![]() ![]() This is too few to get a good quality estimate for the 1990s, and so we didn’t survey those prizes. In fact, just three discoveries made since 1990 have been awarded Nobel Prizes. The reason is that in recent years, the Nobel Committee has preferred to award prizes for work done in the 1980s and 1970s. The very best discoveries in physics, as judged by physicists themselves, became less important. Even with those discoveries, physicists judged every decade from the 1940s through the 1980s as worse than the worst decade from the 1910s through 1930s. That was due to two discoveries: the cosmic-microwave-background radiation, and the standard model of particle physics, our best theory of the fundamental particles and forces making up the universe. It was one of the great periods in the history of science.įollowing that period, there was a substantial decline, with a partial revival in the 1960s. It also saw several other revolutions: the invention of X-ray crystallography, which let us probe the atomic world the discovery of the neutron and of antimatter and the discovery of many fundamental facts about radioactivity and the nuclear forces. This was the time of the invention of quantum mechanics, one of the greatest scientific discoveries of all time, a discovery that radically changed our understanding of reality. But by the 1910s, the prizes were mostly awarded for things that accord with the modern conception of physics.Ī golden age of physics followed, from the 1910s through the 1930s. That’s good news if you’re on a ship, but it scored poorly with modern physicists. There was, for instance, a prize for a better way of illuminating lighthouses and buoys at sea. In that decade, the Nobel Committee was still figuring out exactly what the prize was for. Note that work is attributed to the year in which the discovery was made, not when the subsequent prize was awarded. A decade’s score is the likelihood that a discovery from that decade was judged as more important than discoveries from other decades. The bars in the figure below show the scores for each decade. Think of the survey as a round-robin tournament, competitively matching discoveries against each other, with expert scientists judging which is better.įor the physics prize, we surveyed 93 physicists from the world’s top academic physics departments (according to the Shanghai Rankings of World Universities), and they judged 1,370 pairs of discoveries. We then used those rankings to determine how scientists think the quality of Nobel Prize–winning discoveries has changed over the decades.Īs a sample survey question, we might ask a physicist which was a more important contribution to scientific understanding: the discovery of the neutron (the particle that makes up roughly half the ordinary matter in the universe) or the discovery of the cosmic-microwave-background radiation (the afterglow of the Big Bang). With that in mind, we ran a survey asking scientists to compare Nobel Prize–winning discoveries in their fields. This approach isn’t perfect, but it’s the best system we have. In each case, the standard approach is to ask independent scientists for their opinion of the work in question. We need these assessments to award science prizes, and to decide which scientists should be hired or receive grants. Today, with the benefit of more than a century of hindsight, they look like epochal experiments, early hints of a new fundamental force of nature.īut even though it can be hard to assess the significance of scientific work, it’s necessary to make such assessments. In another experiment, a scientist noticed that a frog’s leg would unexpectedly twitch when touched by a metal scalpel.Įven to the scientists doing these experiments, it wasn’t obvious whether they were unimportant curiosities or a path to something deeper. ![]() In one such experiment, scientists noticed that after rubbing amber on a cat’s fur, the amber would mysteriously attract objects such as feathers, for no apparent reason. ![]() Many of these experiments seemed strange at the time. Part of the trouble is that it’s hard to accurately evaluate how important any given scientific discovery is.Ĭonsider the early experiments on what we now call electricity. It’s surprisingly difficult to measure scientific progress in meaningful ways. But for all this increase in effort, are we getting a proportional increase in our scientific understanding? Or are we investing vastly more merely to sustain (or even see a decline in) the rate of scientific progress? Data from Patrick Collison and Michael Nielsen ![]()
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