Yet another year in which you haven’t won a Nobel Prize!

“Do you hope to win a Nobel Prize?” asked an elderly man who had come to shake my hand after the lecture. I laughed, but he was serious. Maybe I had been a little too successful explaining how important quantum gravity is.

No, I don’t hope to win a Nobel Prize. If that’s what I’d been after, I certainly would have chosen a different field. Condensed matter physics, say, or quantum things. At least cosmology. But certainly not quantum gravity.

Nobel Prize medal for physics and chemistry. It shows nature in the form of a goddess emerging from the clouds. The veil which covers her face is held up by the Genius of Science. Srsly, see Nobelprize.org.

But the Nobel Prize is important for science. It’s important not because it singles out a few winners but because in science it’s the one annual event that catches everybody’s attention. On which other day does physics make headlines?

In recent years I heard increasingly louder calls that the Prize-criteria should be amended so that more than three people can win. I am not in favor of that. It doesn’t make sense anyway to hand out exactly one Prize each year regardless of how much progress was made. There is always a long list of people who deserved a Nobel but never got one. Like Vera Rubin, who died last year and who by every reasonable measure should have gotten one. Shame on you, Nobel Committee.

I am particularly opposed to the idea that the Nobel Prize should be awarded to collaborations with members sometimes in the hundreds or even thousands. While the three-people-cutoff is arguably arbitrary, I am not in favor of showering collaboration members with fractional prizes. Things don’t get going because a thousand scientists spontaneously decide to make an experiment. It’s always but a few people who are responsible to make things happen. Those are the ones which the Nobel committee should identify.

So, I am all in favor of the Nobel Prize and like it the way it is. But (leaving aside that many institutions seem to believe Nobel Prize winners lay golden eggs) the Prize has little relevance in research. I definitely know a few people who hope to win it and some even deserve it. But I yet have to meet anyone who deliberately chose their research with that goal in mind.

The Nobel Prize is by construction meant to honor living scientists. This makes sense because otherwise we’d have a backlog of thousands of deceased scientific luminaries and nobody would be interested watching the announcement. But in some research areas we don’t expect to see payoffs in our lifetime. Quantum gravity is one of them.

Personally, I feel less inspired by Nobel Prize winners than by long-dead geniuses like Da Vinci, Leibnitz, or Goethe – masterminds whose intellectual curiosity spanned disciplines. They were ahead of their time and produced writings that not rarely were vague, hard to follow, and sometimes outright wrong. None of them would have won a Nobel Prize had the Prize existed at the time. But their insights laid the basis for centuries of scientific progress.

And so, while we honor those who succeed in the present, let’s not forget that somewhere among us, unrecognized, are the seeds that will grow to next centuries’ discoveries.

Today, as the 2017 Nobel prize is awarded, I want to remind those of you who work in obscure research areas, produce unpopular artworks, or face ridicule for untimely writing, that history will be your final judge, not your contemporaries.

Then again maybe I should just work on those song-lyrics a little harder ;)