The Nobel ballot of James Franck

In 1963, the year before he died of a heart attack at the age of 81, retired University of Chicago professor James Franck did what he had done almost every year for half his life: He submitted a nomination for the Nobel Prize in Physics. Thirty-eight years earlier, the German-born experimentalist had shared the physics Nobel for his part in discovering “the laws governing the impact of an electron upon an atom.” Like all laureates, he received a standing invitation to nominate colleagues for future prizes.

And nominate he did. Franck relished collaboration (see the article by Frank von Hippel, Physics Today, June 2010, page 41 ) and spent time in several of the world’s physics hotbeds—Berlin, Göttingen, Copenhagen, Chicago—where he crossed paths with numerous physics luminaries. When he worked with people he admired, he didn’t shy away from endorsing them. Over a 36-year span, he submitted 34 nominations for the physics prize—more than any other nominator through 1966, the most recent year for which the Nobel Prize organization has released nomination data. The next-closest nominators, laureates Max von Laue and Louis de Broglie, submitted 31 ballots. Only six other physicists of that era submitted 20 nominations or more. Franck also submitted eight nominations for the chemistry prize.

The graphic below shows the 29 physicists Franck nominated during his career and the years he nominated them. Nominations that produced a Nobel the same year they were made are shown in orange; physicists who ultimately won the physics Nobel have asterisks next to their names. A close look at Franck’s voting record reveals a laureate who stuck steadfastly to his role as gatekeeper to physics’ most prestigious institution—despite being frustrated by the Nobel selection committee at nearly every turn.

For some a vote, for others a campaign

Among the ranks of Nobel nominators, there were those who were content to cast a nomination and let come what may. Albert Einstein almost never nominated the same person twice, even though 7 of the 10 physicists he nominated lost on the first try. His lone repeat nomination went to quantum theorist Erwin Schrödinger, who won the 1933 Nobel after being overlooked the year before.

But then there were other laureates who didn’t so much nominate candidates as campaign for them. If their nominee was spurned by the committee one year, they tried again the next year, and the year after that. Robert Millikan was a campaigner. Even after his protégé Carl Anderson won the 1936 prize for the discovery of the positron, Millikan nominated Anderson 10 more times for work with Seth Neddermeyer on cosmic rays. Fellow campaigner Patrick Blackett, the cosmic-ray physicist who received the 1948 prize, used all but five of his 17 nominations to lobby for his former collaborator Giuseppe Occhialini. Anderson never won a second Nobel, and Occhialini never won a first.

Franck was the quintessential campaigner. When the committee rejected his nominations, he would try again, often testing different combinations of nominees and different allocations of the prize between them. He invested much of his nominating capital in Otto Stern, whose 1922 experiment with Walther Gerlach demonstrated the quantization of angular momentum in atoms. In 1940, after watching his first eight nominations for Stern fail, Franck tried nominating Stern on two ballots at once—each with a different set of co-nominees. When that trick failed, Franck gave up. Four years later, Stern finally received a Nobel, not for the Stern–Gerlach experiment but for the discovery of the proton’s magnetic moment and for work with molecular beams.

The committee rules

Franck repeated old nominations far more often than he proposed new ones. He regularly nominated close friends and collaborators, such as nuclear fission codiscoverers Lise Meitner (five nominations) and Otto Hahn (four), quantum theorist Max Born (four), and spectroscopy pioneer Robert Wood (six).

But Franck’s persistence rarely paid off. If his nominee didn’t win on the first try, they were unlikely to win on later tries. Of the 11 physicists for whom Franck cast multiple nominations, only Born won on the strength of a repeat endorsement from Franck. Three nominees, Stern, Maria Goeppert Mayer, and Hans Jensen, won a year or more after Franck last nominated them. Goeppert Mayer and Jensen won for their shell model of nuclear structure. Two others, Hahn and physical chemist Peter Debye, received chemistry prizes.

That theoretical physicist Arnold Sommerfeld never won despite six nominations from Franck and 84 nominations in all—the most received by any physicist—was particularly hard for Franck to swallow. “I find it absolutely always unjust that Sommerfeld didn’t get the Nobel Prize for the fine structure,” Franck told Goeppert Mayer in a 1962 interview , referring to Sommerfeld’s identification of the fundamental constant that characterizes the strength of electromagnetic interactions. “I made myself several times the proposal. I really don’t know why it didn’t work out.”

The reason “it didn’t work out” is almost certainly the same reason so many of Franck’s other nominations didn’t work out: A powerful voice on the selection committee had other ideas. As historian Robert Marc Friedman details in The Politics of Excellence , that powerful voice often belonged to Swedish theoretical physicist Carl Wilhelm Oseen. Friedman notes that it was Oseen who insisted on giving the 1930 prize to Chandrasekhara Raman alone—even though the committee member tasked with evaluating Raman had recommended he share the prize with Wood, one of Franck’s nominees. Likewise, when Stern’s “worthiness for a prize was repeatedly spelled out year after year by the likes of Franck,” Friedman writes, Oseen “was not persuaded, indeed he was not willing to be persuaded.” (See the accompanying article on Oseen and his fellow committee members’ evaluations of Nobel favorites.)

Franck barely hid his frustration when he thought the committee had made a misstep. “It is really a scandal. How often . . . the Nobel Prize is given not in the right order,” he told Goeppert Mayer in 1962, noting that the physical chemist Willard Libby won the chemistry Nobel for carbon dating while Martin Kamen, the discoverer of carbon-14, was still waiting for recognition. (Kamen never would win a Nobel.) “Libby deserves it, and I am very pleased that he gets it, but [it’s] not quite correct to give it to him before Kamen.”

For Franck, it wasn’t enough to honor the right person—one had to honor the right achievement. When Emilio Segrè shared the 1959 physics prize with Owen Chamberlain for heading the collaboration that discovered the antiproton at Berkeley Radiation Laboratory’s cyclotron, Franck didn’t mince words : “When he got the Nobel Prize I said he got it for the wrong thing. . . . I said that he deserved it, but not for that.” Presumably Franck, who nominated Segrè for the 1956 prize alongside Meitner, Goeppert Mayer, and Jensen, would have preferred to see Segrè recognized for his earlier work with heavy elements.

A job that never ends

For many laureates, the job of identifying the next Nobel laureate continues long after they hang up their lab coats. Millikan continued advocating for Anderson’s second Nobel up until Millikan’s death at age 85. Quantum theorist and 1918 laureate Max Planck turned 89 the year he cast his final nomination, for Meitner. Had she won, Planck wouldn’t have lived long enough to see her accept the prize.

Franck cast what would be his final nomination, for biophysicist Max Delbrück, in 1963. Early in his career, Delbrück had worked under Meitner and made important contributions in the field of gamma-ray scattering. But he later turned his attention to biophysics. Although the committee rebuffed Franck’s nomination of Delbrück for the 1963 physics prize, six years later Delbrück shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for insights into the nature of gene replication. One imagines that Franck—ever insistent that the right person get the right prize for the right achievement—might have turned a little in his grave.