Q&A: Brian Keating wants to revamp the Nobel Prize

Since 1901, 207 physicists have won the Nobel Prize in Physics, an award endowed in the will of Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. For a few months in 2014 it seemed likely that the leaders of a team working on the BICEP2 telescope would join that distinguished list. In March of that year, the BICEP2 collaborators announced that they had detected compelling evidence of cosmic inflation. The press jumped on the story, and a video of a team member sharing the news with inflation theorist Andrei Linde went viral. But the excitement didn’t last. Subsequent analysis found that the BICEP2 signal was the result of distortions imprinted by galactic dust (see Physics Today, April 2015, page 17 ).

Brian Keating had a front-row seat to the rise and fall of the claimed discovery. A cosmologist at the University of California, San Diego, Keating was one of the founding members of the collaboration and devised the name BICEP. In his new book, Losing the Nobel Prize: A Story of Cosmology, Ambition, and the Perils of Science’s Highest Honor , Keating provocatively concludes that the prospect of a Nobel Prize influenced the way BICEP2 announced its findings—and that competition for the award discourages collaboration and creates false ideas about the way modern science is done.

In the May issue of Physics Today, Lloyd Knox calls the book “a compelling personal memoir, a fascinating history of cosmology, and an interesting firsthand account of a dramatic scientific adventure.”

PT: In the book, you write about the BICEP2 collaboration’s decision to hold a press conference before submitting its paper to peer review. Tell us a bit about the reasoning behind that decision. Did you agree with it?

KEATING: I was comfortable with it. I wouldn’t say that I was a huge supporter of it. Several other cosmic microwave background experiments had released papers of lesser potential significance through that approach, and I think that gave the leadership confidence to go ahead. But I think it was problematic in retrospect to not have anybody from outside the collaboration look at the BICEP2 results before release.

PT: What was it like to watch all of that excitement around BICEP2’s findings build and then to learn that the observation was caused by dust?

KEATING: Certainly one of the more disappointing moments of my life—to have this idea for an experiment and have the experiment work flawlessly, but to have the interpretation be retracted after the so-called XXX paper from the Planck collaboration. People will remember the retraction, but no one will ever really appreciate, in my mind, the technical accomplishments.

I like to think about what would have happened if we didn’t have an interpretation in the paper, if we just recorded what we saw. But we were worried that the Planck collaboration was going to scoop us—they certainly played their cards very close to their chest, because they wouldn’t share the data that would have been either exculpatory or damning.

This is the way that science has unfortunately come. And I believe it’s geared around a desire to win the Nobel Prize—and not necessarily just among the scientists. People say, “Well, I don’t know any scientist whose sole focus is to win a Nobel Prize.” I think that’s probably true, but I also don’t know too many actors or actresses who say, “My sole focus is to win an Oscar.” And yet, you better believe the movie studios want that.

What’s the analog of the movie studios for a working physicist? It’s the funding agencies. It’s clear that they want to justify things to their patrons, and it’s much easier to explain and simplify their mission and their success by pointing to a metric like the Nobel Prize. On all the major three-letter agency websites , you’ll find a list of how many Nobel Prizes they’ve funded. And then university laboratories will brag about anybody who ever set foot in the building and won a Nobel. I think it’s kind of ridiculous.

PT: What inspired you to write Losing the Nobel Prize?

KEATING: I had an inkling that the story of BICEP2 would be told in a way that would focus on the Nobel Prize—either the event being worthy of a Nobel Prize, or the event disappearing, having to be retracted, and not winning the Nobel Prize. But I didn’t anticipate being asked by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to nominate candidates for the Nobel Prize for 2016, just a year after the BICEP2 results literally turned to dust! At first it was really a great honor. And then it kind of turned into—not horror, but I was really surprised, shocked, and disappointed by what I discovered.

PT: How did becoming a Nobel nominator change your perspective?

KEATING: When I looked at Alfred Nobel’s will and compared it with the letter that I received from the Nobel Prize committee, I was really startled by what I found. The will said that the prize had to be given to the person—singular—who had made the greatest discovery or invention in terms of impact on the betterment of mankind in the preceding year. I couldn’t think of any Nobel Prize that had ever been given out within a year.

So I looked at my invitation to nominate. The committee said, basically, “We don’t want you to pay attention to that pesky clause in Nobel’s will. Instead you can nominate three people, and it could be something that was discovered or invented a long time ago.”

The first Nobel Prize went to Wilhelm Röntgen, who invented the ever-popular Röntgen rays, which you get at your doctor nowadays as x rays. And that discovery was made by a single person the same year that Nobel wrote down his will, 1895. It instantly transformed the world for the better. It aided in the discovery and treatment of numerous maladies. It went from the lab to the doctor’s office within a couple of weeks. It really does completely adhere to Nobel’s vision for the prize. Röntgen discovered the rays around the time Nobel was writing his will, so it’s impossible for me to think he wasn’t influenced by that discovery.

Basic science research has evolved so much since the time of Alfred Nobel. There has not been a single-winner Nobel Prize in Physics in more than 25 years, and [Georges Charpak ] might be the last one ever because of the exponential growth of physics projects in the “big science” era.

PT: Do you think there are other prizes, like the Dirac Medal or the Wolf Prize, that are also creating some bad incentives for science? Or do you think there’s something particularly problematic about the Nobel?

KEATING: I think all these prizes that recognize individuals have troubles. I read an article recently about similar problems with the Fields Medal. There are artificial strictures on it, such as the requirement that it go to a mathematician under 40, and it was heavily gender biased for many years, up until very recently. These single, individual prizes promote the stereotype that science is done by at most three people. I think it’s a disservice to the way science is actually carried out.

But I call the Nobel Prize the greatest monopoly in the world because it’s the most prestigious prize there is in any field, any vocation. There’s no competition from the other prizes that you mentioned. Few people know what the Dirac Medal is, for example, although it is named after a Nobel laureate. The Nobel Prize is so prestigious that I think it has a greater responsibility.

PT: Do you think there are changes that the Nobel committee can make to the prize that would benefit science?

KEATING: Absolutely. My desire is not to kill the Nobel Prize but to revive it in a way that benefits mankind by advancing the spectrum of diversity and inclusivity that modern science has become, or should aspire to.

In my book, I outline five ways that the Nobel Prize could be reformed. One of the five is that we should allow posthumous Nobel Prizes. The lack of a posthumous award, I think, is the most insidious of the Nobel’s problems. In 2017 the LIGO Nobel was awarded, of course, to three people. But it left out one of the founding fathers who started the LIGO experiment, Ron Drever . The winners admitted that if that prize had been awarded in 2016 when Drever was alive, he would have won. But the Nobel really rewrites that history. In the citation the committee actually goes out of its way to say that Drever “ultimately ended up outside the project’s primary path ,” and yeah, he started it, but in the end it was really these three guys that are still alive. The committee was able to justify limiting the number of [LIGO] laureates to three thanks to the 1974 stipulation prohibiting posthumous prizes.

PT: What are you working on now?

KEATING: My main focus is the Simons Observatory , a massive project located in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile that I co-lead. The project is a precursor to what’s known as the CMB Stage 4 experiment , to fully mine the cosmic microwave background of all of its secrets, whether they be in polarization or in temperature.

I think it’s quite beautiful because we’re trying to answer questions as to whether we are in a privileged location in space or in time. Did inflation occur? Was there a termination to inflation, or does it go on eternally? Will there be evidence ever found for the multiverse? I think these are really the biggest questions you could pursue.

We’ve impaneled a board of competitors and other people in the field to serve as our external advisory committee. And that will get us impartial and unbiased advice as to how we should handle things like big releases.

PT: What are you reading right now?

KEATING: I’ve been reading a lot of business books. There are a lot of parallels between running a scientific entity like the Simons Observatory and running a medium-size corporation. I think scientists often feel because of their brilliance that they’re capable of basically doing anything—that it’s easy to be a manager, so easy that you only need an MBA to do it. And I think it’s quite the contrary.

Right now on my nightstand is a book called Lincoln on Leadership. Lincoln would go out of the White House as much as he could to be with the troops. In my case, the troops are the graduate students or the postdocs. He went to meet with the generals, which are like the co-investigators. I’m reading that and letting my brain move in a different direction—to try to be a manager and be worthy of leading such a large group of some of the world’s brightest human beings.