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Nobel: Hawking passed over
09/10/2000 10:31 - (SA)
London - Amid mounting criticism from scientists that the Nobel prizes are outdated, a published report on Sunday cited inside sources as saying
one of the world's most famous living scientists, Professor Stephen Hawking, has again failed to capture the Nobel prize for physics.
Despite receiving great acclaim for popularising cosmology with his book A Brief History of Time, the Cambridge University professor has been overlooked by the Swedish judging panel, which will announce the winner on Tuesday from a list of 10 or 15 finalists.
The report in The Sunday Times said he is understood to have been ruled out because his work is deemed to be purely theoretical and
remains unproven.
Anders Barany, secretary of the Nobel committee for physics, was quoted as saying: "I am often asked why Hawking has not won the prize. He has done fabulous work but we are not yet sure that it really applies to nature."
Hawking, 58, is best known for his theories about the formation of the universe, which he believes was originally no bigger than a
pea.
He claims it existed in this state for a fraction of a second before the "big bang" about 12 billion years ago created time and
space.
The wheelchair-bound scientist, who suffers from motor neurone disease, a crippling illness of the nervous system, has more
recently expounded a theory about black holes emitting radiation, referred to as Hawking Radiation.
Although the Nobel judges have no policy on the relative merits of theoretical or experimental discoveries, there appears to be an
unwritten rule that theorists receive the prize only when their work has been verified experimentally.
"Stephen Hawking is a good example," said Barany.
The administrators of the Nobel prizes reportedly are considering significant changes to the annual awards amid criticism that they
no longer reflect modern science and that they focus on obscure discoveries.
A report in The Sunday Telegraph said that the Royal Swedish Academy is rethinking the physics, chemistry and medicine prizes.
The awards have been made since a 1901 bequest by Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite, which stipulated that they be given
to scientists who had "conferred the greatest benefit on mankind" in the previous year. Recipients have included Einstein, Rutherford, and Crick and Watson.
A growing number of academics complain, however, that the three categories in the prizes fail to reflect the cutting edge of
science, which is now advancing rapidly in areas such as astronomy and genetics.
Critics add that the Academy's insistence on limiting the prizes to just three individual researchers for each award fails to reflect the fact that many breakthroughs come from the work of huge teams of scientists, The Sunday Telegraph reported.
One British Nobel laureate, who declined to be named, was critical of the sheer obscurity of recent Nobel-winning research, especially in physics.
He said: "There has been a tendency towards a loss of perspective, a lot of Nobels have gone for discovering some particular particle
that, looking back, might not seem too crucial. There's a sense of a bandwagon at work - of a private community thinking that its own work is very important."
Sir John Maddox, emeritus editor of the science journal Nature, in whose pages much Nobel prize-winning work has first been published, said that the Nobels should now be completely reformed.
He told The Telegraph: "The problem is that science has gone beyond the Nobel Prizes, my real worry is that they do not have the right
criteria. The good of humanity is rarely being served." - Sapa-DPA
- SAPA
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