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0 pointsmnl12y ago0 comments

Well... no. Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer were awarded the Nobel prize in 1984 for the discovery of the W and Z particles (January 1983). Glashow, Salam and Weinberg were awarded with it in 1979, before the Electroweak Theory was fully confirmed, although there were solid hints at that time, it was a bit premature.

I'm really not too happy about this because the Nobel prize has shunned deserving scientists again. The consensus is that this mechanism can be attributed to three papers, One from Englert and Brout, another from Higgs, and yet another from Guralnik, Hagen and Kibble.

The silly rule of having to give the award to at most three living authors rules out Brout and, as it would be a problem to choose one of GHK (because they signed in alphabetical order, good for them) it's too obvious why they're out, even when the current understanding of the theory can be traced back to their string of papers.

This is not the first time: for instance, nobody really understands why Cabibbo wasn't awarded some years ago along with Kobayashi and Maskawa... for the CKM matrix!

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anbu3212y ago

GHK published their paper later in the year (although they apparently arrived at the result independently..), which might be why they were left out.

In 1962 P.W. Anderson worked out that Nambu–Goldstone massless mode can combine with the massless gauge field modes to produce a massive vector field (e.g. the so-called "higgs-mechanism", but in a non-relativistic context). In 1964 E&B,H,GHK showed that this is also possible in a relativistically invariant theory.

Here's a twitter comment from John Preskill (caltech): "The emphasis on finding a relativistic model may be misplaced, though. Anderson understood the mechanism well." https://twitter.com/preskill/status/387580651664191488

So maybe Anderson is more deserving of the last spot than GHK.

VLM12y ago

Civilized behavior would imply private splitting of the cash, at least. I can't remember an example of that ever happening with any Nobel award in any field, although its probably happened. One of those things I'm not sure how to google for without getting 99% unrelated. If done completely privately there may be no public record of any sort...

Steuard12y ago

I've always had the impression that the cash is the least important part of a Nobel prize. Even if you're being purely mercenary about it, Nobel laureates can probably get paid speaking engagements whenever they want. But it's the prestige that really matters, and I suspect that for most scientists a share of the cash would be a poor substitute.

ISL12y ago

As a physicist: There are lots of good reasons to go into physics. Doing it for the money probably isn't one of them.

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