Nobel lottery in the era of mass graves - Reuters

Ilya Ferapontov, RIA Novosti.

Swedish academics are not able to give all the sisters on earrings: awarding the Nobel Prize in Physics Peter Higgs and Francois Engler, they have ignored the other three authors of the Higgs mechanism – Gerald Guralnik, Carl Hagen, and Tom Kibble.

And if

Kibble Briton took the situation stoically, the American Hagen frankly offended and suggests that it is an attempt to “squeeze out” the number of Americans winners.

In 1964 he published three articles is really on the mechanism of spontaneous symmetry breaking. The first of them – Engler and the late Robert Brout – appeared in the summer, in September, an article Higgs, and only a month – Article Guralnik, Hagen and Kibble. Traditionally, authors of “Higgs” mechanism called all six.

Nobel Committee apparently guided arithmetic, awarding winning author of the first two articles and ignoring the third.
Hagen believes that on this occasion the Nobel committee had to change the rules under which the winners should be only three, but not separate “six”.

Interestingly, however, another, which of them would get a prize, if not thousands of physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider, which was discovered the Higgs boson. I think the correct answer is “no.” But the discoverer of the Nobel Committee to award the particles can not – they are much more than three.

The reality of modern science is now very different from the situation in which Alfred Nobel wrote his last will and testament.

“Mass graves” – Article, where the authors are hundreds, if not thousands of people – the norm for modern physics. For example, the discoverers of the Higgs boson are registered entire CMS collaboration and ATLAS, each of which consists of thousands of people.

Previously, in order to open a new law of nature, it was enough to accurately measure the time of the fall of the iron core with the Leaning Tower of Pisa, this will now take years, billions of dollars and gigawatts of energy.

We have quite know the world around him. Mankind is drawn further and further away from the usual scale – in the depth of the microcosm and the depth of space. The problem is that the further back we climb, the more expensive it is to us. Research project worth billions of dollars is no longer an uncommon.

Thus the situation when the Nobel Prize instituted its not a trace remains. The Nobel Committee found a way out: to give the award theorists to predict the discovery.However

1960s many theorists have proposed a variety of different types of the standard model, a variety of options – from the Higgs boson, without the Higgs boson, with many different Higgs bosons, many variants of the theory of supersymmetry. The reality could easily be arranged quite differently.

theorists play the lottery with the universe – we build a theory, the experimenters spend years on her check if they support the theory – you won.

Perhaps the Nobel committee is really to change the rules and give the prize is the one who said the key word?

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