Nobel Prize in Physics

The Unlucky Thirteen!

 

The Nobel Prize is given … for theoretical work that has been confirmed by observation. It is very, very difficult to observe the things I have worked on. It's a pity that nobody has found an exploding black hole. If they had, I would have won a Nobel prize.

- Stephen Hawking

On this day, marking the investiture of the celebrated Nobel prizes, this rather lengthy article commemorates thirteen eminent personalities who were unlucky to miss out on a richly deserved Nobel Prize in Physics.

 

The Awards

Today (December 10), the Nobel Prizes for this year (2023) are being conferred at a traditional and time-honored ceremony at the Concert Hall in Stockholm, Sweden.  Instituted at the dawn of the twentieth century, these prizes are meant to be awarded each year in recognition of outstanding achievements in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and peace. They have become the most coveted and recognized symbols of excellence in these areas all over the world.

The Nobel Legacy

Here are some excerpts from a website discussing the legacy of Alfred Nobel:

Alfred Nobel (1833–1896), was a 19th-century Swedish chemist, engineer, and industrialist. Like all interesting human beings, his life contained ironies and inconsistencies. He never earned a university degree but was a gifted inventor and chemist, highly skilled in science and engineering, well read and fluent in five languages. He lived in cosmopolitan cities but preferred solitude. As an entrepreneur, he managed multinational technology corporations but found time to write novels and poetry. His business was the manufacture of explosives and armaments, but he actively supported pacifism. He amassed great wealth but left almost all of it to people he would never meet. His will stated:

"The whole of my remaining realizable estate…shall constitute a fund, the interest on which shall be annually distributed in the form of prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit to mankind."

The interest earned… would be apportioned equally between physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and peace.

The Physics Prize would go to “the person who shall have made the most important discovery or invention within the field of physics” as determined by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. This criterion allows discoveries of fundamental principles (e.g., quantum electrodynamics) or applications (e.g., the transistor). 

A year after writing his will, Alfred Nobel passed away on December 10, 1896. The first Nobel Prize ceremony was held at the Royal Academy of Music in Stockholm in 1901. The first Nobel Prize in Physics went to Wilhelm Roentgen for his 1895 discovery of X-rays.

 

The Unlucky Ones

The Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded 117 times to 225 persons between 1901 and 2023. Incidentally, John Bardeen is the only laureate who has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics twice, in 1956 and 1972. Occasionally, some relatively insignificant work has also been rewarded, a notable example being Gustaf Dalen in 1912 “for his invention of automatic regulators for use in conjunction with gas accumulators for illuminating lighthouses and buoys”

Considering the explosive growth of science since the awards were instituted, quite possibly, for every one of the final awardees, several equally deserving ones may have lost out in the final selection process. This is accentuated by the fact that the award is limited to no more than three candidates each year and no award is made posthumously.  On several occasions in the early years the award was given to just one person or not at all.

In view of my background in Physics and its historical aspects, I would like to focus on some outstanding non-recipients of the Nobel prize in Physics, to those who, in my opinion, richly deserved it and didn’t make it to the select list for whatever reason.  In my choice of thirteen such unlucky ones (this number was not predetermined!), three are Indians (Jagadish Chandra Bose, Satyendra Nath Bose and George Sudarshan), and five are women.  The choice is based purely on my own perceptions and I may have omitted some out of incomplete knowledge.

I have refrained from considering such stalwarts as Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla because they are predominantly inventors. Also narrowly missing out from my list are people like K S Krishnan (a co-worker of C V Raman), Ludwig Boltzmann, Meghnad Saha, David Joseph Bohm, and a few others, whose contributions are highly significant.

Paradoxically, the great Ernest Rutherford, whose sensational alpha scattering investigations paved way for the picture of the nuclear atom, didn’t get the Nobel prize in Physics, and he should be the strongest claimant in my (or anyone else’s) list.  But the mitigating fact is that he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry!

Some readers may notice a clear bias in favor of Astrophysics and Cosmology in my list!  This is perhaps justifiable on the ground that these disciplines were not considered as part of Physics for a long time. However, there is no bias in the order in which the unlucky ones are listed.  It is in order of the year of their birth, oldest first. Here is my list:

1.     Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858 - 1937)

2.     Henrietta Swan Leavitt (1868 - 1921)

3.     Lise Meitner (1878 - 1968)

4.     Edwin Hubble (1889 - 1953)

5.     Satyendra Nath Bose (1894 - 1974)

6.     Georges Lemaitre (1894 - 1966)

7.     Robert Oppenheimer (1904 - 1967)

8.     Chien-Shiung Wu (1912 - 1997)

9.     John Stewart Bell (1928 - 1990) 

10.Vera Rubin (1928 - 2016)

11.George Sudarshan (1931 - 2018)

12.Stephen Hawking (1942 - 2018)

13.Jocelyn Bell Burnell (1943 -)

I now proceed to discuss briefly the achievements of each of these unlucky thirteen and the reasons why I consider them as deserving at least a share of the Nobel prize in Physics.

1.     Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858 - 1937)

Considered to be the father of experimental science in the Indian subcontinent, J C Bose was a polymath who started as a physicist and later moved on to biophysics, botany and biology. He was a pioneer in the investigation of electromagnetic waves in the microwave region and its optical characteristics. His achievements in the other fields were even more pathbreaking, but they are not relevant in the present context.

A staunch nationalist, J C Bose founded the Bose Institute in 1917 in Kolkata, a premier research institute in India and also one of its oldest, and served as its director from its inception to his death, something that Nobel Laureate C V Raman was to emulate later. It was also the first interdisciplinary research centre in Asia.

Earlier in his career, Bose had worked with Lord Rayleigh at the University of Cambridge from which he graduated in 1884. He returned to India to join the Presidency College of the University of Calcutta as a professor of physics. There, despite racial discrimination and a lack of funding and equipment, Bose carried on his scientific research.

Bose’s 60 GHz microwave apparatus at the Bose Institute in Kolkata is shown in the picture below. The receiver at left used a galena crystal detector inside a horn antenna and a galvanometer to detect microwaves. Bose invented all the apparatus used at microwave frequencies.

Bose’s Galena detector was the first semiconductor device and photovoltaic cell, whose significance was recognized by Walter Brattain, Nobel laureate in physics along with John Bardeen and William Shockley in 1956 for their invention of the transistor. 

In November 1895 at a public demonstration in the Town Hall in Kolkata, Bose showed how the millimetre range microwaves could travel through the human body, and over a distance of 23 metres through two intervening walls as well. Bose was the first to use a semiconductor junction to detect radio waves, and he invented various now-commonplace microwave components. Nobel Laureate Neville Mott remarked that “J.C. Bose was at least 60 years ahead of his time. In fact, he had anticipated the existence of p-type and n-type semiconductors."

Bose demonstrated his wireless millimetre wave (microwave) experiments at the Royal Institution, London in January 1897. This predates the wireless experiments at Salisbury Plain in May 1897 by Marconi, to whom the Nobel prize was however awarded. 

In Italy, Guglielmo Marconi was known for his creation of a practical radio wave based wireless telegraph system. This led to Marconi being credited as the inventor of radio, and he shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with Karl Ferdinand Braun "in recognition of their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy".  J C Bose had made very similar discoveries with microwaves before Marconi, but didn’t attract the attention of the Nobel awards committee.  In all fairness, he should have shared the prize with the other two in 1909.

Bose received numerous honours both within the country and abroad, was knighted in 1917, and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1920 for his exceptional contributions and achievements. He died aged 78, leaving behind a monumental legacy in both physical and biological sciences.

2.     Henrietta Swan Leavitt (1868 - 1921)

In the world of Astronomy and Astrophysics, measuring very large distances, such as the distance to a star or a galaxy, is a vital requirement. For a long time, the only techniques available to astronomers were based on parallax and triangulation. They could only be used for measuring distances up to several hundred light years. Beyond that, a radically new technique was needed, and that was the contribution of Henrietta Swan Leavitt through her discovery of the period-luminosity relationship for Cepheid variable stars.

Henrietta Swan Leavitt was born and brought up in Lancaster, Massachusetts. It wasn't until her fourth year of college that she took a course in astronomy. She also began working as volunteer assistant, at the Harvard College Observatory. In 1902, she was hired by the director of the observatory, Edward Pickering, to study the brightness variations of a particular class of stars called Cepheid variables as recorded in the observatory’s collection of photographic plates. She identified 1,777 variable stars in the Small and Large Magellanic clouds in the southern skies.

Eventually she classified 47 of these as Cepheid variables and noticed that those with longer periods were brighter than those with shorter periods. She correctly inferred that as the stars were in the same distant clouds, they were all at much the same relative distance from us. Any difference in apparent magnitude was therefore related to a difference in absolute magnitude. When she plotted her results for the two clouds, she noticed that they formed distinct relationships between brightness and period. The plot (see a typical logarithmic plot in the graph below) is known as the period-luminosity plot and a mathematical expression for the relationship has come to be known as Leavitt’s law.

Leavitt's work allowed astronomers to stretch the measurable cosmic scale distances up to 200 million light years, resulting in an understanding of our stellar neighborhood far into the depths of space. One result of this is that our own galaxy, the Milky Way, has a diameter of about 100,000 light years. The distances to most of the nearby galaxies could be determined through this technique since it is possible to find one or more cepheid variable stars in them through large telescopes. The distances to the small and large Magellanic clouds (which are mini-galaxies in themselves) have been found to be 210 thousand and 179 thousand light years respectively. The distance to our nearest galaxy, Andromeda, is known to be 2.2 million light years.

Leavitt’s discovery led to such revolutionary developments in Astrophysics and Cosmology that it is inconceivable she could be overlooked for a Nobel prize in Physics. The great Edwin Hubble had repeatedly remarked that she deserved the Nobel prize. The only explanation is that the awards committee thought that these disciplines were not part of Physics! It took a long time to rectify this attitude, and some outstanding discoveries went unrewarded in the intervening period. 

3.        Lise Meitner (1878 - 1968) 

Otto Hahn & Lise Meitner

In one of my previous blog articles I wrote (see here):

“In 1938, German chemists Otto Hahn (1879-1968) and Fritz Strassman (1902-1980) discovered a strange result when Uranium was bombarded by neutrons. The main products of the induced radioactivity were nearly half way down in the periodic table (mainly barium and krypton isotopes) instead of being close to it as was known till then. This puzzling phenomenon was explained by physicist Lise Meitner (1878-1968), and her nephew Otto Frisch (1904-1979), as due to the break up (fission) of the target nucleus into much lighter nuclei, with a substantial amount of the nuclear binding energy of uranium being liberated.  Equally puzzling was the denial of the 1944 Nobel Prize to Lise Meitner, while recognizing the contribution of Otto Hahn to this history making discovery, of nuclear fission.”

In support of my statement, I quote here a recent item archived from the New York Times:

Miller, Katrina (2 October 2023). "Why the "Mother of the Atomic Bomb" Never Won a Nobel Prize - Lise Meitner developed the theory of nuclear fission, the process that enabled the atomic bomb. But her identity — Jewish and a woman — barred her from sharing credit for the discovery, newly translated letters show." The New York Times. Archived from the original on 2 October 2023. Retrieved 2 October 2023.

“Meitner was a giant in her own right, a contemporary of Nobel laureates like Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr and Max Planck. After the second atomic device was dropped on Nagasaki, the American press dubbed her the “mother of the atomic bomb,” an association she vehemently rejected.” She was praised by Albert Einstein as the "German Marie Curie"

Lise Meitner was born in Vienna and went to college at the University of Vienna in 1901, graduating with a PhD in Physics.  She then moved to Berlin where she worked for the next 30 years, mainly at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. She was forced to leave Germany in 1938 due to the rise of Nazism and her Jewish origin. She sought and found refuge in Sweden and lived there until her death in 1968. The highlight of her career was her collaboration with Otto Hahn in the historic discovery of nuclear fission and her theory of the process itself, which had an impact on the development of the nuclear weapon under the Manhattan Project in USA during the second World War.  She was herself not part of the project.

While Otto Hahn richly deserved his Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 1944, Lise Meitner deserved a Nobel Prize in Physics, arguably the same year, for Physics. Aided by her nephew Otto Frish, she had come out with the theory of nuclear fission, almost immediately after Hahn’s discovery of Uranium fission was made known.

Remarkably, according to the Nobel Prize archive, Lise Meitner was nominated 19 times for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry between 1924 and 1948, and 30 times for the Nobel Prize in Physics between 1937 and 1967! Yet she was ignored. 

The denial of the award to Lise Meitner is undoubtedly one of the worst instances of prejudice and discrimination in the history of modern science.

4.     Edwin Hubble (1889 - 1953)

Edwin Powell Hubble, whose name has been immortalized through the successes of the Hubble Space Telescope named after him, played a crucial role in establishing the fields of extragalactic astronomy and observational cosmology, paving the way for our understanding of the workings of the Universe. Hubble showed that many stellar objects previously thought to be clouds of dust and gas, and described as ‘nebulae’, were actually galaxies beyond the Milky Way. He used the period-luminosity relationship discovered by Henrietta Swan Leavitt (discussed earlier in this article) for determining their distances.

Hubble also showed that the recessional velocity of a galaxy increased with its distance from the Earth, a property known as Hubble's law, although the Belgian astronomer Georges Lemaître had proposed it two years earlier. The Hubble law (now renamed Hubble-Lemaître law) implies that the universe is actually expanding.  Previously, evidence had emerged that the light from many of these nebulae was strongly red-shifted, indicating that they possessed high recessional velocities.

Born in Marshfield, Missouri, Hubble had outstanding academic as well as athletic prowess. In deference to his father’s wishes, he studied jurisprudence at Oxford University before switching to astronomy in which he had developed a strong interest in his early days back home.  He pursued astronomy and mathematics in the University of Chicago and graduated in 1910. He was also a laboratory assistant for Robert Millikan, a future Nobel Prize recipient in Physics. The famous Yerkes Observatory was his next sojourn and he received his PhD degree in 1921. Incidentally, he served with distinction in both the world wars.

Hubble’s big break came in 1919 when George Ellery Hale offered him a position at the Mount Wilson Observatory near Pasadena, California.  He remained there permanently and used the then world’s largest (100-inch) Hooker telescope for his seminal measurements of the distances and speeds of a large number of galaxies that led to the Hubble Law.  Hubble's findings changed the scientific view of the universe radically, just as Galileo’s had first done in the seventeenth century,  and laid the foundations for modern cosmology.  

At that time, the Nobel Prize in Physics did not recognize work done in astronomy and astrophysics as pointed out before. Hubble canvassed strongly for these disciplines to be considered as part of physics so that astronomers, including himself, could be recognized by the Nobel Prize Committee. This campaign was unsuccessful in Hubble's lifetime, but shortly after his death, the Nobel Prize Committee decided that astronomical work would be eligible for the physics prize. It was too late for him, and Henrietta Leavitt, and possibly others as well.

5.        Satyendra Nath Bose (1894 - 1974)

 

In the world of quantum physics today, the term boson is ubiquitous, signifying a sub-atomic entity with distinctive properties, and in particular, obeying what has come to be known as the Bose-Einstein statistics.  The ‘Bose’ here, in the illustrious company of the great Albert Einstein, is none other than Satyendra Nath Bose, who belonged to the golden era of early twentieth century science in India, most of which flourished in pre-independence Bengal, the cradle of Indian science.

Bose studied at the Presidency College in Kolkata, where Jagadish Chandra Bose was one of his teachers. A polymath and a polyglot, Bose had a wide range of interest in varied fields, including physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology, mineralogy, philosophy, arts, literature, music, and several languages, including German which came in handy in his dealings with Einstein. In 1921, he moved to the newly set up University of Dhaka and collaborated with renowned astrophysicist Meghnad Saha in some theoretical studies. 

Bose followed with keen interest the revolutionary new developments of contemporary physics in Europe, particularly the work of the legendary Einstein for whom he developed great respect and reverence in characteristic Indian intellectual tradition.    He translated and published Einstein's original scientific papers in English and this was how most Indian scientists first got to know about Einstein's work. 

In his seminal work that led to revolutionary physical insights, Bose visualized black body radiation as a gas of photons, similar to a gas of classical particles obeying Maxwell-Boltzmann (MB) statistics, and tried to apply similar techniques to derive the immensely successful Planck's radiation formula in a manner radically different from what Planck himself had done.   In counting the energy states of the photons, Bose stumbled upon the property of indistinguishability in a fortuitous way.  A highly simplistic analogy may help to clarify this. If two objects are labeled A and B, their combinations AB and BA are treated as different entities in the MB formalism.  Apparently, Bose made the 'mistake' of treating them as the same, and this is what basically led him to a derivation of the correct formula for the distribution of photon energies, viz., Planck's formula.  Though it was much later that he realized the revolutionary and true meaning of his methodology, Bose's euphoria was understandable.  He had derived Planck's formula bereft of the ad hoc and unsatisfactory nature of Planck's assumptions, and based on Einstein's photon concept.  

Bose's persistent efforts to get his discovery published by any reputed science journal proved futile.   Apparently, he was way ahead of his times with an idea few could even understand during those days.  There must have been a lot of skepticism about something like this coming from an unknown native of a country that was equally unknown in the scientific world.  In despair, Bose hit upon an idea almost as daring as the one he was trying to publicize.  He mustered enough courage to communicate his work to the one person he most admired professionally and upon whose work it was partly based – the great Einstein himself, by then an international celebrity and whom Bose always regarded as a great master.  

Einstein was highly impressed and his response to Bose's plea was as decisive as it was prompt. He translated Bose's paper into German and sent it for publication with his comment: "...Bose's derivation of Planck's formula appears to me to be an important step forward. The method used here gives also the quantum theory of an ideal gas, as I shall show elsewhere". Bose's paper, translated under the title Plancks Gesetz und Lichtquanten-hypothese, was published in the August 1924 issue of the renowned German journal Zeitschrift fur Physik.  

Einstein, the genius that he was, understood the implication of Bose’s seminal work even better than the originator himself.  While Bose had applied a new statistical technique for the understanding of a photon gas, Einstein realized that it could be generalized and applied even to material particles that had an integral spin; in other words, to all bosons. He published this work a few months later.  The resulting theoretical edifice has come to be known as Bose-Einstein statistics and is one of the cornerstones of all of Quantum Physics, on par with Fermi-Dirac statistics. 

One of Bose's great ambitions was realized when he managed to spend two years in France and Germany, meeting and working with some towering personalities of the time, including Marie Curie, Paul Langevin, Louis de Broglie, Lise Meitner, Wolfgang Pauli and Werner Heisenberg.  Of course, the most memorable of these was his association in Berlin with the master himself, Albert Einstein.   

A large number of scientists have received the Nobel Prize for highly significant and path breaking work based on or connected with Bose-Einstein statistics. Paradoxically, the only name missing from such a list is that of Bose himself.  What an irony that his work was not considered worthy of such recognition! A similar fate befell the other great Bose of Bengal – Jagadish Chandra Bose, for his discovery of radio communication (he should have at least shared the prize that was given to Marconi).   

If I could travel back in time and set right some of the anomalies and injustices in the award of Nobel prizes for scientific achievement, I would give a Nobel Prize in Physics jointly to Bose and Einstein for their historic contributions.  Would I like to take away Einstein's award for the Photoelectric Effect? No, not all!  On the contrary, I would give him a third one for his work on Relativity, the one that he most deserves! 

6.     Georges Lemaître (1894 - 1966)

Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître was a Belgian Catholic priest, theoretical physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and professor of physics at the Catholic University of Louvain. He was the first to propose that the observed recession of nearby galaxies can be explained by assuming that the universe itself is expanding.  Confirmatory evidence came soon afterwards from the investigations of Edwin Hubble (as discussed earlier).

Lemaitre first derived "Hubble's law", now called the Hubble–Lemaître law, in 1927, two years before Hubble's article. He was also the first to provide an estimate of the Hubble constant which has now become a fundamental parameter in Cosmology, with wide ranging implications. Lemaître also proposed what later came to be termed the "Big Bang theory" of the origin of the universe, calling it the "hypothesis of the primeval atom.”

Lemaître was born in Charleroi, Belgium, and obtained his doctorate degree in 1920. He was also ordained as a priest in 1923. The same year, he became a research associate in astronomy at the University of Cambridge and worked with Arthur Eddington. He spent the next year working with Harlow Shapley at the Harvard College Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and at the MIT. In 1925, after joining the Catholic University of Louvain, he published the revolutionary idea that the universe is expanding, deriving it mathematically as a direct consequence of Einstein’s General Relativity. Initially, it was met with wide scepticism, but was praised later by Einstein after it was elucidated in detail in a lecture at the California Institute of Technology.

Earlier for Einstein, the concept of an expanding Universe with a definite beginning had been an unwelcome consequence of his General Theory of Relativity. He had derived an equation for the behaviour of the four-dimensional space-time continuum in which gravitation was interpreted as a geometrical property of the continuum, with matter producing a distortion or curvature of it to enable objects to move in it the way they are observed to move.  An expanding Universe was a logical consequence of such an exercise. However, Einstein's belief in a static, steady state Universe was so strong that he tweaked his equation to conform to the concept by arbitrarily introducing an extra term called the ‘cosmological constant’ into his result. Later, when Einstein realized that the theoretical foundation for the expanding Universe had been staring at his face all the time and that he had lost out on what was perhaps the most important discovery in cosmology up to that time, he termed the introduction of the cosmological constant as the biggest blunder of his life.

In later years Lemaitre became seriously interested in the use of electronic computers for solving complex problems, and worked with several state-of-art computers of those early days.

In relation to Catholic teachings on the origin of the Universe, Lemaître viewed his theory as neutral, with neither a connection nor a contradiction of the faith; as a devoted Catholic priest, Lemaître was opposed to mixing science with religion, although he held that the two fields were not in conflict.

In 1955, for his prediction of the expanding universe, Lemaître became the first theoretical cosmologist ever to be nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physics. Sadly, this was too little too late.  Yet another landmark achievement went unrewarded.

7.     Robert Oppenheimer (1904 - 1967) 

Christopher Nolan’s recent Hollywood blockbuster biopic Oppenheimer has brought into sharp focus the legacy of its lead character, J Robert Oppenheimer, who was simultaneously vilified and glorified as the ‘father of the A-bomb’, at least in popular perception. An outstanding theoretical physicist, of such unqualified reputation as to head the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton as the boss of the great Albert Einstein, something of a polymath and polyglot, including scholarship of the ancient Sanskrit language and its monumental Bhagavad-Gita, and above all, a man with the right skills and competence to oversee the transformation of one of the profoundly fundamental discoveries in science into what sadly turned out to be an existential threat to humanity itself.  

Such attributes alone do not merit a Nobel prize. But his contributions to the progress of physics does, as we shall see later.

Born in 1904 to a rich nonconformist liberal Jewish American family in New York, Oppenheimer was a naturally brilliant student, of almost anything that he fancied, science taking the front seat.  In 1911, he entered the Ethical Culture Society School, founded on the Ethical Culture movement, whose motto was "Deed before Creed". Oppenheimer entered Harvard College in 1922, graduating in 1925.  He spent some unhappy time at Cambridge, England, before moving to Gottingen in Germany to work under the legendary Max Born, a pioneer in quantum mechanics. It was there that he also studied with some of the greatest names of that era in the fledgling field, including Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, Paul Dirac, Enrico Fermi, Maria Goeppert and Edward Teller, most of them future Nobel laureates.  In 1927 he got his doctorate degree under Max Born.

Back in the USA, Oppenheimer worked alternately at Caltech and the University of California, Berkeley, both outstanding centres for physics research. At Berkeley, aside from his research and teaching activities, he became a strong sympathiser and active supporter of communist ideology, something that was to haunt him for the rest of his life.

Oppenheimer did important research in nuclear physics, spectroscopy, and quantum field theory, including its extension to quantum electrodynamics. His work predicted many later discoveries, including the neutron, meson and neutron star. Perhaps Oppenheimer’s best-known contribution to Physics is what has come to be known as the Born-Oppenheimer approximation method in the mathematical treatment of molecules to simplify complex calculations. The technique, developed with his mentor Max Born, had a profound influence on the application of quantum mechanics to solve complex problems. It remains his most import work. 

With Melba Phillips, the first graduate student to begin her PhD under Oppenheimer's supervision, Oppenheimer worked on calculations of artificial radioactivity under bombardment by deuterons, subsequently known as the Oppenheimer–Phillips process. 

As early as 1930, Oppenheimer wrote a paper that essentially predicted the existence of the positron. Two years later, Carl Anderson discovered the particle, for which he received the 1936 Nobel Prize in Physics. 

In the late 1930s, Oppenheimer became interested in astrophysics and developed a theory of what later came to be known as black holes, a terminal phase in stellar evolution, now well established. If he had lived long enough to see his predictions substantiated by experiment, he might have won a Nobel Prize for his work on gravitational collapse concerning neutron stars and black holes. 

Oppenheimer usually sowed the seeds of pathbreaking new ideas only to leave them for his students and associates to see through to their logical conclusion. In this he earned the lasting respect and admiration of fellow physicists, including the likes of Albert Einstein, Max Born and Niels Bohr.

1938 marked the discovery of nuclear fission by two German scientists (as discussed before). The implication of the discovery was quick to be absorbed by the scientific community, and Oppenheimer was among the first to do so.  This led to the eventual development of the Atom Bomb under the leadership of Oppenheimer as part of the Manhattan Project, and this altered the course of history. 

Oppenheimer’s contributions in any particular area of physics may not have proved adequate for a Nobel prize. But the Nobel committee had enough reason to bestow one on Oppenheimer if it had taken into account the sum total of his contributions, something that it has done occasionally in the long history of Nobel prizes.

 

8.     Chien-Shiung Wu (1912 - 1997)

In the history of experimental physics, Marie Curie’s name perhaps stands out as the greatest female personality of all time. If one were to look for a close match, it would be the Chinese-American nuclear and particle physicist Chien-Shiung Wu, often dubbed the ‘Chinese Madame Curie’ or ‘the first Lady of Physics’ or ‘Queen of Nuclear Research’.  She is best known for conducting the Wu experiment named after her, which proved that parity* is not conserved^# in weak interactions^. This landmark discovery resulted in her colleagues Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang being awarded the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics, and she being astonishingly left out. Lee and Yang certainly deserved the award for their theoretical work predicting the phenomenon, but it was Wu’s confirmatory experimental work that gave legitimacy to it.  This had far-reaching consequences to the standard model of particle physics, and it is difficult to make out what was going through the minds of the committee members when this travesty was being legitimized. 

[*Parity inversion transforms a phenomenon into its mirror image. If parity-conservation were violated, then it would be possible to distinguish between a mirrored version of the world and the mirror image of the current world.  ^#A conservation law states that a particular measurable property of an isolated physical system does not change as the system evolves over time. ^In nuclear and particle physics, the weak interaction, which is also often called the weak nuclear force, is one of the four known fundamental interactions, with the others being electromagnetism, the strong interaction, and gravitation. It is the mechanism of interaction between subatomic particles that is responsible for the radioactive decay of atoms.]

Born in mainland China, C S Wu had her college education in Nanjing University and migrated to the United States in 1936, and moved to the University of California at Berkeley. She worked with E O Lawrence at his Cyclotron facility for some time and then shifted to Caltech where she was associated with its director Robert Millikan. Her monumental experimental work on beta decay was duly noticed and gave her primacy in the field.  This led her to participation in the Manhattan Project, where she carried out some crucial experiments on the isotopes of Uranium. 

After the end of the world war in 1945, Wu accepted an offer of a position as an associate research professor at Columbia University. She remained at Columbia for the rest of her career, and in 1952, became the first woman to become a tenured physics professor in university history. It was here that she conducted the historic experiment that confirmed parity violation in weak interactions.

Wu’s extraordinary achievements in experimental physics stand out as beacons to others in the field, both men and women.  It is a pity that they didn’t receive their just reward by way of a richly deserved Nobel prize.

9.     John Stewart Bell (1928 - 1990) 

It has always been assumed that an event happening in one part of the world cannot instantaneously affect what happens somewhere else. This principle, called locality, was long regarded as a cherished assumption behind the laws of physics. Albert Einstein and two of his colleagues, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen pointed out in a seminal publication in 1935 that quantum mechanics permits what he called “spooky action at a distance”, and thereby unknowingly sowed the seeds of the present quantum revolution we are hearing about.  Since this was considered impossible, physicists wondered whether quantum mechanics is itself to blame for this so called EPR Paradox and if something was really missing from it.

In 1964, Northern Irish physicist John Stewart Bell put forward a theorem, known simply as Bell’s theorem, showing that quantum mechanics actually permits instantaneous connections between far-apart locations. The locality principle was seriously under threat. The concept of ‘local hidden variables’ was introduced to save the situation.  But Bell proved that we could rule out local hidden variable theories, and indeed rule out locality altogether This stunning development is at the root of the quantum revolution we are hearing about today.  The locality principle was reduced to a testable hypothesis. Bell predicted distinctly stronger statistical correlations in the outcomes of certain far-apart measurements than any locality theory possibly could. Experiments have repeatedly confirmed this and vindicated quantum mechanics since then. Implicit in the theorem is the proposition that the determinism of classical physics is fundamentally incapable of describing quantum mechanics.

Bell’s theorem challenged our most deeply held intuitions about physics, and prompted physicists to explore how quantum mechanics might enable tasks unimaginable and considered impossible in a classical world.  According to Krister Shalm, a quantum physicist at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, “The quantum revolution that’s happening now, and all these quantum technologies — that’s 100% thanks to Bell’s theorem.”  Quantum entanglement, quantum computers, quantum teleportation, cryptanalysis, quantum key distribution, communication, cyber security, etc., are some of the technologies involved. 

Bell was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland.  He attended the Queens University of Belfast and obtained a bachelor’s degree in 1948 and went on to obtain a PhD from the University of Birmingham in 1956. In 1960 he began to work at CERN, Geneva. The pathbreaking theorem named after him was conceived during this period. 

To date, all Bell tests have supported the theory of quantum physics, and not the hypothesis of local hidden variables. These successful efforts to experimentally validate violations of the Bell inequalities (arising out of Bell’s theorem) resulted in the award of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics to John Clauser, Alain Aspect, and Anton Zeilinger.

Bell’s work is of such fundamental importance in Quantum Physics that he is unlucky to have missed out on a Nobel prize before his rather untimely death.

10.  Vera Rubin (1928 - 2016)

The observable universe is now known to contain only about 4% of ordinary matter. 23% of it is dark matter and the remaining 73% is dark energy.  This has profoundly influenced our understanding of the nature and composition of the universe.  The inference of dark matter in the universe had its origin in the seminal studies of galactic rotational properties by the American astronomer Vera Florence Cooper Rubin.

Vera Rubin uncovered the discrepancy between the predicted and observed angular motion of galaxies by studying galactic rotation curves. This work provided evidence for the existence of dark matter. These results were later amply confirmed.

Rubin did graduate studies at Cornell University and Georgetown University, where she observed deviations from Hubble flow in galaxies and provided evidence for the existence of galactic superclusters. She got her Ph D under George Gamow at the George Washington University in 1954. After a decade of work in various institutions, Rubin did her pathbreaking work at McDonald and Palomar Observatories (with the world’s largest telescope, the 200” Hale Telescope at Mount Palomar) beginning in 1965.

The Rubin–Ford effect, an apparent anisotropy in the expansion of the Universe on the scale of 100 million light years, was discovered through studies of spiral galaxies, particularly the Andromeda Galaxy, chosen for its brightness and proximity to Earth.

Rubin began to study the rotation and outer reaches of galaxies, an interest sparked by her collaboration with the Margaret and Geoffrey Burbidge. She investigated the rotation speeds of spiral galaxies, beginning with Andromeda, by looking at their outermost material. She observed that the outermost components of the galaxy were moving as quickly as those close to the center. This apparent anomaly was an early indication that spiral galaxies were surrounded by dark matter. She further uncovered the discrepancy between the predicted angular motion of galaxies based on the visible light and the observed motion. Her research showed that spiral galaxies rotate quickly enough that they should fly apart, if the gravity of their constituent stars was all that was holding them together. Since they stay intact, a large amount of unseen mass must be holding them together, a conundrum that became known as the galaxy rotation problem.

Rubin's calculations showed that galaxies must contain five to ten times as much dark matter as ordinary matter. Her results were confirmed in subsequent decades, and became the first confirmatory results supporting the theory of dark matter, first proposed by Fritz Zwicky in the 1930s.

In her long career in observational astronomy, Vera Rubin received almost every major award and honor, except the Nobel Prize.  Most recently, in December  2019, the 8.4 m Large Synoptic Survey Telescope was renamed the Vera C Rubin Observatory in recognition of her contributions to the study of dark matter, as also her outspoken advocacy for the equal treatment and representation of women in science. The huge observatory is coming up on a mountain in Cerro Pachón, Chile, and will focus on the study of dark matter and dark energy.

Vera Rubin being overlooked for the Nobel Prize was possibly yet another instance of gender bias as much as the non-recognition of Astronomy and related disciplines as part of Physics.

11. George Sudarshan (1931 - 2018)

Ennackal Chandy George Sudarshan (better known as E C G Sudarshan) was an Indian American theoretical physicist credited with numerous contributions to the field of theoretical physics, including the Glauber-Sudarshan P representation, V-A theory, quantum Zeno effect, spin–statistics theorem, non-invariance groups, positive maps of density matrices, quantum computation, etc.

He was born in Pallom, Kottayam, India. and raised in a Syrian Christian family, but later left the religion and converted to Hinduism.   He graduated from the Madras Christian College in 1951, and obtained a master's degree at the University of Madras a year later. He worked at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) for a brief period with Homi Bhabha and others. Subsequently, he moved to the University of Rochester in New York to work under Robert Marshak as a graduate student. In 1958, he received his PhD degree from the University of Rochester. Subsequently he moved to Harvard University to join Julian Schwinger as a postdoctoral fellow.

Sudarshan was the originator (with Robert Marshak) of the V-A theory of the weak force, which eventually paved the way for the electroweak theory. Feynman acknowledged Sudarshan's contribution in 1963 stating that the V-A theory was discovered by Sudarshan and Marshak and publicized by Gell-Mann and himself.  Sudarshan also made significant contributions to the field of quantum optics and developed a quantum representation of coherent light later known as Glauber-Sudarshan representation. For this, controversially, Glauber was awarded the 2005 Nobel prize in Physics ignoring Sudarshan's contributions.

Sudarshan was also the first to propose tachyons, particles that could travel faster than light, but this has remained purely a theoretical construct. He developed a fundamental formalism called dynamical maps to study the theory of open quantum systems.

He taught at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), University of Rochester, Syracuse University, and Harvard. From 1969 onwards, he was a professor of physics at the University of Texas at Austin and a senior professor at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He worked as the director of the Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMSc), Chennai, India, for five years during the 1980s, dividing his time between India and USA. During his tenure, he transformed it into a center of excellence.

Sudarshan was passed over for the Physics Nobel Prize on more than one occasion, leading to a major controversy in 2005 when several physicists wrote to the Swedish Academy, protesting that Sudarshan should have been awarded a share of the Prize for the Sudarshan diagonal representation (also known as Glauber-Sudarshan representation) in quantum optics, for which Roy J Glauber was awarded a share of the prize. 

In 2007, Sudarshan told the Hindustan Times, "The 2005 Nobel prize for Physics was awarded for my work, but I wasn't the one to get it. Each one of the discoveries that this Nobel was given for work based on my research." Sudarshan also commented on not being selected for the 1979 Nobel prize which went to Steven Weinberg, Sheldon Glashow and Abdus Salam.

Sudarshan passed away in 2019 at Austin, Texas, aged 89 and may have been unlucky not to get the coveted Nobel Prize in Physics.

12. Stephen Hawking (1942 - 2015)

In the matter of ‘mind over matter’ no one mattered more than Stephen William Hawking, the English theoretical cosmologist who was, in his last days, virtually a lump of inactive human flesh topped up by one of the most fertile and creative brains in human history, propped up with the latest in technology that kept him communicating with the outside world! In the saga of defiance of misfortune and the triumph of the human intellect over adversity, perhaps only deaf and blind Helen Keller of yore comes anywhere close to him.

In 1959, at the age of 17, he began his university education at the University College, Oxford. In 1962, he began his graduate work at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and obtained his PhD degree in general relativity and cosmology. In 1963, at age 21, Hawking was diagnosed with a slow-progressing form of motor neurone disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, that gradually paralysed him.  After the loss of his speech, he communicated through a synthesized speech-generating device initially through use of a handheld switch, and towards the end by using a single cheek muscle!

Hawking occupied the prestigious Lucasian Professorship in Mathematics at Cambridge University for thirty years, a postion once held by the great Isaac Newton himself.

Hawking collaborated with Roger Penrose on gravitational singularity and the theoretical prediction that black holes can emit radiation, often called Hawking radiation, an astonishing result since nothing was ever supposed to be able to come out of black holes. To achieve this, Hawking had to use some advanced mathematics that he himself developed, much the same way Einstein did while developing the general theory of relativity.  Initially, Hawking radiation was controversial. By the late 1970s, the discovery was widely accepted as a major breakthrough in theoretical physics. This was a precursor to the development of a new discipline, the thermodynamics of black holes, an astounding development enabling a description of black holes in terms of entropy, temperature, etc., terms that are familiar in classical thermodynamics. 

Edward Witten, a theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, said: “Trying to understand Hawking’s discovery better has been a source of much fresh thinking for almost 40 years now, and we are probably still far from fully coming to grips with it. It still feels new.”

Hawking was also the first to come up with a theory of cosmology combining general theory of relativity with quantum mechanics. Following these, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1974. He was only 32 then, one of the youngest to earn an FRS. As his fame grew, sadly so did the disease.  He had to rely more and more on the latest technology-based support systems, permanently confined to a motorized wheel chair that fully utilized these systems.

Hawking was a pioneer in the theoretical study of black holes. The most important thing about Hawking radiation is that it shows that the black hole is not cut off from the rest of the universe. Also, as the great theoretical astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar once commented, black holes are the most perfect macroscopic objects in the universe, being constructed just out of space and time; moreover, they are the simplest as well, since they can be exactly described by an explicitly known geometry.

Hawking achieved huge popular appeal and commercial success with several works of popular science in which he discussed his theories and the subject of cosmology in general. His book A Brief History of Time was a runaway success, and appeared on the Sunday Times bestseller list for a record-breaking 237 weeks. It also made him an international celebrity and a rich man.

“Not since Albert Einstein has a scientist so captured the public imagination and endeared himself to tens of millions of people around the world,” Michio Kaku, a well-known physicist and science communicator said in an interview. “What a triumph his life has been,” said Martin Rees, a Cambridge University cosmologist, the astronomer royal of England and Hawking’s longtime colleague. “His name will live in the annals of science; millions have had their cosmic horizons widened by his best-selling books; and even more, around the world, have been inspired by a unique example of achievement against all the odds - a manifestation of amazing willpower and determination.”

Hawking passed away on 14th March 2018 at the age of 76, nearly fifty years longer than medical science opined he would.

When Hawking died, I was sightseeing in Bangkok.  I was so depressed by the news that I cut short my visit, returned to my hotel and spent the rest of the day in silent contemplation of an extraordinary life, a true symbol of the triumph of mind over matter.

At the core of Hawking’s theory of blackholes is Hawking radiation, predicted to be produced by tiny evaporating black holes at their end stage, something yet to be detected observationally. This is apparently what came in the way of the Nobel committee in awarding him a prize in physics. Hawking blithely remarked, “The Nobel is given only for theoretical work that has been confirmed by observation. It is very, very difficult to observe the things I have worked on.”

This ought not to have been the case. The history of Nobel prizes is replete with instances of the award having been made on the basis of achievement in a particular field that has had a profound impact on its future course. For example, to Max Planck “in recognition of the services he rendered to the advancement of Physics by his discovery of energy quanta”, and to Subramanyan Chandrasekhar “for his theoretical studies of the physical processes of importance to the structure and evolution of the stars”.  The Nobel committee apparently took an ostrich-like attitude when Hawking’s case was debated, thereby passing up an opportunity to honour itself by voting for one of the most significant awards it could have taken credit for.

13.  Jocelyn Bell Burnell (1943 - )

Dame Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell is an astrophysicist from Northern Ireland who, as a postgraduate student, discovered the first radio pulsars in 1967 at Cambridge.

Born in Lurgan, Northern Ireland, Jocelyn Bell graduated from the University of Glasgow in 1965, and completed her PhD in 1969 in Cambridge. At Cambridge, she worked with Antony Hewish and others to construct the Interplanetary Scintillation Array just outside Cambridge to study quasars, which had recently been discovered.

On 28 November 1967, while a postgraduate student at Cambridge, Bell Burnell detected a ‘bit of scruff’ on her chart-recorder papers. The signal had also been visible in data taken in August, but it had taken her three months to find it. She established that the signal was pulsing with great regularity, at a rate of about one pulse every 1.33 seconds. This was identified after several years as a rapidly rotating neutron star. Though serendipitous, this was a major milestone in Astrophysics. The event was later documented by the BBC Horizon series.

The discovery eventually earned the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1974; but she was not one of the recipients!

Jocelyn Bell had helped build the Interplanetary Scintillation Array over two years and initially noticed the anomaly, sometimes reviewing as much as 30 m of paper data each night. Bell later said that she had to be persistent in reporting the anomaly in the face of skepticism from her supervisor Anthony Hewish, who initially insisted it was due to interference and man-made. She spoke of meetings held by Hewish and Martin Ryle to which she was not invited. The discovery was eventually published with Hewish as the lead author, followed by her name and then three others. The 1974 Nobel Prize went to Anthony Hewish and Martin Ryle, the latter for a different but related achievement. Significantly, Jocelyn Bell’s name didn’t figure at all in the awards.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, in its press release announcing the prize, had cited Martin Ryle and Antony Hewish “for their pioneering research in radio astrophysics: Ryle for his observations and inventions, in particular of the aperture synthesis technique, and Hewish for his decisive role in the discovery of pulsars”.  At the time, fellow astronomer Fred Hoyle had criticized Bell's omission. Obviously embittered, she appeared to have reconciled herself to the situation with the enigmatic statement, "I believe it would demean Nobel Prizes if they were awarded to research students, except in very exceptional cases, and I do not believe this is one of them." In later years, she opined that "the fact that I was a graduate student and a woman, together demoted my standing in terms of receiving a Nobel prize."

Feryal Özel, an astrophysicist at the University of Arizona, characterized Bell Burnell's contributions as follows: “She helped build the array she used to make the observation. She is the one who noticed it. She is the one who argued it's a real signal. When a graduate student takes that kind of lead in her project, it's hard to play it down.”

Though the Nobel Prize eluded her, Jocelyn Bell Burnell has received almost all the best-known awards and honors in Astrophysics, and held some of the most distinguished positions in both Britain and abroad.  In 2018, she was awarded the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. Following the announcement of the award, she decided to use the $3 million prize money to establish a fund to help female, minority and refugee students to become research physicists. The fund is administered by the Institute of Physics.

Summation

The unlucky thirteen in my list consists of widely diverse celebrities with one common thread connecting them – they all deserved the Nobel prize, no less definitively than those who did, and in some cases at least, the awards committee could have been slightly more objective and less insensitive.