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Register a new userVerification of the anecdote about Edwin Hubble and the Nobel Prize
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Kohji Tsumura
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Edwin Powel Hubble is regarded as one of the most important astronomers of 20th century. In despite of his great contributions to the field of astronomy, he never received the Nobel Prize because astronomy was not considered as the field of the Nobel Prize in Physics at that era. There is an anecdote about the relation between Hubble and the Nobel Prize. According to this anecdote, the Nobel Committee decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1953 to Hubble as the first Nobel laureate as an astronomer (Christianson 1995). However, Hubble was died just before its announcement, and the Nobel prize is not awarded posthumously. Documents of the Nobel selection committee are open after 50 years, thus this anecdote can be verified. I confirmed that the Nobel selection committee endorsed Frederik Zernike as the Nobel laureate in Physics in 1953 on September 15th, 1953, which is 13 days before the Hubbles death in September 28th, 1953. I also confirmed that Hubble and Henry Norris Russell were nominated but they are not endorsed because the Committee concluded their astronomical works were not appropriate for the Nobel Prize in Physics.
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Computing such correlation coefficient would be straightforward had we had available the rankings given by the prize committee to all scientists in the pool. In reality we only have citation rankings for all scientists. This means, however, that we have the ordinal rankings of the prize winners with regard to citation metrics. I use maximum likelihood method to infer the most probable correlation coefficient to produce the observed pattern of ordinal ranks of the prize winners. I get the correlation coefficients of 0.47 and 0.59 between the composite citation indicator and getting Abel Prize and Fields Medal, respectively. The correlation coefficient between getting a Nobel Prize and the Q-factor is 0.65. These coefficients are of the same magnitude as the correlation coefficient between Elo ratings of the chess players and their popularity measured as numbers of webpages mentioning the players.
Despite frequent references in modern reviews to a seventeenth-century Venetian longitude prize, only a single, circumstantial reference to the alleged prize is known from contemporary sources. Edward Harrisons scathing assessment of the conditions governing the award of an alleged Venetian longitude prize simultaneously disparages the rewards offered by the Dutch States General. However, the latter had long run its course by 1696, the year of the citation, thus rendering Harrisons reference unreliable. Whereas other longitude awards offered by the leading European maritime nations attracted applicants from far and wide, often accompanied by extensive, self-published pamphlets, the alleged Venetian prize does not seem to have been subject to similar hype. The alleged existence of seventeenth-century Venetian award is particularly curious, because the citys fortune was clearly in decline, and longitude determination on the open seas does not appear to have been a priority; the citys mariners already had access to excellent portolan charts. It is therefore recommended that authors refrain from referring to a potentially phantom Venetian longitude prize in the same context as the major sixteenth- to eighteenth-century European awards offered by the dominant sea-faring nations.
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