Quote:
Originally Posted by ChrisD
there were 3 winners this year. Personally, if I was going to win it, I would hope for no winners the previous year so it jackpotted.
Chris
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Three is the maximum number of people who can win a Nobel Prize at the
same time, except for the Peace Prize which can be awarded to institutions.
This obviously gets tricky when more than three people have made
significant contributions to the discovery.
There tends to be a bias towards experimentalists rather than theoreticians.
You are more likely to win it if you do the work in the lab and make the
discovery rather than your boss who came up with the idea for it and
asked you to go do the experiment.
There have been some exceptions. Having come up with the theory of the Higgs Boson,
Higgs had to essentially wait 50 years when it was experimentally confirmed to be awarded the
Nobel. Roger Penrose won it “for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the
general theory of relativity.” If Black Holes had never been confirmed by observation, doubtless
there would have been less chance of it being awarded to him.
Alfred Nobel's will stated that the prizes should be awarded to “those who,
during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit to
humankind.”
From 1974, a prize cannot be awarded posthumously, unless death has
occurred after the announcement.
