
Scientists who never won a Nobel Prize - mmhsieh
https://www.wondersofphysics.com/2019/01/scientists-who-never-won.html
======
dekhn
Personally, I think the Nobel in Chemistry should have gone to Harry Noller
(UCSC), who established that the core function of the ribosome is implemented
by RNA, not proteins. After 20+ years of making his case and generally not
being believed (even though he had excellent data), a competitor did a crystal
structure proving him right and won the prize.

[https://reports.news.ucsc.edu/breakthrough/](https://reports.news.ucsc.edu/breakthrough/)
[https://www.mercurynews.com/2009/10/08/nobel-committee-
skips...](https://www.mercurynews.com/2009/10/08/nobel-committee-skips-over-
ucsc-chemist/)
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2821081/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2821081/)
[https://blogs.sciencemag.org/books/2018/11/19/gene-
machine/](https://blogs.sciencemag.org/books/2018/11/19/gene-machine/)

Harry was my advisor and helped me start my career in computational biology
back in the mid 90s. I asked him recently about the Nobel and he said it
didn't bother him since one the Nobel was awarded, nobody ever doubted he was
wrong about the ribosome again.

~~~
julienchastang
+1 for Noller. In a previous life, I worked as an undergrad in an RNA lab
(remains the best job I have ever had) and we studied Noller's work closely.

~~~
dekhn
Harry was a great teacher (I had him for Biochem 101 and a lab class). Very
understated but quite good at communicating his enthusiasm for the biophysics
underlying biology). The lab class, "Biology of Macromolecules" was
challenging: you're handed a pile of microbial cells, told the species, and
then you have to go to the primary literature and learn how to purify
restriction endonuclease from it (using the original methods) and then map a
plasmid. I remember he said something which sounded arrogant, but I later
learned was excellent advice: "most of you are going to take the entire
quarter to run your experiment. I would do all the lab work in 1 long day- the
moment you crack those cells open, proteases are going to start eating your
REs".

He did say that if I wanted to be a successful scientist, I should never have
a girlfriend or get married, or have kids, because those all eat into your
ability to spend 18 hours in the lab every day (I married my college
girlfriend, was a modest scientist, and transitioned to software engineering,
and _then_ had kids; there's no way I could handle being a successful
scientist while having a family).

~~~
julienchastang
I got into the UCSC grad program at the time you were there but didn't go.
Funny how our paths almost crossed. I actually wanted to study with Haussler
whom I met over lunch once. Yeah, I chose the SE life with family, kids
myself. IMO there are too many scientists discouraging students from being
scientists. Yeah, it is hard, but anything of value is going to be a challenge
no matter what you do.

~~~
dekhn
Haussler was my undergrad advisor (along with Harry). I remember I tried to
get a job working for Harry, and when he turned me down his postdoc said "Hey,
David Haussler over in CS is starting up a computational biology group, you
should go talk to them". That was one of the most valuable pieces of long-term
career advice I could ever get.

Personally I now actively advise people to avoid becoming (academic)
scientists unless they are willing to dedicate an unreasonable amount of their
life to it (more or less agreeing with Harry). It's really unfortunate but
there just aren't enough jobs out there and too many of the folks who do
manage to get positions aren't particularly honest or ethical.

------
dejv
Well there are many great scientists that should won Nobel Price. My favorite
was Antonin Holy [0].

Very humble guy who invented a lot of modern drugs, but who didn't like to go
conference circus road which is required to get the prize (paraphrasing his
words). He worked in the lab till his dead, lived in cheap house and commuted
to work by public transport even after earning hundreds of millions, or more,
in fees for his discoveries.

[0]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton%C3%ADn_Holý](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton%C3%ADn_Holý)

------
DiabloD3
Surprised to see Kristian Birkeland missing from the list. Nominated 7 times,
but never won.

From Wikipedia:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristian_Birkeland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristian_Birkeland)

"Birkeland organized several expeditions to Norway's high-latitude regions
where he established a network of observatories under the auroral regions to
collect magnetic field data. The results of the Norwegian Polar Expedition
conducted from 1899 to 1900 contained the first determination of the global
pattern of electric currents in the polar region from ground magnetic field
measurements. The discovery of X-rays inspired Birkeland to develop vacuum
chambers to study the influence of magnets on cathode rays. Birkeland noticed
that an electron beam directed toward a magnetised terrella was guided toward
the magnetic poles and produced rings of light around the poles and concluded
that the aurora could be produced in a similar way. He developed a theory in
which energetic electrons were ejected from sunspots on the solar surface,
directed to the Earth, and guided to the Earth's polar regions by the
geomagnetic field where they produced the visible aurora. This is essentially
the theory of the aurora today."

"In 1913, Birkeland may have been the first to predict that plasma was
ubiquitous in space. He wrote: "It seems to be a natural consequence of our
points of view to assume that the whole of space is filled with electrons and
flying electric ions of all kinds. We have assumed that each stellar system in
evolutions throws off electric corpuscles into space. It does not seem
unreasonable therefore to think that the greater part of the material masses
in the universe is found, not in the solar systems or nebulae, but in 'empty'
space."[7]"

"In 1916, Birkeland was probably the first person to successfully predict that
the solar wind behaves as do all charged particles in an electric field: "From
a physical point of view it is most probable that solar rays are neither
exclusively negative nor positive rays, but of both kinds".[12][13] In other
words, the Solar Wind consists of both negative electrons and positive ions.""

Without him, the modern study of cosmology and planetary science would be a
mess.

------
krnsll
Freeman Dyson is a glaring miss here.

Feynman and Schwinger shared the 1965 Nobel in Physics for their respective
perspectives on Quantum Electrodynamics. But it was Dyson who unified
Feynman's diagram approach with Schwinger's field model.

~~~
ChrisLomont
Shinichirō Tomonaga also shared the 1965 Nobel for this work, and his work was
much more fundamental to QED than Dyson.

The Nobel Prize can go to at most three people.

~~~
krnsll
Thanks for pointing that out. My apologies for missing Tomonaga. Was going on
my anecdotal memory, should have researched.

------
scottlocklin
Sticking Hawking and Tesla in with Bose and Poincare is .... eccentric. It's
not a popularity contest.

Fun fact: one of Bose's grandsons worked as a bartender at Triple Rock in
Berkeley for a while.

~~~
rxhernandez
I mean, Tesla was as ubiquitous (if not more) in my EE degree as Bose and
Poincare were in my Physics degree. I don't think I heard Hawking mentioned
once during my Physics degree but I also didn't care to take any astronomy
coursework.

~~~
dekhn
Hawking was a cosmologist not an astronomer. It would have come in any class
covering advanced black hole theory.

------
SommerfeldNobel
Any list that doesn't include Sommerfeld is written by amateurs. But it's
unsurprising. He's the best physicist no one has heard of.

Aside his long list of accomplishments which span pioneering work in all of
physics, from QM, relativity, to fluids, he also accomplished:

\- Arguably the father of QM, since the "founders" were all his students and
built upon, or generalized his ideas.

\- Four of his students got Nobel prizes. Three of his post-docs got the nod.
One of them, Pauling, got two Nobel prizes. His students include Heissenburg,
Debye, Bethe, Pauli.

\- Nominated 84 times.

\- His work on Special Relativity helped it gain acceptance

\- Wrote some of the best physics books.

~~~
roberto
> Nominated 84 times.

Interesting, the article says that "Poincaré was nominated a record 51 times
for the Nobel Prize but never won."

~~~
vonmoltke
The article is wrong on it being a record. According to the Nobel Foundation's
nomination database, Arnold Sommerfeld was indeed nominated 84 times and won
0:
[https://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/archive/show_people.ph...](https://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/archive/show_people.php?id=8661)

------
Florin_Andrei
> _Poincaré was nominated a record 51 times for the Nobel Prize but never
> won._

I feel Poincaré did a lot of good work in physics but he was not... a closer,
I guess. He (along with other people) had the basics of relativity on their
hands in the early 1900s, but for whatever reason it was Einstein who
published the fully-formed conclusions of that whole collective process of
exploration.

Poincaré did a lot of great work in math. I think of him as primarily a
mathematician.

> _Tesla_

Great engineer, but I don't see how he belongs here.

------
ffggvv
There’s also Henry Moseley who likely would’ve won the 1916 prize in physics
but died in 1915 as a soldier in WW1

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Moseley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Moseley)

his death sparked the government to change its policy of enlisting scientists

------
julienchastang
Rosalind Franklin - X-ray crystallographer who helped decipher the structure
of DNA.

Carl Woese - Discoverer of the 3rd domain of life archaebacteria among other
scientific accomplishments.

~~~
btilly
Rosalind Franklin definitely belongs on the list. However her not getting the
prize has a simple reason. She died of ovarian cancer before the prize was
awarded for DNA, so couldn't have been considered.

Ironically her cancer could well have been caused by the research that she was
not publicly recognized for.

~~~
julienchastang
Yes. That is true. She passed away before the Nobel. Anyone interested in this
topic should read "The Double Helix" by Watson. It is a real page turner and
discusses how Watson and Crick kind of stole Franklin's research.

~~~
btilly
Absolutely.

Now there is an interesting question. How could Watson and Crick have figured
out Franklin's data faster than she did? The answer turns out to be
coincidence. There are 230 crystallographic groups. As a crystallographer,
Franklin knew them all, and had to rule them all out. However Watson had done
his PhD research on a protein that happened to have the same crystallographic
group as DNA. So he knew one group really, really well and it turned out to be
the right one.

Sometimes luck is more important than skill.

~~~
dekhn
I don't think what you said is accurate. First, the work was done in fibre
diffraction (2d pattern), not crystal diffractionso I'm not certain that
crystallographic groups even apply (typically for representing 3d symmetry
groups). Second, nothing in the W&C paper has to do with determining the
crystallographic group, rather they proposed a model which was consistent with
the diffraction data, but also with a wide range of other observations, such
as Chargaff's rules, which led to the modelling of base pairs with the correct
eno/ketol forms. What Franklin _did_ know was that the structural was helical,
but not that it was a double helix with antiparallel strands (and that's what
W&C posited, leading to the most wonderfully stated conclusion of all time
("it has not escaped our notice...")

A few other important points: Franklin published a paper in the same journal
edition as W&C with her own work. W&C thanked Franklin (she's in the
acknowledgements). She got more credit than people today believe (mainly
because of the misleading book "Dark Lady" and the terrible book "The Double
Helix").

The best original source I've found on this is The Eighth Day of Creation,
which is based on primary sources (Franklin's notebooks which she willed to
Aaron Klug, along wiht interviews with most of the people involved). After
reading that I concluded that the work Franklin did on this project did not
warrant a Nobel Prize even if she had not died before it was awarded.

(my PhD is on DNA structure, and I spent a huge amount of time researching its
history)

~~~
Pulcinella
I will second “The Eighth Day of Creation” (which despite its cool title, has
nothing to do with religion).

I can’t agree with your conclusion, though. It’s very clear she should have
been awarded the prize, not Wilkins (who I think should not have received the
prize even “in place of” Franklin). The book paints a picture of Wilkins not
doing much more than management work and training Raymond Gosling (Franklin’s
PhD student who did the actual work and probably should have won in her place,
if not Chargaff or someone else).

Of course, the book also makes it very clear that John Randall told Wilkins
one thing and Franklin something very different about their working
relationship that caused their relationship to be very tense and Franklin to
largely cut Wilkins out of her work. Why Randall did this and never clarified
or why Wilkins or Franklin never sought clarification from him is unclear.

~~~
dekhn
But... what exactly did Rosalind Franklin do in this case, other than collect
the raw data (not Nobel-worthy) and notice that it was consistent with a helix
(not enough of the elucidation to be useful for molecular biology)? She didn't
come up with any of the subtle guesses about nucleic acid pairing,
antiparallel strands, or the exact atomic positions (later shown to be mildly
erroneous due to the water/alcohol content).

it's clear Franklin was mistreated, but far from clear that there is evidence
of Nobel-worthy work by Franklin in this case.

------
globuous
"Poincaré was nominated a record 51 times for the Nobel Prize but never won."

Damn !

------
giloux314
I'd add Emmy Noether to this list :
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether)

~~~
rurban
I had the same thought. But mathematicians who just help physicists rarely get
a nobel. Even if its work is invaluable, such as Emmy's work. You could call
her one of the "fathers" if modern theoretical physics, if it wouldn't be too
ironic.

Thanksfully they didn't forget to mention Lise Meitner

~~~
dnautics
to be fair, Mietner has an element named after her which is a far, far more
exclusive club.

------
dplavery92
Maybe Vera Rubin belongs on this list as well.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_Rubin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_Rubin)

~~~
CalChris
Along with Henrietta Leavitt.

------
btilly
The most glaring omission in my view is Fred Hoyle.

Read [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fred-hoyle-
missin...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fred-hoyle-missing-
equation/) for more.

------
Rochus
Interesting list. After all, there is also the opposite case, where it is
difficult to understand why a certain prize was awarded. I once attended a
lecture by Nobel Laureate Richard Ernst, where he presented a good dozen Nobel
Prizes for which there was a corresponding Russian publication, which had been
published earlier than the honored work.

------
dnautics
Clyde Hutchison. Worked on the wrong type of restriction enzyme (type I) which
is devilishly hard because it's cutsite is stochastic (also makes it useless
for bioengineering). Missed one Nobel prize there (went to his buddy Ham
Smith, who worked on type ii which everybody knows and loves).

Later proposed a theoretical mechanism for site directed mutagenesis
(contingent on economical DNA synthesis). When that technology rolled around,
he was on the paper - apparently he did the wet experiment himself - but it
was Adams that got the prize.

Missed two Nobel prizes. First one was bad luck, second one was all on the
committee.

Funny thing about biology, of you ask working biologists who discovered
restriction enzymes or who invented site directed mutagenesis, or who
discovered gfp, they will typically not be able to tell you.

------
hardtke
Stephen Hawking did not have an important theory with an experimentally
testable prediction, similar to the current crop of brilliant string theorists
(Ed Whitten, for instance). Alan Guth should have the Nobel Prize, in my
opinion, for his theory of inflation. It is widely accepted but does not have
a specific experimentally verified prediction that can rule out all other
scenarios. The Nobel committee does not want to be proven wrong later.

------
trimbo
Raymond Damadian.

The Nobel for inventing MRI went to Lauterbur and Mansfield, even though
Damadian played a major role and is recognized by many as "an inventor of
MRI". Full page ads ran in newspapers at the height of the controversy.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Damadian#Nobel_Prize_c...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Damadian#Nobel_Prize_controversy)

------
lisardo
It's missing Carlos Chagas
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize_controversies#1921](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize_controversies#1921)

------
mvaliente2001
Top greatest writer who never won a Nobel prize: Jorge Luis Borges.

~~~
roberto
People who won both the Nobel and the Oscar:

\- George Bernard Shaw \- Al Gore \- Bob Dylan (also a Pulitzer)

~~~
dylan604
EGOT+N?

~~~
wwarner
gold ENGOT

------
iaw
Early in my life I met a former nuclear physicist who had worked explicitly on
nuclear counter-intelligence against the Russians during the cold war
immediately post-WW2. The story was that he was being considered for a
nomination but declined because publicizing who he was would've created a
security issue.

------
tpmx
You wouldn't believe how proper, non-racist and balanced this comment was
before being seized upon by a mob, half of whom have deleted their messages
now.

Lesson to fellow Europeans: Don't ever comment on anything that involves race.
The Americans are going through something special at the moment and they're
lashing out at pretty much anything.

I wish I could delete this comment, but alas I can not.

~~~
dilippkumar
> this Indian-run website says...

It looks like Vedang Sati is just a regular guy on the internet who happens to
be of Indian origin and his pick of his favorite people don't show any obvious
bias[0].

On the other hand, I shouldn't even be defending him. The implied
bias/nationalism here is in poor taste. This is no different from saying

> this Jew-run website says...

[0] [https://www.vedangsati.com/p/about-
me.html](https://www.vedangsati.com/p/about-me.html)

~~~
tpmx
You should be ashamed for your cherrypicking and barely masked accusations of
racism and for (sort of) causing Godwin's law to be invoked. Did you learn the
technique at your workplace, btw? I can very easily imagine that.

------
mellosouls
Einstein. Yes, he won one - but as this discussion has expanded a bit from the
original article it could be argued he was underserved...

[https://www.huffpost.com/entry/einstein-fantasy-
physics_b_49...](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/einstein-fantasy-
physics_b_4948045)

~~~
catmistake
Personally, I think his work on the Photo-Electric Effect deserved the
recognition that it received. But Albert Einstein is far more myth than man.
Everyone idolizes Einstein, he was the quintessential mad scientist. And it is
difficult to challenge the notion of this myth without being accused of anti-
semetism. But I risk doing so...

When one actually studies the History of Science, one discovers shocking
things. None of the ideas attributed to Einstein were actually Einstein's. I
don't want to bash Einstein. He was truly brilliant. So another way to put it
is Einstein stood on the shoulders of giants. Though I can and will bash the
notion that Einstein was so innovative that all the ideas were his. None of
them were. Let's examine all the original insights traditionally attributed to
Albert Einstein. Comment too long, I will reply to my own comment and
continue...

~~~
catmistake
Empedocles (c. 490–430 BC) was the first to propose a theory of light, and
claimed that light has a finite speed. In 1021, Alhazen (Ibn al-Haytham)
published his Book of Optics, in which he presented a series of arguments
dismissing Empedocles emission theory of vision in favour of the now accepted
intromission theory, in which light moves from an object into the eye. This
led Alhazen to propose that light must have a finite speed. Also in the 11th
century, Ab Rayhn al-Brn agreed that light has a finite speed, and observed
that the speed of light is much faster than the speed of sound. In the 13th
century, Roger Bacon argued that the speed of light in air was not infinite,
using philosophical arguments backed by the writing of Alhazen and Aristotle.
In the 17 century, Pierre de Fermat also argued in support of a finite speed
of light. In 1629, Isaac Beeckman proposed an experiment in which a person
observes the flash of a cannon reflecting off a mirror about one mile (1.6 km)
away. In 1638, Galileo Galilei proposed an experiment, with an apparent claim
to having performed it some years earlier, to measure the speed of light by
observing the delay between uncovering a lantern and its perception some
distance away. He was unable to distinguish whether light travel was
instantaneous or not, but concluded that if it were not, it must nevertheless
be extraordinarily rapid. The first quantitative estimate of the speed of
light was made in 1676 by Rømer. From the observation that the periods of
Jupiter's innermost moon Io appeared to be shorter when the Earth was
approaching Jupiter than when receding from it, Rømer concluded that light
travels at a finite speed, and estimated that it takes light 22 minutes to
cross the diameter of Earth's orbit. Christiaan Huygens combined this estimate
with an estimate for the diameter of the Earth's orbit to obtain an estimate
of speed of light of 220000 km/s, 26% lower than the actual value. In his 1704
book Opticks, Isaac Newton reported Rømer's calculations of the finite speed
of light and gave a value of "seven or eight minutes" for the time taken for
light to travel from the Sun to the Earth (the modern value is 8 minutes 19
seconds). Newton queried whether Rømer's eclipse shadows were coloured;
hearing that they were not, he concluded the different colours travelled at
the same speed. In 1729, James Bradley discovered stellar aberration, and from
this effect he determined that light must travel 10210 times faster than the
Earth in its orbit (the modern figure is 10066 times faster) or, equivalently,
that it would take light 8 minutes 12 seconds to travel from the Sun to the
Earth. In the 19th century Hippolyte Fizeau developed a method to determine
the speed of light based on time-of-flight measurements on Earth and reported
a value of 315000 km/s. His method was improved upon by Léon Foucault who
obtained a value of 298000 km/s in 1862. In the year 1856, Wilhelm Eduard
Weber and Rudolf Kohlrausch measured the ratio of the electromagnetic and
electrostatic units of charge, 1/00, by discharging a Leyden jar, and found
that its numerical value was very close to the speed of light as measured
directly by Fizeau. The following year Gustav Kirchhoff calculated that an
electric signal in a resistanceless wire travels along the wire at this speed.
In the early 1860s, Maxwell showed that, according to the theory of
electromagnetism he was working on, electromagnetic waves propagate in empty
space at a speed equal to the above Weber/Kohlrausch ratio, and drawing
attention to the numerical proximity of this value to the speed of light as
measured by Fizeau, he proposed that light is in fact an electromagnetic wave.
In 1865, James Clerk Maxwell had proposed that light was an electromagnetic
wave, and therefore travelled at the speed c appearing in his theory of
electromagnetism. The well-designed experiment performed by Albert A.
Michelson and Edward W. Morley in 1887 failed to detect a luminiferous aether
medium through which electromagnetic waves travelled. Essential to Einstein's
theories, irregardless of still clinging to the notion of aether, and really
because of the Michelson-Morley experiment, Hendrik Lorentz proposed that the
motion of the apparatus through the aether may cause the apparatus to contract
along its length in the direction of motion, and he further assumed, that the
time variable for moving systems must also be changed accordingly ("local
time"), which led to the formulation of the Lorentz transformation. Based on
Lorentz's aether theory, Henri Poincaré (1900) showed that this local time (to
first order in v/c) is indicated by clocks moving in the aether, which are
synchronized under the assumption of constant light speed. In 1904, Poincaré
speculated that the speed of light could be a limiting velocity in dynamics,
provided that the assumptions of Lorentz's theory are all confirmed. In 1905,
Poincaré brought Lorentz's aether theory into full observational agreement
with the principle of relativity. To be clear, the modern origin of Relativity
is rooted in Poincaré's work, and it's deeper origins first appears nearly 300
years earlier in the 1632 Galilean Invariance, aka Galileo's Theory of
Relativity.

continues in reply to my own comment...

~~~
catmistake
It is well-known that Einstein was notoriously bad at mathematics. The sole
reason for the decade of delay between his 1905 Special Theory of Relativity
and his 1915 General Theory of Relativity is that Einstein did not have the
mathematics to calculate the formulas. He needed some of the work done by
Hermann Minkowski. By 1908 Minkowski realized that the special theory of
relativity, introduced by his former student Albert Einstein in 1905 and based
on the previous work of Lorentz and Poincaré, could best be understood in a
four-dimensional space, since known as the "Minkowski spacetime," in which
time and space are not separated entities but intermingled in a four-
dimensional space–time, and in which the Lorentz geometry of special
relativity can be effectively represented using the invariant interval x^2 +
y^2 + z^2 -c^2*t^2. So even the notion of space-time was not Einstein's idea.
Although Einstein is credited with finding the field equations for General
Relativity, the German mathematician David Hilbert published them in an
article before Einstein's article. This has resulted in accusations of
plagiarism against Einstein, although not from Hilbert, and assertions that
the field equations should be called the "Einstein–Hilbert field equations".
However, Hilbert did not press his claim for priority.

Albert Einstein's friendship with Marcel Grossmann began with their school
days in Zurich. Grossmann's careful and complete lecture notes at the Federal
Polytechnic School proved to be a salvation for Einstein, who missed many
lectures. Grossmann's father helped Einstein get his job at the Swiss Patent
Office in Bern, and it was Grossmann who helped to conduct the negotiations to
bring Einstein back from Prague as a professor of physics at the Zurich
Polytechnic. Grossmann was an expert in differential geometry and tensor
calculus; just the mathematical tools providing a proper mathematical
framework for Einstein's work on gravity. Thus, it was natural that Einstein
would enter into a scientific collaboration with Grossmann.

It was mathemetician Marcel Grossmann who emphasized the importance of a non-
Euclidean geometry called Riemannian geometry (also elliptic geometry) to
Einstein, which was a necessary step in the development of Einstein's general
theory of relativity. Abraham Pais's book on Einstein suggests that Grossmann
mentored Einstein in tensor theory as well. Grossmann introduced Einstein to
the absolute differential calculus, started by Christoffel and fully developed
by Ricci-Curbastro and Levi-Civita. Grossmann facilitated Einstein's unique
synthesis of mathematical and theoretical physics in what is still today
considered the most elegant and powerful theory of gravity: the general theory
of relativity. The collaboration of Einstein and Grossmann led to a ground-
breaking paper: "Outline of a Generalized Theory of Relativity and of a Theory
of Gravitation," which was published in 1913 and was one of the two
fundamental papers which established Einstein's theory of gravity.

continues in reply to my own comment...

~~~
dfphil
I heard Kip Thorne say, "Einstein was a mediocre mathematician. Now don't get
me wrong; he was a vastly better mathematician than I'll ever be, but Hilbert
was a great mathematician." We undergrads are sitting around thinking "great:
Hilbert > Einsten > Thorne >>>> us. We're doomed"

~~~
catmistake
Fair enough, though I was comparing him to his peers and friends.

------
x3c
For me, the most notable absence is Gandhi for Nobel for peace.

~~~
ninjinxo
He effectively won in 1948. They don't do posthumous awards, so they abstained
from giving out the prize that year, stating directly that: "there was no
suitable living candidate".

And he didn't get one a decade prior because he was reportedly a tad racist,
giving other candidates the edge.

------
adharmad
George Sudarshan

Fred Hoyle

------
scott31
Tesla is one of the most overrated persons in history. Edison is better in
every regard, except for killing an elephant

~~~
catmistake
_except for killing an elephant_

Let that stand as a symbol for all the other horrible things Edison did, like
electrocuting a number of dogs and cats, and killing his assistant.

Tesla is not exactly overrated, but at least he never stole credit for
inventions, and he never killed anyone, unlike Edison (his assistant,
glassblower Clarence Madison Dally, who died a rather horrible death).

"Relatively unknown," is a better description for Tesla. Edison invented a few
things, the telegraph... no that was David Alter. Edison invented something to
copy telegraphs, and he invented the phonograph, which was truly
revolutionary, a way to record sound... but he did not invent the record
player... he made lightbulbs practical... but he did not invent the electric
lightbulb, of course. Edison did not invent the kinetoscope, or movie camera
(that was Edward Muybridge) and he knew very little about it, but he took
credit for it anyway. Edison took credit for wax paper, but he had absolutely
nothing to do with that invention (invented by Gustav Le Gray). He did not
invent storage batteries, but he made a lot of money with them. Edison did not
invent the power generator, though he is credited for it (his assistants,
Charles Batchelor and Francis Upton, were the true inventors of this).

Nearly all the other great achievements attributed to Edison were actually
invented by his rival inventors or unknown (to the masses) employees, the
researchers he hired, (such as the electric chair, invented by Harold P.
Brown).

Tesla was a lot smarter than Edison. He never wrote anything down, and was
able to keep his designs in his head. He invented the Tesla coil, the Tesla
Turbine, The Shadowgraph, the Neon Lamp, The Niagra Falls Transformer House,
the Induction Motor, the RC boat, Alternating Current, and _Radio_. Tesla held
over 300 patents across 5 continents, and all of then were his innovations.
God knows how many of Edison's 1000-some patents were actually his.

I don't understand how you or anyone can believe what you wrote. Edison was a
major douche bag, an obvious sociopath, which sort of overshadows what he
actually invented, which actually number in the low double digits. Tesla's
inventions number in the low-mid triple digits

Tesla is not overrated, quite the opposite, apparently, and Edison certainly
is not better in any regard than Tesla.

But Tesla was weird, and not all that popular. Edison, like all successful
sociopaths throughout history, was hugely popular.

~~~
dnautics
> Edison was a major douche bag, an obvious sociopath, which sort of
> overshadows what he actually invented, which actually number in the low
> double digits

This is some sort of urban legend/myth that came about sometime in the early
2000s. Probably due to the Oatmeal.

Edison was not a sociopath. Specifically with respect to Dally, Edison kept
Dally on the payroll even when he was too sick to work, and IIRC personally
paid out Dally's immediate family a coninuing pension after Dally's death. For
the era around 1900 that was unheard of, and at the very least, evidence of
humanity that you don't seem to be willing to admit.

~~~
catmistake
Keeping Dally on the payroll doesn't negate that he initially showed no regard
for Dally's nor his own safety, which is a sociopathic trait. It does not make
up for Edison's ruthless practices, nor his unbridled ambition and greed.
Edison had no respect for Tesla, even cruelly mocking him, behavior you'll
find in sociopaths. Edison had a disregard for right and wrong, was
consistently dishonest, a compulsive liar, even taking credit for the
Fluoroscope which killed Dally, though Tesla had been working on it before
Edison irresponsibly began messing around with it. Dishonesty is a sociopathic
trait. Edison stiffed Tesla a significant amount of money he owed him for
fixing his DC motor, and in fact, Edison would not share any of his wealth.
Edison relished being the center of attention, another sociopathic trait. I
could compromise with you and say we can't know for certain that he was a
sociopath. He may have merely been a narcissist, as there are a number of
overlapping symptoms.

------
monster_group
It is easy to look at this list and say gender and ethnicity played a role
(which wouldn't be surprising particularly in that era). But five people on
the list are white men. Physicists were more likely to be white men (at least
in those times). So no matter what list you make of physicists, they will end
up on that list. My point is, it is not possible to deduce any bias from such
a list. For any coveted prize there are many well deserving people that don't
get it simply because there's only one prize to be awarded per year and
there's no sure and objective way to know if one who got it was indeed more
deserving than the others who didn't.

~~~
JKCalhoun
> My point is, it is not possible to deduce any bias from such a list.

Is it? In at least two (three?) of those cases the male colleagues were
recognized with the Nobel prize and their female colleagues were not.

~~~
monster_group
That's a good point.

