Make that fiftyone years
October 8, 2014 3:27 AM   Subscribe

Any list like this will inevitably leave deserving people out, and probably this list is biased toward U.S.­–based physicists. It is not intended to be comprehensive or a “top 10 list,” or to be the last word on the topic, but rather to spark a discussion. And most importantly, it is intended to show that the 51-year streak of male physics laureates cannot be blamed on a lack of viable female candidates. So with that out of the way, let’s hope to soon see this tired streak broken by a third—and fourth and fifth—woman accepting the Nobel Prize in Physics.
The nobel Prize committee have decided to honour the inventors of the blue light LED with the 2014 Nobel Prize in physics, extending the half a century streak of only having male winners with another year. Yet as Gabriel Popkin's list of worthy female Nobel Prize candidates shows, there's no lack of female contenders.
posted by MartinWisse (48 comments total) 16 users marked this as a favorite
 
At least now they can afford to reimburse me the $1MM I've spent on electrical tape covering up fucking blue LEDs.
posted by sockpup at 3:41 AM on October 8, 2014 [18 favorites]


A common theme on this list is that other people (men) have already won Nobel prizes for work very closely related to and/or based on the work these women have done... Personally, I am very much rooting for Lene Hau, whose work established the particular sub-field of physics I work in and continues to set the standard.
posted by OnceUponATime at 4:24 AM on October 8, 2014 [2 favorites]


Just think what they could do if they distributed that prize money to 1000 average physicists of no special stature instead. Now these physicists, who have already been well rewarded with tenure and awards, will just blow it on two weeks in Maui.

; )
posted by spitbull at 4:24 AM on October 8, 2014 [3 favorites]


Just think what they could do if they distributed that prize money to 1000 average physicists of no special stature instead. Now these physicists, who have already been well rewarded with tenure and awards, will just blow it on two weeks in Maui.

; )


This is a good joke.

It's also widely believed that the Nobel Prize is an anti-stimulus for good work. Richard Hamming:
You may find yourself as I saw Brattain when he got a Nobel Prize. The day the prize was announced we all assembled in Arnold Auditorium; all three winners got up and made speeches. The third one, Brattain, practically with tears in his eyes, said, ``I know about this Nobel-Prize effect and I am not going to let it affect me; I am going to remain good old Walter Brattain.'' Well I said to myself, ``That is nice.'' But in a few weeks I saw it was affecting him. Now he could only work on great problems.

When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did Shannon in. After information theory, what do you do for an encore? The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn't the way things go. So that is another reason why you find that when you get early recognition it seems to sterilize you. In fact I will give you my favorite quotation of many years. The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, in my opinion, has ruined more good scientists than any institution has created, judged by what they did before they came and judged by what they did after. Not that they weren't good afterwards, but they were superb before they got there and were only good afterwards.
posted by grobstein at 4:43 AM on October 8, 2014 [16 favorites]


One of the things I noticed while skimming the list of past winners was that atomic and subatomic physics had a near monopoly on the second half of the 20th century, but has been almost ignored in the 21st.

In fact one of the interesting commonalities of 21st century Nobel laureates is how much of their work has relatively immediate practical applications.
posted by ardgedee at 5:00 AM on October 8, 2014 [1 favorite]


Just imagine what this thread might be if we actually discussed women in physics, and not LEDs or what's wrong with the Nobel Prize in general.
posted by drlith at 5:01 AM on October 8, 2014 [10 favorites]


Lise Meitner. Chien-Shiung Wu. Annie Jump Cannon. Emmy Noether. Jocelyn Bell Burnell. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin ...

They was robbed.
posted by kyrademon at 5:03 AM on October 8, 2014 [3 favorites]


Hey, at least a woman got 1/4th of the Nobel Prize in PhysMed this year.
posted by ymgve at 5:34 AM on October 8, 2014


A worthy female does not make a worthy male less worthy. I'd rather see multiple nobels given out. Rank them all and give the top 5 prizes.
posted by blue_beetle at 5:59 AM on October 8, 2014 [3 favorites]


Personally, I am very much rooting for Lene Hau, whose work established the particular sub-field of physics I work in and continues to set the standard.

I think of all the people working on ultra-cold condensed matter states, she's the most likely to win. However, we've already had three awards for this realm (2001, 2003 and 2012.) Trapping light like she did is something truly surprising, though.

Lise Meitner. Chien-Shiung Wu.

Yes, robbed, both of them.

Annie Jump Cannon.

Nowhere near Nobel worthy. She didn't discover anything new. She *classified* the stars on a very useful schema (by what Balmer absorption lines they showed -- the Harvard System). She did much good work, she established a firm catalog, hell, she came up with "Oh Be A Fine Girl Kiss Me", but while that's hard, diligent work, she didn't create the system (though she did drop several of the letters and add the numbers) and she didn't make any new discoveries based on her work.

She did a ton of great work and built a foundation of data that's been incredibly useful, but let's be honest, she did nothing a grad student would do today. Including her on a list of Nobel Candidates Who were robbed is a serious disservice on those who have done actual Nobel worthy work.

Emmy Noether.

A tough call. If there was a Nobel in Mathematics, then not tough at all -- either she would have won or it would have been the single biggest injustice on the list -- but there isn't. She did some work on resolving some paradoxes in GR immediately after it came out, but these were all in the mathematical realm. Is it worthy of a physics medal to clean up Einstein's theory? I don't know. She should have had a Fields Medal, but it was instituted in 1936 and she passed away in 1935.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Robbed, again. Because it's pretty clear that she was the one to discover pulsars, and the award was given. Unlike Meitner and Wu, her omission caused outrage immediately, but she remains unNobel. (She does have The Herschel Medal, and FRS DBE after her name, so she has not gone unrecognized.)

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

Well, she was robbed in the sense that her work (discovery of the primarily H-He composition of the stars) was credited to Henry Russell. But Henry Russell didn't win a Nobel for that either, so saying that Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was robbed of a Nobel for this work is somewhat of a stretch. But it's clear -- Russel dissuaded her from publishing saying that conventional wisdom didn't agree, then later derived the same results in a different way, published, and while giving a small credit to Payne-Gaposchkin in that paper, was hailed as the discoverer.

So, my score: Three Clearly Worthy, one worthy of an award that didn't exist at the time and possibly Nobel worthy, and two who weren't.
posted by eriko at 6:06 AM on October 8, 2014 [12 favorites]


Although the point about women getting skipped over is salient -- Lise Meitner's case being particularly galling -- I find it kind of hard to argue with this year's choice. Few Nobel Physics discoveries have changed the everyday world in such noticeable and fundamental ways as shortwave LED's.
posted by localroger at 6:23 AM on October 8, 2014 [5 favorites]


> Just imagine what this thread might be if we actually discussed women in physics

Fair enough. If Gianotti's hopefully long and fruitful career comes to a close without her being added to the Nobel's rolls, she'll be the first discoverer of a subatomic particle to not be awarded. Which may be germane to the committee's apparent shift in focus I noted above, but it would still be hard to excuse given the significance of the Higgs Boson and the efforts devoted to its search.
posted by ardgedee at 6:23 AM on October 8, 2014 [1 favorite]


Just imagine what this thread might be if we actually discussed women in physics, and not LEDs or what's wrong with the Nobel Prize in general.

Be the change you want to see or take it to meta.
posted by cjorgensen at 6:23 AM on October 8, 2014 [10 favorites]


There have been 14 Japanese Nobel Prize winners sharing 7 Nobel Prizes since 2000, all in the sciences. That's roughly the same as the USA and pretty damn impressive for a country of 70 odd million.
posted by L.P. Hatecraft at 6:34 AM on October 8, 2014


An interesting point that was glossed over in the Slate article was this:
Burnell herself has expressed varying opinions about the Nobel Committee’s decision. In a 1977 speech she said she did not feel she deserved the prize, but more recently, including in a 2004 essay in Science, she has suggested more strongly that her student status and gender may have contributed to her omission.
Which suggests a reading of "while still a fairly junior researcher, she didn't dare upset the establishment, but later in her career she found herself willing to be honest".
posted by jeather at 6:45 AM on October 8, 2014 [6 favorites]


Few Nobel Physics discoveries have changed the everyday world in such noticeable and fundamental ways as shortwave LED's.

To elaborate on this a bit: Almost all "white" LEDs are actually a blue LEDs plus a phosphor. There's no such thing as a "white" LED.

In fact, blue LEDs are so good that we now use the same process (blue LED plus a phosphate) to produce many "green" LEDs as well, because they exceed the performance of actual green LEDs.

We need more women in Physics, and the Nobel committee has egregiously neglected to recognize the tremendous accomplishments of female physicists. However, this particular prize is not without merit. The science that led to the development of blue LEDs has arguably had a more tangible global impact than any other similar development in recent history.

The author makes a salient point, but this is perhaps not the best year to grind this particular axe.
posted by schmod at 6:46 AM on October 8, 2014 [1 favorite]


The gluon doesn't have a Nobel associated with its experimental discovery. I am told that Sau Lan Wu has a reasonable claim on that, though so do many other people it seems.

The way that the Higgs Nobels were given out was and is somewhat controversial in my field. Just considering the theorists who won the prize, the Rule of Three screwed at least one person (all men, in this case). Despite my great admiration for Fabiola Gianotti, I would think that an experimental prize for the Higgs should go to the entire ATLAS and CMS collaborations, or to no one at all. I would have a time arguing that the spokespeople at the time of discovery have a better claim on that discovery than the spokespeople who came before them, much less the thousands of scientists (and even if we're just singling out the people running things rather than the PhDs in the trenches, dozens of group leaders) who were involved. Unlike previous major experimental efforts, the LHC, ATLAS, and CMS are just too large, and took the combined efforts of so many leaders over the decades, that it is hard to point at one man or woman and say "that person is solely responsible." For Big Science, this sort of thing will likely continue to be an issue with respect to the Nobel, and one could argue that the Committee missed a chance to set a precedent with the Higgs Nobel by not recognizing the experiments as combined units.

Getting back to the post itself, Vera Rubin deserves a Nobel for discovering dark matter. Then we can give another one to someone else once we figure out what the hell it actually is. We did it for dark energy, and we have less of a clue about that.
posted by physicsmatt at 6:55 AM on October 8, 2014 [5 favorites]


There have been 14 Japanese Nobel Prize winners sharing 7 Nobel Prizes since 2000, all in the sciences. That's roughly the same as the USA and pretty damn impressive for a country of 70 odd million.

Japan's population is about 127 million.
posted by biffa at 6:55 AM on October 8, 2014 [2 favorites]


One of the most startling things to me about physics is how it seems to be regularly cranking out absolutely monster discoveries. I mean, just last month we learned what our galaxy's home supercluster looks like and that it's much, much, much bigger than we had thought. (And that it looks kind of like a floating milkweed seed.) That was a classic "wow moment" for me, one that took me right back to my childhood.

This list has a bunch of good ones too! Here are the discoveries and predictions from the article that really stood out to me, along with the woman responsible (or partly responsible, in the case of collaborations) for them: Those are some heavy-hitting findings that really add a lot to the sum total of human knowledge, and they're just a sampling of the work from a group of researchers who (unjustly) make up only a minority of the field. Physics just never ceases to amaze and astound. I hope at least some of these women (and the many other deserving female candidates—this article makes it pretty obvious that there are many more out there than could be fit in) get their proper recognition one day. For some of the top candidates it will have to be soon; much of their most important work was done 40 or 50 years ago (though it is important and relevant enough that this need not matter to the committee) and Nobel prizes are not awarded posthumously. I hope I live to see the day.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 6:57 AM on October 8, 2014 [5 favorites]


Saw a great joke on twitter yesterday.

How many Nobel Prize-winning physicists does it take to change a light bulb?

Three.
posted by Toekneesan at 6:58 AM on October 8, 2014 [18 favorites]


The author makes a salient point, but this is perhaps not the best year to grind this particular axe.

It's not like most years the Nobel is given for some worthless work and that this is the one year when finally it wasn't.
posted by jeather at 7:02 AM on October 8, 2014 [1 favorite]


> "Annie Jump Cannon ... Nowhere near Nobel worthy. She didn't discover anything new."

I think you're underestimating her work and her impact. Payne-Gaposchkin was using Cannon's data to show that the stars were composed mainly of hydrogen and helium, for example. But yes, it is true that Russell didn't get a Nobel for that either, so in that sense I agree they weren't "robbed" in the same way Meitner, Wu, and Bell were.
posted by kyrademon at 7:03 AM on October 8, 2014 [1 favorite]


Japan's population is about 127 million.

Right you are, I stand corrected. It's still an impressive achievement!
posted by L.P. Hatecraft at 7:06 AM on October 8, 2014


The No Belle Prize, amiright?
posted by chavenet at 7:09 AM on October 8, 2014 [2 favorites]


The slate article was written the day before the announcement. I think it is perfectly acceptable to both celebrate the important and excellent work of Akasaki, Amano and Nakamura, and also use the lead-up to the announcement of the prize as a good moment to remind people that women are both under-represented and under-appreciated for their ground-breaking contributions to the field - which points to structural problems in science that we must acknowledge and deal with.
posted by physicsmatt at 7:10 AM on October 8, 2014 [3 favorites]


Be the change you want to see or take it to meta.

I kind of feel out of my league, because I don't know from physics, but I'll take a stab at contributing to the discussion: I am curious how much the enormous scale of (and here's where my ignorance comes in: is it correct to say) experimental (vs. theoretical) physics puts women at an even greater disadvantage compared to other experimental sciences, insofar as if science in general suffers from an old-boys-network problem, perhaps the infrastructural scale of the experimental physics "network" (as physicsmatt points out) makes it even more of a problem compared to other science disciplines?
posted by drlith at 7:19 AM on October 8, 2014 [1 favorite]


It is true though that blue LEDs are a huge deal because as schmod rightly points out above, they led directly (and with only a small, relatively obvious modification) to white LEDs. White LEDs are in the process of revolutionizing artificial lighting; they've already pretty much totally taken over all low-voltage applications (where incandescent bulbs were never satisfactory and fluorescents were never practical) and are starting to conquer household lighting. Not only does this provide an improvement in the quality, cost, and durability of light sources that hasn't been seen since the invention of the incandescent bulb itself, it's also about to take a big chunk out of the global energy budget—which will have a significant environmental impact, as many of our most pressing environmental concerns fundamentally boil down to our civilization's bottomless hunger for more energy.

Electric lighting was estimated to account for about 8% (pdf warning, percentage calculation mine) of total global energy consumption in 2002. Not just total electricity generation, but total energy consumption of all types. The gains in efficiency going from incandescent bulbs or even CFLs to LED-based lighting are huge. (Not to mention going straight from kerosene lamps to LEDs, something that is happening all over the developing world at an incredible rate; in 2002 one in three people got their light from kerosene, and now white LEDs are getting cheap enough, and their electricity consumption is low enough, that they are rapidly replacing kerosene even in parts of the world where cash is almost nonexistent and electricity infrastructure is completely absent.) It's a big, big deal.

I totally think it's worth a Nobel, not that anyone asked me. That's not to invalidate the work of the women on this list, though it does show that in physics we're really spoilt for choice as far as massive, groundbreaking, world-changing discoveries. The committee should still be showing more love to the women in the field because they deserve it and have long been unjustly overlooked, but the invention of blue LEDs is a pretty big thing and fits neatly into the Nobel Prize's mission of recognizing major achievements in various fields that have had large, positive impacts on human knowledge and culture. Another color of LED may not seem so revolutionary in terms of physics, but in terms of making the world a better place it's led to a lot of improvement.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 7:19 AM on October 8, 2014 [3 favorites]


Is the issue here really the selection of Nobel laureates, or is that process just a reflection of broader structural problems? As far as I can tell from the Slate article, only Burnell seems to have been really, truly wronged by the process. And even then, it seems like the fact that she was just a student may have been a significant factor there.

So is the Nobel committee really made up of troglodytes (as the author suggests in jest)? Or might it be that the pool of possible Nobel winners is overwhelmingly male? (Again, likely due to serious structural problems outside of the Nobels).
posted by graphnerd at 7:33 AM on October 8, 2014


I am curious how much the enormous scale of (and here's where my ignorance comes in: is it correct to say) experimental (vs. theoretical) physics puts women at an even greater disadvantage compared to other experimental sciences

I would say yes and no to this one. No, because the vast majority of experimental physics is done in perfectly ordinarily-sized labs, not the enormous collaborations of the LHC. But yes because the old-boys network is still so goddamn entrenched; I went to a top-10 school for my PhD and was the only female-bodied person in my cohort of more than 30 people (and I'm trans, so...). The atmosphere can be pretty poisonous.


Few Nobel Physics discoveries have changed the everyday world in such noticeable and fundamental ways as shortwave LED's.

I'd put the relatively recent (2009) Nobel for the invention of the CCD sensor pretty high up there, too.
posted by dorque at 7:38 AM on October 8, 2014 [1 favorite]


graphnerd, the pipeline problem has been hashed over about a million times, but that's not really the point of the article. The point is that these women have already made it through the pipeline, they are already at least as deserving as the men who are winning, but they haven't.
posted by dorque at 7:42 AM on October 8, 2014 [1 favorite]


graphnerd, the article points out that while women are indeed underrepresented in physics as a whole, they are still disproportionately underrepresented in Nobel Prizes. Over the last 50 years, women have made up from 2% to 20% of physicists, as an increasing trend. If we naively say that women have averaged 10% of the physics community over that timespan, and that the frequency of groundbreaking discoveries by women has on a per-person basis been equal to that of men, then 12 or 13 of the 125 total physics prizewinners since 1960 should be women. Instead, the number is zero. I can't be bothered to calculate a p-value for that (though I'd love to see one) but I'd be shocked if it didn't smash the null hypothesis (that the number of female Nobel Prize recipients since 1960 can be explained by the proportion of women in the field plus chance) to smithereens. There's additional bias at work here.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 7:58 AM on October 8, 2014


Plus, even if the pipeline problem makes women physicists 75% less likely than men to be involved in Nobel Prizeworthy discoveries (because bias within the field hinders their careers and their access to the connections and resources that help position researchers to do major work) we should still expect to see about 4 women honored since 1960, not zero. Over a sample size of 125 I'd bet that's still statistically significant.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 8:07 AM on October 8, 2014


> "As far as I can tell from the Slate article, only Burnell seems to have been really, truly wronged by the process."

No, there have been others (Lise Meitner and Chien-Shiung Wu also did not share in the Nobels awarded for the work they made crucial contributions to.)

But as Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The points out, the problem isn't just "women who didn't get to share in the Nobel awarded for their work" -- those are just particularly easy and inarguable wrongs to point to.
posted by kyrademon at 8:22 AM on October 8, 2014


graphnerd, the article points out that while women are indeed underrepresented in physics as a whole, they are still disproportionately underrepresented in Nobel Prizes. Over the last 50 years, women have made up from 2% to 20% of physicists, as an increasing trend. If we naively say that women have averaged 10% of the physics community over that timespan, and that the frequency of groundbreaking discoveries by women has on a per-person basis been equal to that of men, then 12 or 13 of the 125 total physics prizewinners since 1960 should be women. Instead, the number is zero.

There is another stage of underrepresentation here too, wedged between these. Representation of women in physics, as with many other academic departments, tends to decrease with seniority. So even if 10% of all physicists are women then there will be more at the bottom and less at the top. Big breakthroughs are a bit more likely when you have people working for you. This is a much bigger societal problem than the Nobel one really.
posted by biffa at 9:05 AM on October 8, 2014 [1 favorite]


In fact, blue LEDs are so good that we now use the same process (blue LED plus a phosphate) to produce many "green" LEDs as well, because they exceed the performance of actual green LEDs.

The real discovery was a practical method to make wide band gap semiconductor alloys (GaN and InGaN) that allowed us to build the first blue LEDs that were comparable in brightness to then-current R-Y LEDs, then the rapid discovery of several more wide band gap semiconductor alloys (AlGaAS, AlGaInP, ALGaP, AlGaN) that lead to high power LED devices from 760nm to 320nm.

That's what really set off the lighting revolution -- it wasn't that the LEDs were blue. We had blue LEDs in the mid 80s. They were very weak, but we had them. The new alloys let us build *all* LEDs much brighter. We're now pushing 140lm/W out of production LEDs and 300lm/W out of one in the lab.

140lm/w means you're getting 1000lm for 7.15W. A 100W incandescent produces 1050lm. We're talking two orders of magnitude more efficient.

The reason that IR and Red LEDs came first? Roughly, the narrower the band gap, the lower the frequency of light it wants to produce naturally, and we had narrow band gap semiconductors first -- heck, other than lighting, narrow is better. The reason that Blue LEDs and high power Green LEDs drop more voltage? Roughly, the wider the band gap, the larger the voltage drop. (Massive hand waves are occurring in that paragraph. Be warned.)

In terms of RGB, right now, the weak one in efficiency is green. Theoretically, we could get over 600lm/W out of a AlGInP based green LED, we're having trouble getting more than about 115lm/W. Red and Blue LEDs are much closer to their theoretical maxes.

It's unusual to see a Nobel awards for something that everyone now sees every day, but that's precisely what is happening here. There's a very good chance you're looking at a blue LED by merely reading these words. The last award I can compare this to was Jack St. Clair Kirby getting the Physics Nobel for his invention of the integrated circuit. His partner, Robert Noyce, passed away before the award was announced. By policy, the award is not awarded posthumously, though if the award is announced and you pass away before the actual award ceremony, your award will be present to a delegate from your estate. Alfred Nobel's intent with regards to the actual cash prize was to enable those who've done award-worth things to keep researching -- this comes from a time when most research was privately funded.
posted by eriko at 9:19 AM on October 8, 2014 [3 favorites]


physicsmatt: Getting back to the post itself, Vera Rubin deserves a Nobel for discovering dark matter.
Not (yet) redeemable for a Nobel, as dark matter has not been experimentally proven.
posted by IAmBroom at 9:29 AM on October 8, 2014


grobstein, that speech is among my favorites, but I don't think the effect prestige has on scientists and engineers is limited to the Nobel. That said, it would be wonderful if research were done on how to bring about a culture of 'productive prestige' so that the rewarded would still be encouraged to advance many promising ideas. I think this would be worth doing since if someone is an exceptional researcher who has the ability to realize breakthrough inventions and concepts, they are more worth keeping productive than a roomful of ordinary researchers.

It seems like the McArthur grant might be trying to solve this problem in that it's a prize for busy people, but I just see it as replacing the role of other kinds of grants.
posted by michaelh at 9:30 AM on October 8, 2014


Fast stats: There are 825 Nobel Laureates. Six laureates have received more than one medal -- the International Red Cross (Peace x 3), UNHCR (Peace x2), John Bardeen (Physics x2), Frederick Sanger (Chemistry x2), Marie Curie (Physics, Chemistry), and Linus Pauling (Chemistry, Peace.)

Out of the 826 laureates, 44 were women. The first women to win was Marie Curie, who was also the first to win two prizes. By prizes, 15 were for Peace, 13 for Literature, 10 for Medicine, 4 for Chemistry, 2 for Physics and 1 for Economics. Yes, that's 45 prizes, see "Marie Cuire" above. Yes, that was the exact order I predicted them to be in, because humans (and because the Economics prize is much newer than the rest, awarded since 1969)

2009 was a banner year for women: Ada Yonath (Chemistry) Elinor Ostrom (Economics) Herta Müller (Literature), Elizabeth Blackburn (Medicine) and Carol W. Greider (Medicine). In the last 10 years, 15 women have become Nobel laureates, in all categories except Physics.

There's clearly a sea change happening. The Nobel was first awarded in 1901 yet over a third of the women who have been given the award have done so in the last 10 years.
posted by eriko at 9:36 AM on October 8, 2014 [6 favorites]


Getting back to the post itself, Vera Rubin deserves a Nobel for discovering dark matter.

Except, well, she didn't.

She did refine the Galaxy Rotation Problem. Dark Matter has been theorized much before her work -- Jan Oort theorized dark missing matter to explain the observed orbital velocities of stars in the Milky Way in 1932, and Fritz Zwicky in the orbits of clusters around galaxies in 1935. Heck, Horace Babcock observed the unusual rotational curve in M31 in 1939, however, he didn't postulate it was dark matter -- he was worried about optical effects or a poor understand of the mass distribution of galaxies. Louis Volders showed this same curve in M33 in 1958, and clearly speculated that Zwicky's dark matter could solve both the orbit and the rotation problems. All of this was done before Vera Rubin started her work.

So, I can't give her that. This is not to deny her work, which has been exceptionally good, but to say she discovered dark matter or that she was the first to theorize that there may be unseen matter in the universe explaining unseen orbits, *or* that she was the first to notice that galaxies didn't rotate correctly given the observed mass is quite simply untrue, and I would be frankly offended if she was awarded the Nobel for that work -- her work in this realm simply provided *more* evidence that Oort and Zwicky and Volders were correct that there was unobserved mass in the universe in large quantities.

If there's any work she's done to earn the prize, it's twofold. First, her doctoral thesis -- that galaxies clump together for reasons related to their formation. This was basically ignored for two decades, then when we started to see that they do, and there's a probable good reason, she'd nailed it twenty years before. Second, the Rubin-Ford effect, which is still causing consternation -- and things that confuse everyone for years before being generally accepted tend to win the Nobel. Being Right All Along is a big factor. (See Englert/Higgs winning last year once the LHC observed the Higgs.)

Now, is that Nobel Worthy? Those are her work (that I know of) that was new when she published. You don't get the Nobel for body of work. 50 years of really exceptional doesn't earn you the award. You need the Unique One Thing, though sometimes they'll give it a weaker Unique One Thing (see Einstein's Noble for piezoelectics, rather than SR/GR) but they'll still have the Unique One Thing.

I don't know if she has that, but I do know that "Discovery of Dark Matter" is not that thing.
posted by eriko at 10:07 AM on October 8, 2014 [4 favorites]


eriko: Being Right All Along is a big factor. (See Englert/Higgs winning last year once the LHC observed the Higgs.)
Again, the reason Englert & Higgs didn't win until last year was because the LHC observed the Higgs. Their work was realized in the very first year it was eligible.

See also: Stephen Hawking and Hawking Radiation, which is widely believed, but not experimentally proven. Fits the observable facts, but not proven with experimentation.
posted by IAmBroom at 10:24 AM on October 8, 2014


That's what really set off the lighting revolution -- it wasn't that the LEDs were blue. We had blue LEDs in the mid 80s. They were very weak, but we had them. The new alloys let us build *all* LEDs much brighter. We're now pushing 140lm/W out of production LEDs and 300lm/W out of one in the lab.

140lm/w means you're getting 1000lm for 7.15W. A 100W incandescent produces 1050lm. We're talking two orders of magnitude more efficient.


And now, for a parochial perspective. I don't give a (much of a ) fig about household lights. I care about and have been following the LED light revolution from the trenches of the film/video/photography world. Here is the ideal light for film work: efficient, powerful, controlled spectrum and variable color temperature, steady output (both temp and power), dimmable, runs cool, can be battery powered, small, light, physically durable, long lasting bulbs, cheap. Such a light has never existed, and still does not exist. There is always a compromise along any of the variables. But now, finally, the LED lights are coming ever closer to checking off all the boxes. And it is doing so at an astonishing rate. I jumped on the LED light trend fairly early, and have sunk thousands into various configurations, but literally within the past two years, I've seen my entire investment go up in smoke (not literal) as new LED lights are frog leaping the capabilities on a three-monthly basis. I've made the same mistake now several times - I'll think "OK, now it is safe to buy, because surely they won't be able to substantially improve the lights within a timeframe of less than a few years", and sure enough they do just that a few months later. That is because I've been conditioned by the snail-slow evolution of studio lights that came before LEDs. But I'm not the only one, I've spoken to any number of cinematographers who assure me that LEDs are not ready for prime time for this reason or that, except because their information is a year - or even only 6 months - out of date, they're unaware that the specific complaints they cited have been totally obliterated with these new lights that just came out last week. Today, we have high CRI and broad spectrum lights that are incredibly powerful at a cost that puts all HMIs to shame, and soon enough will overtake them in power, having overtaken them in efficiency long ago. Tungsten lamps are hot. HMIs are fragile and a pain to use. Flouros are weak and fragile.

One day - and that day is approaching very, very fast - LED lights will be the only lights you ever see used on sets or out in the field, for any film, stage or photography work. And that's the parochial report from a tiny field. I'll leave the rest of the world applications to the other nerds to hosanna. And on topic - women are underrepresented in physics and recognition? Take a gander at the world of cinematography, and weep - and the film world is supposedly a bastion of liberalism.
posted by VikingSword at 10:35 AM on October 8, 2014 [6 favorites]


The point is that these women have already made it through the pipeline, they are already at least as deserving as the men who are winning, but they haven't.

(Promise I'm not trying to be contrarian here, I'm genuinely curious) I certainly claim no expertise here, but is it really agreed upon that they are at least as deserving? Are there specific prizes that went to men that we can point to and say that they were less worthy of the prize?

I hope I don't sound like some asshole MRA in asking that. I just think it's important to know if what we're talking about is the easy problem to fix (the Nobel committee isn't giving women equal consideration because they're women; so the committee needs change) or the hard one (structural issues in science).

To me as a layperson, the evidence doesn't look very strong for the former, but does on the latter. (And it's important to note that I'm only looking at this Slate article and have very limited context beyond it).
posted by graphnerd at 11:08 AM on October 8, 2014 [2 favorites]


> it's important to know if what we're talking about is the easy problem to fix (the Nobel committee isn't giving women equal consideration because they're women; so the committee needs change) or the hard one (structural issues in science).

I work on pulsars, I've met Jocelyn Bell-Burnell, she and Joe Taylor were in the audience for my first grad student talk, and I've met Tony Hewish. From my limited perspective, the problem is a maybe a tiny bit of the easy one and mostly the hard one.

Jocelyn Bell was passed over because she was female, yes, but also because she was a grad student at the time. So it was easy to say that she wasn't the driving force behind the discovery - a totally wrong thing to say, but easy. The Nobel committee fixed part of the problem when they honored both the grad student (Russel Hulse) and the advisor (Joe Taylor) for the discovery of the first binary pulsar in 1993.

The systematic / pipeline issue is a much bigger problem, especially in physics (again, from my limited perspective). We're lucky in astronomy that we seem to get lots of extremely smart women who have been repulsed by physics colleagues. Thanks, guys.
posted by RedOrGreen at 11:29 AM on October 8, 2014 [2 favorites]


graphnerd, I think at some point it becomes very difficult to judge "objectively." There are no platonic ideals of the perfect Nobel candidate that can be used as a standard candle. Like unhappy families, every Nobel-worthy discovery is unique.

For example: I think Vera Rubin has a claim to the discovery of dark matter, knowing of Zwicky and the others that come before her. eriko disagrees. (I think he raises good points that have merit, so I appreciate his opposing view) Giannotti has been floated as a Nobel candidate. I disagree. Which complaints are based on the particular quirks of that particular discovery, and which are hidden misogyny? In this case I would like to think that both eriko's and my opinions are based on knowledge of the case at hand. But how do you know? Or, for that matter, how do I know? There is clear evidence that men's and women's work is perceived differently by their colleagues (male and female), through a gendered lens. Women and minorities are given far less credit for their accomplishments in science than men get. Can I be sure my opinion about Giannotti is one I reached without letting sociological factors filter in? I'd like to think I did. But scientists are members of society too, and sometimes our personal conviction that we are above such things makes us more susceptible to bias, not less. After all, we don't need to bother to interrogate our biases, since we're clearly all Spock over here, and merely implying that we're not perfectly rational is terribly insulting.

I viewed eriko and me staking out opposite views on Vera Rubin and dark matter as the sort of thing that happens with any field and any sort of accomplishment. Eriko might disagree, I hope not. (Also, I want to be utterly clear that I think eriko's disagreement is based on factors unrelated to gender, I'm just using this as an illustration of the sort of thing that can be done with nearly every prize discussion). It's totally fine and appropriate for the debate around any individual prize candidate. After all, we're not talking about giving Nobels to women as a consolation prize, so we absolutely have to have the same knock-down-drag-out fight over these candidates as we do for the men (I'm just glad I don't have to vote on it). However, since we're only discussing women in this thread, you might get the opinion that there's more room for debate over these candidates than typical. Or that if we had a slate of men for possible Nobels, they'd all be shoo-ins. There are some people who clearly are just the one who needs to get the prize, but mostly it's varying shades of grey and reasonable people can disagree without saying that someone is totally undeserving (the Higgs Prize is a great example. Or why didn't Cabibbo get it with Kobayashi and Maskawa?). And you have to keep in mind that the points that are used as the shades of grey against a particular woman's claim are sometime related to gender expectations in science, so it is not a orthogonal set of concerns.

With that in mind, given that there's such a noticeable disparity between even the small number of women in the field and the number of prizes awarded, and that one can identify a reasonable field of candidates that can at least be argued to deserve a prize, I think we as a field do need to ask if we are allowing our socialization and gendered expectations to prevent us from recognizing the exceptional people in our midst. And if we are, that's a huge fucking problem. Not only because of fundamental fairness and building a better world all that, but even if you were just the Spock-like "rational being" who cared only about advancing fundamental physics, wouldn't you'd want to make damn sure you're not putting up barriers which drive smart talented people (of which there are too few to begin with) out of the field? And into *astronomy*?

To follow up, what RedOrGreen said. Its almost certainly the hard problem of entrenched sub-conscious bias, at least when it comes to the Nobels. It gets more overt at lower levels of accomplishment, however. The disparity is likely indicative of deeper problems in the field, all growing from a common root. "Fixing" the Nobels won't fix the leaky pipeline and all the rest, but the discussion about one may help us confront the other problems more honestly.
posted by physicsmatt at 11:56 AM on October 8, 2014 [7 favorites]


I just think it's important to know if what we're talking about is the easy problem to fix (the Nobel committee isn't giving women equal consideration because they're women; so the committee needs change) or the hard one (structural issues in science).

From my perspective these are not really different problems. (physicsmatt's explanation of why is fantastic.) On a personal level, I can tell you that as a dfab person in physics, there can definitely be a crushing sense of "why am I doing this? No one will ever recognize my accomplishments anyway." When I (pre-transition) was a teaching assistant for our big service courses, I had a lot of women in my classes tell me in office hours how much it meant to them that they could have a woman as their physics TA. I was evidence to them that they might not be chewed up and spat out by the field before they even made it out of undergrad (which is kind of heartbreaking, because they probably still were). To me, the Nobel disparity feels like that on a larger scale: if we as a field can't even get that right, what the fuck am I thinking picking this as a career?
posted by dorque at 12:37 PM on October 8, 2014


I viewed eriko and me staking out opposite views on Vera Rubin and dark matter as the sort of thing that happens with any field and any sort of accomplishment. Eriko might disagree, I hope not.

I don't in any way. In science (as you know, physicsmatt-bob), you put up a hypothesis. You test it. Other challenge your test. You defend the test, change the test to take in the account the challenges, or you drop the hypothesis. The arguments, in the end, make the science stronger -- by weeding out incorrect hypotheses.

We disagree on Vera Rubin's work, but I'm a dilettante in this field, you live in it. It's likely that you've seen much more of her work than I have. So, I have no problem at all with you disagreeing, because, if in the end, her work is Nobel worthy, I want her to get it. So, you disagreeing with me means I have to work harder on my position -- or realize that I'm wrong and abandon it.

(As you said, thankfully, we're not the people who have to make this decision.)

The Roman Catholic Church used to have, in the case of canonization, two people arguing. The Promoter of The Cause was there to prove to all that the given candidate was in fact a saint. The Promoter of The Faith was charged with *disproving* the candidate. This is where we get the term "Devil's Advocate." The point was that we are human, we can be swayed by bad evidence, or we can look at evidence with a biased view. The point of the debate between the two promoters was to make sure that if one was, they would have to prove that there was actual evidence to back them up.

Alas, John Paul II changed the procedure and gave up on advocatus diaboli. You might also notice that John Paul II canonized far more people than any other pope, and that canonization rate remains high today.

It's good to have a debate, as long as both sides go in with the goal of finding, at the end, agreement -- that one position was right, and one was wrong, and now both agree on the right one.

With that in mind, given that there's such a noticeable disparity between even the small number of women in the field and the number of prizes awarded, and that one can identify a reasonable field of candidates that can at least be argued to deserve a prize, I think we as a field do need to ask if we are allowing our socialization and gendered expectations to prevent us from recognizing the exceptional people in our midst.

A simple test is to find out what percentage of the field is not-male, and what percentage of various prize winners that encompass the whole field are not-male. If the percentage is the same -- less than 1% of the Physics Nobel go to women, but less than 1% of the people in the field are not women, then the problem isn't that the Nobel Prize for Physics is biased, it's that the field itself is biased against bringing women into it.

And, of course, you need to bin this over time, because just a glance at the data shows that women are becoming Nobel laureates more often -- again, over a third of the female Nobel laureates received their prize in the last decade. I'm not going to sit here and figure out if that's a 5σ difference, but at a glance it's 3σ. I'm not in particle physics, so I can call 3σ good. :-)
posted by eriko at 5:17 AM on October 9, 2014


You might also notice that John Paul II canonized far more people than any other pope, and that canonization rate remains high today.

As a pretty lapsed Catholic, I always wondered if they lowered the bar to keep the laity interested or because intense debate highlighted the fact they were arguing whether or not someone performed magic at least 3 times.

posted by yerfatma at 6:53 AM on October 9, 2014 [1 favorite]


I totally think it's worth a Nobel

Me too. Especially considering his company initially only gave Shuji Nakamura a $200 bonus for his discovery.

True Boo-Roo is a very early Wired article about him and his work, which also enabled the True Green LED, now seen in traffic lights everywhere. (Distributers still trying to unload warehouses-full of those awful, pre-Shuji chartreuse-yellow 'green' LEDs?) As far as I'm concerned, LED-blue is the color of the 21st Century.

All hail Shuji Nakamura, inventor of the Blue LED!
posted by Rash at 10:35 AM on October 9, 2014


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