Well, I won’t say this guy’s discovery was a “dud,” because it DID work! Even so, I think many of us would be surprised that this discovery won a Nobel.
Before antiobiotics were widely available, doctors observed that high fevers sometimes cured patients of venereal diseases. Julius Wagner-Jauregg built on this observation, and started giving syphillis patients malaria, letting them develop high fevers, then giving them quinine after the high temperatures had a chance to kill off the infection.
Again, it worked… but I’m guessing we’re all glad that method isn’t still in wide use today.
As you suggested, it was actually comical to give the prize to two people who thought what they had discovered was caused by some bird shit rather than a key to the history of the universe.
The Nobel is awarded for actual discoveries, not for theories. Can’t remember whether it was Penzias or Wilson, but one of them said he felt uncomfortable as a Nobel laureate. But then he reconciled that it isn’t given to the most brilliant people, or the most effective theories, but to the actual discoveries that make history.
As a result, pure theoreticians get short shrift by Nobel. Oh well.
Note that Einstein got no Nobel for relativity, but one for explaining the photoelectric effect. (The theoretician’s best route to a Nobel is to explain something already observed but for which there is no good explanation. Then you get credit for the discovery.)
Of course, it helped that his explanation of the photoelectric effect was the first solid “outside” evidence for quantum mechanics.
I am not going go along with this because for one thing then Heisenberg, Schoedinger and Dirac would not have won NP after Andersson discovered antimatter, confirming Dirac’s prediction, which in turn confirmed the accuracy of Quantum Mechanic theory. Similarly quarks were postulated theoretically by laureate Gell-Mann well before they were observed experimentally, and the same goes for W and Z gauge bosons, predicted by Electroweak theory of laureates Glashow, Abdus-Salaam and Weinberg..