Any award that is given out on a regular basis such as the Oscars or Time person of the year is always going to be mired in some controversy over their choices. People will naturally have disagreements and complain about the choices made. Some areas are also naturally more contentious than others and it becomes harder to pick out clear leaders.
What I’m looking for is examples of awards that you think are particularly well chosen and tend to be good at picking the right people. For example, I would nominate the Nobel Prizes. The Nobel committee takes time to make sure the significance of the work is pretty clear cut and most of their choices over the years have been quite good.
Good, because the peace prize is 100% political, and these days it really doesn’t have much to do with peace anyways. I mean, Al Gore? If you want to invent a prize for environmental activism, fine. But to shoehorn him into a peace prize is really pretty stupid.
Supposedly, there’s a lot of controversy over even the science awards. Not that the people don’t deserve it, but that they win long after the work they did that earned it, and for other things than what they should have. Like, they realize retrospecively that someone SHOULD have won a Nobel for X, so years later they award one for Y, which was not really so deserving as X. I’ve heard this argued in the cases of Einstein and Feynmann in physics.
And Feynmann, of course, didn’t even want his - he only accepted it to avoid the fuss and hassle of turning it down. His main objection was that the Nobel Prize Committee was not considering some eminent Russian scientists for political reasons.
The Nobels have had their share of controversy. They refused for years to give an award to Albert Einstein due to antisemitism and finally gave him one to a fairly minor bit of his work (the photoelectric effect, not something you associate with him).
For a better choice, I’d say the Macarthur Fellowship, which have consistently picked out talented people in all aspects and seems to stay clear of any major controversies.
The science Nobel prizes are meticulously researched and investigated prior to announcement - whilst there is frequently controversy about who **didn’t[/B one, you very rarely see a case of an undeserving guy winning. Some fields have so many innovators that it’s just impossible to include all the big hitters on one prize. This year’s chemistry award is a good example, it went to a single person, Gerhard Ertl, for surface chemistry. For such a massive field its strange to see just one man honoured, for sure others have been overlooked there.
You also see some cases of great scientists getting a Nobel prize as a sort of lifetime achievement award, without ever having made the singular discovery that should characterise the prize.
While I’ve yet to read it in detail, Aant Elzinga’s recent detailed study of the debates leading to Einstein’s Nobel Prize (SHP, 2006) doesn’t see antisemitism as a delaying factor and that’s consistent with previous assessments of the history. Antisemitism wasn’t a significant factor in the initial reception amongst physicists of his ideas - indeed Stark, who went on to be one of his Nazi critics, was one of his strongest initial supporters - and nominations of him for the Nobel promptly followed their recognition of his importance. Where there was a delay was the Swedes then arguing for some years about what types of contributions were eligible for the physics prize, e.g. there was a bias towards experimental work and against theory. Again, antisemitism wasn’t a factor in this debate (at least in that specifically Swedish context).
Indeed, Elzinga suggests that the public antisemitism directed against Einstein in Germany following his elevation to celebrity post-1919 helped swing Ahrrenius, the key figure in Swedish physics in the period, behind giving him the prize.
Nor was his work on the photoelectric effect “minor”. There was a compromise hashed out concerning the exact citation of the award, but that was a way of reaching a consensus agreement given the philosophical divisions that had previous blocked his candidature. It could be presented as a clear-cut prediction by him that had been confirmed by experiment, hence acceptable to the experimentally-minded wing amongst the assessors.
The process and the result was more to do with their internal disagreements about the nature of the prize rather than any personal snub to Einstein.