I’ve often wondered: Should the number of Nobel prizes awarded scale with the population? There are far more scientists working today than 50 or 100 years ago, and cappping the number of winners makes them more prestigious over time. Perhaps they will become TOO prestigious...
The fact that they can’t be awarded to a collective rather detracts from the prestige, because for big experiments it is really the collaboratin as a whole that made the discovery and not some guy at the top.
That is true for any discovery after the stone hand ax.
A "true" discovery that can be ascribed to one person 100% instead of to a network of people working jointly in space and time (the dead are involved too!) needs that person to work without using knowledge as well as any tools created by others (in space as well as in time).
Humanity is more like a brain - the secret of our success is in the connections between us (again, in space as well as in time).
My own conclusion, but I found this in support:
https://youtu.be/jaoQh6BoH3c ("Henrich is professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University.")
> The number of individuals who know how to make a can of Coke is zero. The number of individual nations that could produce a can of Coke is zero. ... Invention and creation is something we are all in together. Modern tool chains are so long and complex that they bind us into one people and one planet. They are not only chains of tools, they are also chains of minds: local and foreign, ancient and modern, living and dead — the result of disparate invention and intelligence distributed over time and space.
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Same in business. Each time you hear about an extremely well-paid executive or a "self-made(!!?) billionaire" remind yourself that those people's main "accomplishment" is to live today. How much of the network effects (of the human network in space and in time(!)) does one person "deserve"?
I would tell those "self-made" people complaining about taxation that if they go into the deep forest and stop using the human network - which is everybody else (let's even give them access to the dead people's achievements in the form of vast knowledge) - they can keep 100% of the grass and mud huts they manage to create.
Humanities wealth and more important its ability to create more of it is almost all network effects. If all the people alive would work a) in isolation and b) without anything they got from previous generations, what would we accomplish?
Einstein was a genius, so was Newton. What would they have accomplished a) without the exchange with their peers (network in space), b) without building on prior knowledge (network in time)?
So, who deserves that Nobel Prize? That billion dollar empire?
I don't mind any of those existing - I'm not an "evil communist". I do mind when people get a bit too excited about "deserving" and "stealing from me" (taxes). Relax and remember that you are one lucky bastard, able to benefit from network effects that you did next to nothing to help create (because most of it was and is created by everybody else).
Hey, thanks for writing all that out. I shared your comment with my family and it really made a positive difference in a long-standing disagreement we’ve had. I hope you continue to post your thoughts here.
Derek Price's "law of exponential increase" from "Science Since Babylon" (1961) is an observation that there has been an exponential growth of science over a long period of time.
The Nobel Prize hasn't had a corresponding growth.
The population has also had an exponential growth, so there is a definite correlation. Should some day we reach zero population growth, we'll learn if Price's law breaks down.
Science as an institution has definitely grown exponentially by any metric: the number of journals, papers, citations, academic positions, administrative positions, PhDs awarded, PhD students.
This does not necessarily correspond to growth in real rigorous knowledge about the world.
The former is easy to measure, the latter is hard to measure, but is what we should care about.
Isn't the error rate and the disagreement rate in the latter so high that any attempt to quantify it would end up in flame-wars and bicycle sheds?
That is, do you have any point other than to express a sort of personal cynicism?
To get back to the topic, do you believe there is less growth in "real rigorous knowledge about the world" being done now than 100 years ago when the Nobel Prize was established? Because I would disagree with that assessment.
> Isn't the error rate and the disagreement rate in the latter so high that any attempt to quantify it would end up in flame-wars and bicycle sheds?
Yes. Still much better than counting papers/journals/conferences/citation/degrees/students/PhDs.
> That is, do you have any point other than to express a sort of personal cynicism?
I believe that measuring science quantitatively is damaging. It creates a situation where those who game the system do much better than those who do good science.
> do you believe there is less growth in "real rigorous knowledge about the world" being done now than 100 years ago when the Nobel Prize was established? Because I would disagree with that assessment.
As a lay observer, I'd say that theoretical and particle physics is not advancing very quickly compared to 100 years ago. Late 19th century and early 20th century were magical times - 1905 alone brought special relativity, the photoelectric effect, and E=mc^2 (and that's just Albert Einstein).
Other fields, such as the more "mundane" areas of physics saw and still see a lot of progress, but Nobel prizes are rarely awarded there. Medicine had a great period in the first few decades after the war. Nutrition has gone backwards in recent decades.
Math, computer science, software, a lot of electrical engineering also saw a lot of progress, but it's irrelevant to the discussion. There's no Nobel prize in those fields.
BTW, Einstein never got a Nobel for special or general relativity.
I don't think it's fair to single out particle physics. The Standard Model is one of the best tested and most accurate theories we have. While there are certainly problems with it, it's a bit like saying that explorers these days aren't advancing as quickly as they did in the 1600s because we aren't discovering new islands at anywhere near the same rate.
Modern genetics is amazing. The new genome sequencing techniques have (among many things) helped us understand evolutionary history in a way that people didn't even dream of 75 years ago.
Astronomy has also undergone explosive growth in the last few decades. The discovery of new exoplanets doesn't even make the news any more.
The Nobel Prize for Physics in 2017 and 2011 were astronomy projects.
Some of the recent EE-related Physics Prizes were 2014 ("efficient blue light-emitting diodes"), and 2009 (fiber optics); at least one person in each case was an EE.
