Charles Sheffield - A Braver Thing

VIP免费

2024-11-24 0 0 56.09KB 23 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

A BRAVER THING

Charles Sheffield

A DF Books NERD’s Release

First published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, February 1990

The palace banquet is predictably dull, but while the formal speeches roll on with their obligatory nods to

the memory of Alfred Nobel and his famous bequest, it is not considered good manners to leave or to

chat with one's neighbors. I have the time and opportunity to think about yesterday; and, at last, to

decide on the speech that I will give tomorrow.

A Nobel prize in physics means different things to different people. If it is awarded late in life, it is often

viewed by the recipient as the capstone on a career of accomplishment. Awarded early (Lawrence Bragg

was a Nobel Laureate at twenty-five) it often defines the winner's future; an early Prize may also

announce to the world at large the arrival of a new titan of science (Paul Dirac was a Nobel Laureate at

thirty-one).

To read the names of the Nobel Prize winners in physics is almost to recapitulate the history of

twentieth-century physics, so much so that the choice of winners often seems self-evident. No one can

imagine a list without Planck, the Curies, Einstein, Bohr, Schrödinger, Dirac, Fermi, Yukawa, Bardeen,

Feynman, Weinberg, or the several Wilsons (though Rutherford is, bizarrely, missing from the Physics

roster, having been awarded his Nobel Prize in Chemistry).

And yet the decision-making process is far from simple. A Nobel Prize is awarded not for a lifetime's

work, but explicitly for a particular achievement. It is given only to living persons, and as Alfred Nobel

specified in his will, the prize goes to “the person who shall have made the most important discovery or

invention within the field of physics."

It is those constraints that make the task of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences so difficult.

Consider these questions:

. What should one do when an individual is regarded by his peers as one of the leading intellectual forces

of his generation, but no single accomplishment offers the clear basis for an award? John Archibald

Wheeler is not a Nobel Laureate; yet he is a “physicist's physicist,” a man who has been a creative force

in half a dozen different fields.

. How does one weight a candidate'sage ? In principle, not at all. It is not a variable for consideration;

but in practice every committee member knows when time is running out for older candidates, while the

young competition will have opportunities for many years to come.

. How soon after a theory or discovery is it appropriate to make an award? Certainly, one should wait

long enough to be sure that the accomplishment is “most important,” as Nobel's will stipulates; but if one

waits too long, the opportunity may vanish with the candidate. Max Born was seventy-two years old

when he received the Nobel Prize in 1954—for work done almost thirty years earlier on the probabilistic

interpretation of the quantum mechanical wave function. Had George Gamow lived as long as Born,

surely he would have shared with Penzias and Wilson the 1978 prize, for the discovery of the cosmic

background radiation. Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1921, at the age of forty-two. But it cited

his work on the photoelectric effect, rather than the theory of relativity, which was still considered open

to question. And if his life had been no longer than that of Henry Moseley or Heinrich Hertz, Einstein

would have died unhonored by the Nobel Committee.

So much for logical choices. I conclude that the Nobel rules allow blind Atropos to play no less a part

than Athene in the award process.

My musings can afford to be quite detached. I know how the voting must have gone in my own case,

since although the work for which my award is now being given was published only four years ago,

already it has stimulated an unprecedented flood of other papers. Scores more are appearing every

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Charles Sheffield - A Braver Thing.pdf

共23页,预览3页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Charles Sheffield - A Braver Thing

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: