What does the quality of Nobel Prize work over time tell us about our recent technological progress? Has it been exponentially improving as the proponents of the “technological singularity” idea predict, or is it more linear? (Or slowing down, even)
Does the prize committee have a tougher time each successive year with greater numbers of top-quality work?
Much as the optimist in me would like to believe that there’s so much progress that they might consider giving prizes more frequently, I have a feeling human society is actually getting dumber and most people only care about mundane crap like the latest news about Paris Hilton or Tom and Katie.
I don’t think there’s a GQ here. I’m not even sure the question is answerable.
For one thing, the scientific Nobel Prizes are given out for theoretical work and so can’t be rated in terms of technological progress. Nor does the work often does not lead to any technological breakthroughs. Many Physics prizes have been given out for work contributing to understanding basic particle interactions, but it’s hard to make a case that explaining symmetry violations led to DVDs.
And what do the interests of human society have to do with theoretical science? Do you honestly think that people were any less absorbed with celebrities 50 or 75 or 100 years ago? If so, you’ve never read any history.
Here’s a book you need to read: The year the world went mad, by Allen Churchill. The year is 1927. The book is about celebrities, and how people went nuts about them. Any chapter of it could be played out today, with only the media types changed. Nothing has changed about human society.
The science Nobels often are purely theoretical work, but they’re not supposed to be. According to Nobel’s will, they’re supposed to be for things with practical application. And, in fact, many of them do have practical application. The first physics Nobel, for instance, was for the discovery of X-rays, which have enormous practical applications, and did at the time, as well, even though Roentgen didn’t understand how they actually worked. Michelson, of Michelson and Morley fame, won the prize not for his attempted (and famously failed) measurement of the ether, but for his work on establishment of fundamental standards of measure. And the medicine prize a few years ago was for the polymerase chain reaction method of duplicating DNA strands, which (in itself) told us nothing about the structure or function of DNA, but revolutionized the practical applications of genetics.
Yes, my generalization was a generalization. Yet it’s still true, despite the exceptions. I’d also add the generalization that recent prizes have tended even more to the theoretical than did the earliest prizes.
I continue to argue that the Nobel Prizes are collectively not an indicator of technological progress in any way.
Oddly, this is far from obvious and the interpretation of what he wanted has always been argued about. What the will specifies is that the prizes should be awarded to those “who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind.” That may sound as if it’s nicely pointing towards practical accomplishments, but then this wording covers all the prizes, including Literature. As a result, the Academy seems to have taken the meaning rather broadly right from the start. In the case of the Physics prize, the will does go on to require that it be for “the most important discovery or invention”. But Elisabeth Crawford, who wrote the standard study of the early decisions, has argued that they immediately applied the unstated rule that “invention” couldn’t apply to anything that had been patented. The reasoning seems to have been that the prize shouldn’t be awarded to someone who’d already derived financial profit from what they’d done. It was to be reserved for deserving cases who otherwise hadn’t benefited. The obvious counterexample, aside from possibly Marconi, is the 1912 prize for the invention of a regulator for use in buoys; Crawford believes this was partly a symbolic, one-off protest about the unstated rule by the more technological members of the Academy and exceptional because Dalen had just been blinded in a lab accident. Otherwise the prize has always been given to people who, at least at the time, were primarily seen as physicists rather than inventors.
Even with the later qualifications, I think you’re reaching for the wrong terminology. Restricting myself to the Physics Prize, I think it’s correct to say that the prizes have overwhelmingly been awarded to work - either experimental or theoretical - in fundamental physics and that there is usually little obvious relation, if any, between this and technological progress.
It is true that there have been shifts in the pattern of awards over the years and that these surely reflect more on the attitudes of the Swedish Academy than anything else. It took a long time for astronomical work to be included at all, yet that’s now a regular part of the prize. Then there’s the issue of the particle physics/quantum field theory prizes over the last two decades. In a period where everything has basically merely confirmed the Standard Model in ever greater detail and so nothing leaps out as a “discovery”, the awards shifted from reflecting recent surprises to awarding older developments that led to the rise of that model in the 1970s, but which weren’t recognised by the Prize at the time. The recent awards in that area thus only indirectly reflect the current state of this particular field.
So, no, the Physics Prize tells us virtually nothing about technological progress over the last century.
I used “technological progress” because it’s the term the OP used. I wanted to emphasize that it wasn’t the correct term to use in this application. IOW, we’re agreeing on this.
We’re indeed agreeing about “technological progress”, but your claim that the prizes have mainly been given for “theoretical work” is still plain wrong in any sense that the Swedish Academy, the recipients, most of the nominees, Chronos or myself would use the term. “Fundamental”, “pure” or “non-applied” would be far more normal usages than “theoretical”, which has a whole different set of connotations in this context, for the distinction you were trying to make.
Haven’t read the actual lit, but why would the idea of a technological singularity imply that any one discovery/invention would be exponentially better? Wouldn’t it be sufficient to have an exponential increase in the numbers of qualified applicants, each of whom is about the same quality as ever?
What? The standard distinction is between theoretical and experimental, and it’s used everywhere when talking about science. If you insist on using some other terminology, fine, but my point remains exactly the same.
> . . . I have a feeling human society is actually getting dumber . . .
Do a search on “Flynn effect” and “intelligence”. In so far as we can measure such things, human society is getting smarter. Of course, we could argue that intelligence simply can’t be measured, but if it can be, we’re getting smarter.
If you want to start a more interesting thread (probably in Great Debates), you might ask if the idea of the “technological singularity” makes any sense.
While I actually believe that we are getting smarter, why do we not see more of the Renaissance Man? Perhaps I am using the term incorrectly, IOW, I mean why don’t we see more Ben Franklins, Abe Lincolns, and, oh, I can’t think of one, oh, I’ll use Jose Rizals (national hero of The Philippines, according to my girlfriend’s co-worker who fits the model I’m speaking of).
These people are largely self-taught, speak a ton of languages (Rizal spoke 22 :eek: - I can barely master English, and speak horrendous Peggy Hill Spanish), earned difficult degrees at a young age, etc. I guess it’s the language thing I find so amazing… Anyway, are we seeing less of these types of people, while society plays catch-up, or are there so many of these people that their abilities seem average? I guess it depends on how we define intelligence ultimately.
I think I see the point that bonzer is making. A fellow who works at a particle accelerator, for instance, is likely doing fundamental physics work, as opposed to applied, but he’s an experimentalist, not a theorist. By the same token, I can imagine a person doing theoretical work on, say, miniaturized silicon etching techniques, which is a very applied field. While there’s some correlation between “theoretical” and “fundamental”, it’s far from absolute. I don’t know which distinction is more relevant here, though.
The ‘quality’ of Nobel prizes has undoubtedly changed over the years, reflecting the development and maturation of the various scientific fields. The earlier awards frequently went to titanic figures who made epochal discoveries, later awards go to more specialised pieces of science. On the face of it, there is no comparison whatsoever to be made between the work of Linus Pauling, say, who won the 1954 chemistry prize for his studies on ‘the Nature of the chemical bond’ and modern winners like Grubbs, Shrock and Chauvin, who won this year’s chemistry prize for olefin metathesis. Pauling’s work supports the entire edifice of contemporary chemistry, whereas the latter group of people studied a single chemical reaction, albeit an important one, out of hundreds.
It would, however, be quite wrong to compare the two and conclude that the quality of discoveries in chemistry is on the decline. The two awards just represent the best of what was on offer in different eras, a juvenile phase and a mature phase of the science if you like. Modern chemistry research is collaborative, specialised and multi-disciplinary. The important problems of today don’t depend on any one promethean figure for a solution; our terms of reference are largely defined in the traditional sciences.
You’re giving an example of the selection effect. We remember those people who were exceptional. How many of these people were there at any one time? (Lincoln doesn’t even count by your criteria, since he was a typical backwoods lawyer with no extra languages.)
Are there people like that today? Of course there are. Thousands. We just don’t know which ones will be remembered by history for their exceptionalness. If you want to find them, though, read newspapers or magazines or books or award certifications.
Anecdotal, sadly. I read Time and The Economist and while these publications don’t really highlight individual accomplishments, when they do, some people are clearly in their own league, while others seem sort of…meh. (Sorry, I’m not very articulate today, just thinking about the weekend). I guess what’s really telling is reading the letter columns. It reminds me of this stand up routine I saw on Comedy Central where the comedian was comparing war letters home from the American Revolution vis-a-vis the Gulf War (e.g. Flowery written prose, witty, intelligent, inciteful, vs. “Dear Irene, it is very, very, very, very, hot here. I cannot wait to get back home and do some freaky nasty stuff to you.”)
My question still stands, where are these Renaissance types? Again, my view is a little biased on what I consider to be intelligence, but my thoughts are that if society is getting smarter, we should be seeing people excel at a wide array of disciplines. When I was in college, I knew a guy who went to Cambridge to work on a (near) zero K refrigerator. He was also socially inept and could barely write. A math genius, and seriously functionally retarded in everything else. My math professor said at his college they derived their proofs by hand without a calculator, computer graphing materials, etc. I see people who happen to be really smart in one discipline, area, etc., but it is mostly through training education and years of hardwork. The guys I speak of seem to be self-made. Other than business (e.g. Dell, Gates, Jobs), where is the poet-warrior king?
Perhaps, as a society, they are more common than I realize, and media just doesn’t highlight them.
Exactly. Theory vs. experiment is a different distinction from pure/fundamental vs. applied.
The split in the Physics Nobels between theory and experiment over the last 50 years has been about 20:30, so theory has been far from in the majority. By contrast, the split between pure and applied over the same period is harder to call and could very well be argued about, but at a glance only about half a dozen of the prizes were for work that I’d call primarily applied.
The numbers are no doubt different for the Chemistry and Medicine Prizes.
> My question still stands, where are these Renaissance types?
Somewhere in the early 19th century it became impossible to be even minimally proficient in all areas of intellectual studies. There’s too much to learn these days. Even in the Renaissance it was actually rather rare to be proficient in everything. I don’t think that it’s that rare to find people who know a lot about several quite different subjects. Heck, it’s almost a requirement for belonging to one of the several interlocking groups that I spend most of my spare time with. First, they’re all interested in science fiction or fantasy or they wouldn’t be in these groups. There’s Brick, trained as an economist and working as a financial analyst, a winner or judge on several different (intellectual) game shows, somewhat of an expert on Samuel Delany, who writes a blog in which he discourses in detail on (among other things) baseball and crime TV shows. There’s Martin, who’s a freelance writer who writes on educational policy, charitable foundations, science fiction, beermaking, and other things. There’s Barbara, who teaches philosophy to deaf people and occasionally does a course on philosophical ideas in science fiction, which means she has to be constantly thinking about both philosophy and science fiction while expressing herself in American Sign Language (which she only learned a few years ago). I’m trained in math and linguistics, work as a mathematician, am somewhat of an expert on C. S. Lewis, know a lot about film, and still spend a lot of my reading time learning about new subjects I haven’t covered yet. And all these people do this without being anybody famous (and don’t think that their being polymaths make them something special).