve Keen (2020) Globalizations 18(1):1-29. doi:10.1080/14747731.2020.1807856.
18. ↑ ‘This is a fight for life’: climate expert on tipping points, doomerism and using wealth as a shield: Economic assumptions about risks of the climate crisis are no longer relevant, says the communications expert Genevieve Guenther by Jonathan Watts (24 Jun 2025 07.00 EDT) The Guardian.
19. ↑ The Language of Climate Politics: Fossil-Fuel Propaganda and How to Fight It  by Genevieve Guenther (2024)‎ Oxford University Press. ISBN 0197642233.
20. ↑ Nobel Laureates at Cato Cato Institute.
21. ↑ Chang, Andrew C., and Phillip Li (2015). “Is Economics Research Replicable? Sixty Published Papers from Thirteen Journals Say ”Usually Not”,” Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2015-083. Washington: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, http://dx.doi.org/10.17016/FEDS.2015.083.
22. ↑ She Changed Astronomy Forever. He won the Nobel Prize for it by Ben Proudfoot (July 27, 2021) The New York Times.
23. ↑ Japan's newest star: a chemist by Jonathan Watts|first=Jonathan (November 4, 2002) The Christian Science Monitor.
24. ↑ https://www.nobelpeaceprize.org/nobel-peace-prize/nomination/criteria-for-nominators
25. ↑ Who Doesn't Have a Nobel Prize Nomination?, LA Times
26. ↑ The World’s Worst Nobel Peace Prize Nominees: From Rush Limbaugh to Josef Stalin, we round up a rogue's gallery of the worst Nobel Peace Prize nominees. (10.10.13 5:45 AM ET) The Daily Beast.
27. ↑ See the Wikipedia article on Nobel Peace Prize § Nomination and selection.
28. ↑ https://americannationalmilitia.com/reverend-kevin-annett-is-nominated-for-the-nobel-peace-prize/
29. ↑ 29.0 29.1 Mahatma Gandhi, the Missing Laureate Nobelprize.org.
30. ↑ Nobel prize to be awarded to dead scientist: Winner of the Nobel prize for medicine had passed away but rules state that award cannot be given posthumously by Ian Sample (3 Oct 2011 14.24 EDT) The Guardian.
31. ↑ 31.0 31.1 31.2 31.3 Mother Teresa: The Untold Story by Aroup Chatterjee (2016) Fingerprint!/Prakash Books India. ISBN 9788175993310.
32. ↑ Nobel panel knew Kissinger Vietnam deal unlikely to bring peace, files show: Accords negotiated by Kissinger and Le Duc Tho in 1973 sealed US exit from war but were soon flouted by North and South Vietnam (11 Jan 2023 12.28 EST) Reuters via The Guardian.