As many of you know the Nobel Prizes were recently awarded. I decided last night to read through some of the papers that Nambu (who won half of the physics prize) wrote. These papers helped to understand the origin of mass in protons, neutrons, and similar objects and informed our current understanding of how fundamental masses of electrons and quarks are generated.
For me what was stunning though was how wrong the paper is. It was written based on the views of the particle world that were dominant in 1961 with no real concept of quarks or that protons and neutrons are compound particles. This makes the paper rather clunky compared to the current understanding and how the same principles might be presented in a modern textbook.
Perhaps it is a lesson to us. He was not awarded the prize for an extremely accurate prediction but rather for an insight that fueled our undertanding of the masses of subatomic particles. He wasn't the first to have the idea; he borrowed it from theories of superconductivity. He didn't put the finishing touches on it. But he did apply the insight in a new way that has shaped theoretical physics for 50 years. I think that deserves a prize.
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I'm curious about why the prize was for something based on 1961 information. Is there such a long queue of people deserving the Nobel prize, did it take Nambu that long to develop his concepts, or did it take the Nobel committee that long to discover that this was Nobel prize material?
Well, yes the queue really can be that long and yes it takes a long time to figure out what is really worthy.
Nobel originally hoped that prizes would be awarded for work in the last year like the Academy Awards for film. Unfortunately, no one knows after one year how important a paper is.
In 1961 Nambu's work was a new application of spontaneous symmetry breaking, but no one knew if it would really work out. As I said he was working with protons and neutrons as fundamental fields. Gell-Mann and Zweig wouldn't postulate quarks until 1964. Then a fuller form of Nambu's work could be done for mass in Hadrons (Protons and neutrons among other objects.) In 1973 the Standard Model came out which used the idea to give mass to other fundamental objects. And today with the LHC coming on line we are on the verge of hopefully discovering the Higg's Boson. (The object in the standard model that gives the fundamental masses.)
Many of those people already earned prizes for their work, but now they look and realize that Nambu's was a crucial bridge to all of that. If none of these other discoveries had happened then Nambu's work would be insightful but ultimately not used by physics.
Another part could be political. Nambu is more famous for his work on String Theory, but much of the physics community is not convinced that string theory is really science. (It can not yet be tested experimentally.) He is getting on in years and they may have felt he deserved the prize and needed to find something with clear experimental results.
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