Just curious.
Excellent question. I’ll go looking, but my educated hunch is “no”. Nobel prizes didn’t start until the early 20th century, and by that time the science community had the ways and means to quickly examine theories as they were proposed. Scientists had also become a lot more hesitant (on the whole) to put forth definitive theories. It was, after all, the time in which electromagnetism and theories of light were colliding with more traditional Newtonian mechanics. Scientists of any real note had more questions than answers.
Remember, too, that the Nobel Prizes are not like the Oscars! A scientist sometimes has to wait several years before getting the prize. Some examples:
[ul]
[li]Sir James Chadwick: 1935 Physics Prize for discovering the neutron in 1930.[/li][li] Albert Einstein: 1921 Physics Prize for work going as far back as 1905.[/li][li] Otto Hahn: 1944. Chemistry prize for identifying atomic fission in uranium.[/li][li] Marie Curie: 1911. Chemistry prize for isolating radium in 1898.[/li][/ul]
A theory that’s important enough to warrant a Prize will immediately gain attention from the worldwide community. They will attempt to repeat the experiments or other work. If the theory doesn’t fit, everyone will know long before the work comes before the Prize board.
A note: calling theories “wrong” misses a point. Theories either fit or don’t fit all the phenomena we observe. As we observe more, we either confirm a theory, disprove it, or supersede it. That is, if we had awarded Newton a Nobel Prize for Physics, and then discovered that his theory is incomplete when looking at things moving near the speed of light, we’d still be OK.
I seem to remember reading a few years ago that a Nobel Prize in Chemistry (is there such a thing?) had been awarded early on, and it was learned many years later that the theory for which the guy got the prize was really, really wrong (but had seemed to make brilliant sense at the time, obviously). Don’t have a cite, though.
There has been call to retrract the 1949 prize in Medicine given to Egas Moniz, a developer and proponet of the lobotomy technique.
Might you be thinking of J J Thomson, who won the Nobel Prize in 1906 for discovering the electron? He proposed the plum pudding model of the atom, which was disproved by Rutherford after Johnson won his Nobel Prize.
But Thomson’s prize wasn’t for his incorrect theory of the structure of the atom: that was just a consequence of his discovery, which was very much correct.
How about everyone who’s ever won it for negotiating “peace” in the Middle East?
Buechner proposed that yeast cells excrete proteins that metabolize sugars. We now know that this metabolism occurs inside the cells. Though Buechner won a Chemistry Nobel for his work with yeast, his outside-the-cell theory was not cited in the award.
Moniz’s work on lobotomies seems the most suspect, and an unfortunate goof on the part of the Prize committee.
NB: “Johnson” in my post above should of course read “Thomson”.
:smack:
Poor Alfred Nobel! The one prize he really cared about is the most political, opinion-oriented, and suspect of the lot.
Best to say “let’s not go there”. Same goes for literature.
Instead, look at what’s missing:
[ul]
[li]Mathematics. Grossly unfair.[/li][li]Astronomy. Has to share with physics, which is unfair. Especially unfair now that we’re beginning to explore the solar system.[/li][li]Biology and Biochemistry. If you’re lucky, you can sneak into Medicine/Physiology or Chemistry.[/li][li]Oceanography, Geology, Meteorology, Paeleontology, and any other of the physical sciences.[/li][/ul]
And of course you have to be alive. God forbid you should die right after a major discovery!
It’s worth mentioning that Nobel prizes aren’t supposed to be awarded for theories at all. Rather they are to be given for discoveries, i.e., experimental observations. From Nobel’s will, quoted in the Statutes of the Nobel Foundation, the prize money is supposed to be distributed in the sciences as follows:
An observation can’t really be wrong, barring dishonesty or malfunctioning equipment, which are ruled out by independent replication of the experiment. You might come up with a wrong theory to explain the observation, but, strictly speaking, you didn’t get the Nobel for the explanation. That’s why people like Penzias and Wilson won the Nobel for just observing the cosmic microwave background without making any real theoretical contributions. Meanwhile, Hawking hasn’t received the Nobel for his theory that Black holes radiate because no one has observed it.
Someone mentioned the amount of time between a theory (or a discovery) and the awarding of a Nobel Prize. The record holder for that must be Dr Subramaniam Chandrashekhar of India. In a paper he wrote in 1933 he proposed that stars with a mass 1.44 times greater then the Sun will eventually become supernovas while those with a lesser mass will become white dwarves. This 1.44 solar mass limit is called “the Chandrashekhar limit”. He was awarded his Nobel Prize in 1983 - fifty years later.
Um, “discoveries” can be theoretical as well as experimental. In the past ten years, the Physics Nobel has gone to physicists doing entirely theoretical work three times: 1999, for the theory of electroweak interactions; 2003, for contributions to the theory of superconductors; and 2004, for the discovery of “asymptotic freedom”, which allowed the strong nuclear interactions to be explained. (There have been other instances, as well, where the prize was awarded jointly to a theorist and an experimentalist working on the same subject – 2005’s prize, for example.)
As wolf_meister noted, though, an awful lot of time usually elapses between when a theoretical “discovery” is made and the awarding of the corresponding Nobel. A case similar to Chandrasekhar’s, in fact, was the winners of the 2003 Physics Prize, who also did their work a half-century earlier. The 1999 and 2004 prizes had a shorter amount of time elapse – a mere twenty or thirty years.
An even better example is Einstein. He won a Nobel for his discovery of the photoelectric effect, but no prizes for his special and general theories of relativity.
The selection committee in Oslo seems to reward effort more than results.
I believe Einstein won his prize for the explanation, not the discovery, of the photoelectric effect, which must have been known for a while.
Incidentally, Nobel specified that the prize be awarded for the most important discover in the preceding year, a stipulation that has been utterly ignored. Most often, you cannot judge the importance of a discovery until long after.
As for prizes in mathematics, I think the whole discipline is seen as too theoretical for Nobel. The speculation that the reason was that Mittag-Leffler (the most famous Swedish mathematician of the 19th century) ran off with Nobels wife is weakened a bit by the fact that Nobel had no wife (nor significant other) and lived mostly in Paris. Anyway, it is adequately explained by the fact that he was an eminently practical man with the eminentlly practical man’s disdain for theory.
Interesting Awardees:
2005 Peace Prize
INTERNATIONAL ATOMIC ENERGY AGENCY and MOHAMED ELBARADEI for their efforts to prevent nuclear energy from being used for military purposes and to ensure that nuclear energy for peaceful purposes is used in the safest possible way.
1994 Peace Prize
YASSER ARAFAT , Chairman of the Executive Committee of the PLO, President of the Palestinian National Authority.
1973 Peace Prize
HENRY A. KISSINGER , Secretary of State, State Department, Washington.
LE DUC THO , Democratic Republic of Viet Nam. (Declined the prize.)
for jointly negotiating the Vietnam peace accord in 1973.
1929 Peace Prize
FRANK BILLINGS KELLOGG Former Secretary of State, Negotiated the Briand-Kellogg Pact.
Supposedly, Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla were set to (jointly) receive the Nobel Prize 9for physics) around about 1910 or so. Tesla LOATHED Edison, and announced he would refuse the prize (if awarded jointly). So neither one got it.
Too bad-it would have been nice for a real “mad scientist” like Tesla to have gotten the prize!
One other item: Dr. Elie Metchnikoff received a Nobel prize for medicine-he had this weird theory that eating yoghurt would eneable you to live to 120! I heard he tested this theory on himself-anybody know how long he lived? 
To 71, according to Wiki.
After actually looking it up, instead of just going off the cuff, I believe you are correct. :smack:
Continuing the hijack - the shortest time between discovery and Nobel award probablybelongs to Klaus von Klitzing - publication in 1980, Nobel awarded in 1985. He also has a solo award in physics, which is rare these days.