How Nobel favorites have fared

Carl Wilhelm Oseen, Svante Arrhenius, and Allvar Gullstrand are probably not the first names that most people associate with the Nobel Prize in Physics. Yet in understanding the history of the award, those three Swedes—all members of the five-person Nobel physics committee—are arguably more important than Einstein, Planck, or any other laureate.

Since 1901, the physics committee has selected the people who make the nominations and then evaluated the resulting nominees. Each year it makes a recommendation to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which usually—but not always—approves the award. Although the committee must consider any individual who is proposed in writing by a valid nominator, it has no obligation to choose the person with the most nominator votes. “Nominators create the smorgasbord,” says Robert Marc Friedman, a professor of history of science at the University of Oslo in Norway. “Then the committee members pick according to their taste.”

Based on the years 1901–66, the committee has eagerly exploited its independence. Of the 60 years in which a prize was awarded, the committee opted for the leading choice of the nominators just 29 times (see the table below). And according to the research of Friedman and other historians, the instances when the committee spurned the favorites offer the juiciest anecdotes.

Take the case of poor Henri Poincaré . In 1910 the Frenchman appeared on 59% of nominators’ ballots for the physics prize. He earned nominations from nearly the entire French contingent plus laureates including Pieter Zeeman, Guglielmo Marconi, and Hendrik Lorentz. Poincaré was the most overwhelming favorite of any nominee through 1966.

But as Friedman explains in his 2001 book, The Politics of Excellence , Poincaré fell victim to the politics of the Nobel committee. As epitomized by the awarding of the 1907 prize for “optical precision instruments” to Albert Michelson, the committee strongly favored physicists who pushed the boundaries of experimentation and measurement. In those early years, theorists, such as 1902 laureate Hendrik Lorentz, had to irrefutably explain previous measurements to even have a chance. Poincaré’s work was pure theory—and to add another strike, it was largely mathematical.

Poincaré also failed to secure the support of the most influential committee member, chairman Svante Arrhenius. Largely to oppose a rival in the academy who had initiated the campaign for Poincaré, Arrhenius pushed the candidacy of countryman Knut Ångström. Even Ångström’s death before the announcement of the prize couldn’t save Poincaré; according to Friedman, Arrhenius just dug up documentation in support of Johannes van der Waals, who had long been dismissed as a candidate and whose critical research had taken place in the 1870s. (Alfred Nobel’s bequest requires that the awards be based on achievements “during the preceding year.”) A single 1910 nomination from Harvard physicist Theodore Richards was all van der Waals needed to win the prize. Poincaré received additional votes before his death in 1912 but never won the Nobel.

The committee’s aversion to theory also strung along the candidacies of the pioneers of quantum theory. Max Planck , who garnered the most nominator votes six times beginning in 1909, had to wait until 1919 to receive the prize for his discovery of energy quanta. (The committee exercised its right to defer the 1918 prize and awarded it to Planck the following year.) Similarly, Otto Stern’s 1922 experiment confirming spin quantization did not net him a Nobel until 1944 (he received the reserved 1943 prize); Stern had been a favorite four times, as early as 1928.

If the Nobel committee was skeptical about quantum theory, it was downright hostile toward relativity. Albert Einstein garnered his first Nobel nomination in 1910, five years after he introduced special relativity. By 1920, the year after Arthur Eddington’s solar eclipse expedition to confirm general relativity, Einstein was dominating the vote. Yet the Nobel committee member chosen to evaluate Einstein’s candidacy was physicist and ophthalmologist Gullstrand, who, Friedman writes in a 1981 Nature article, was both biased and incapable of understanding such complex theoretical physics. Unsurprisingly, Gullstrand did not provide a glowing review.

It took shrewd politicking and creative semantics to finally push Einstein over the top. In 1921 newly appointed committee member Oseen decided to drop the case for relativity and instead nominate Einstein for the photoelectric effect. More specifically, Oseen pushed to recognize the law of the photoelectric effect, which links the energy of an electron emitted by a metal to the frequency of irradiating light, and not Einstein’s then-controversial theory that light consists of photons. Eager to curb the barrage of nominations for Einstein without elevating relativity (and quantum theory, for that matter), the committee agreed in 1922 to award Einstein the deferred 1921 prize.

When a resounding favorite didn’t win, it’s often illuminating to examine who did. Take 1912, a year in which Planck, for the third time, was the clear favorite of nominators. The physics committee ignored the consensus and put forth Heike Kamerlingh Onnes for the liquefaction of helium. It turned out, Friedman writes in The Politics of Excellence, that it didn’t matter whom the committee chose. The Royal Swedish Academy, which usually rubber-stamps the committee’s choice, wanted to honor compatriot Nils Dalén for his invention of the automated lighthouse. Dalén received the 1912 Nobel Prize in Physics after receiving a lifetime total of one nomination. Six years later the Nobel decision makers gave the reserved 1917 prize to Charles Barkla, who likewise rode his lone nomination to Nobel glory. Barkla’s analysis of the spectra emitted by metals exposed to x rays was noteworthy, but few people would have placed Barkla in the same class as Planck, Einstein, and several other nominees.

The Nobel committee’s choices better reflected those of the nominators between the late 1920s and the start of World War II, and then again in the postwar period. Between 1945 and 1966, nearly every favorite in a given year would go on to win the prize, frequently in that same year. But again the exceptions are illuminating. Lise Meitner, the 1947 favorite who cumulatively garnered 29 nominations, never won the prize; only Otto Hahn, in the form of the 1944 chemistry prize, ever gained Nobel recognition for the discovery of nuclear fission.

Jan Oort and Hendrik van de Hulst, the cofavorites in 1960, committed the cardinal sin of being astrophysicists. Decades earlier the Nobel committee had designated astrophysics too similar to astronomy, which was considered unworthy of the physics Nobel, thus derailing the candidacy of frequent nominee George Ellery Hale. That stigma apparently continued until 1974, when the booming field of radio astrophysics was apparently deemed relevant enough to award the prize to Martin Ryle and Antony Hewish. Historians will have to wait until 2024—the academy releases its nominations after 50 years—to see whether a glut of nominations for Ryle and Hewish spurred the committee to change its stance.

It doesn’t always pay to be the favorite

For each year, the table below lists the leading vote-getter, the Nobel Prize winner, and the percentage of nominators’ ballots on which each of those people appeared. The favorite won at least a share of the prize in shaded years. An asterisk denotes that the given year’s prize was deferred to the following year. In those cases, the percentages shown for the winners reflect the votes of the prize year and the following year, since both years’ voting pools were considered.