The Politics of Excellence: Behind the Nobel Prize in Science , Robert Marc Friedman W. H. Freeman, New York, 2001. $30.00 (379 pp.) ISBN 0-7167-3103-7
The 2001 centenary of the Nobel Prize, by far the most prestigious of all prizes for intellectual eminence, is a time for celebration as well as critical reflection. In his The Politics of Excellence, historian of science Robert Friedman provides the latter and shuns the former. Indeed, as he states in the preface, “This book breaks the illusion of the Nobel Prize as being an impartial, objective crowning of the ‘best’ in physics and chemistry.” Friedman demonstrates mercilessly that, at least during the first half of the century, the drive behind the Nobel awards was not an impartial search for scientific excellence; rather, he says, it was the wish of a small group of Swedish scientists to promote themselves and the ideas in which they believed. For example, he shows how Albert Michelson’s Nobel Prize—not for the famous ether-drag experiment but for his method of precision interferometry—depended directly on the strong “experimenticist” inclination of the Uppsala physicists. Michelson had made no discovery, as required by the Nobel statutes, but his work resonated well with the values of precision experiments that counted highly for the majority of the physics committee.
As Friedman argues in fascinating detail, some of the prizes—say, those awarded to Swedish inventor Gustaf Dalén in 1912 and British physicist Charles Barkla in 1917—must be characterized as gross mistakes. Of course they can be explained, but the explanation is political rather than scientific. According to Friedman, these awards should not be considered aberrations; to the contrary, he considers them representative of the entire Nobel nomination system.
Much of the book is concerned with more or less scandalous awards or, conversely, nonawards. Among the physicists with numerous nominations who did not win the committee’s favor, Arnold Sommerfeld and Lise Meitner are perhaps the best known. Then there are the scientists who were denied a prize because they worked in the “wrong field,” that is, areas that the Nobel committee members defined as outside physics proper.
Friedman considers in particular astrophysics, an area that the Nobel committee for its first two decades considered to be part of physics. George Hale was nominated several times, and might have received the 1923 prize, had it not been for the resistance from committee members who wanted to focus resources and therefore decided that astrophysics really belonged to astronomy. With this new interpretation of the domain of physics, the committee did not need to take seriously the nominations of, for example, Henry N. Russell, Edwin Hubble, and Hans Bethe. (Only in 1967 did Bethe receive the prize for the theory of stellar energy production that he had proposed almost 30 years earlier.)
Based on meticulous archival studies, Friedman covers the science prizes up to 1950, and also includes a chapter on awards made after 1950, when the establishment of a 50-year secrecy clause made information about the nomination processes much more uncertain. Yet, from such cases as John Cockcroft (1951) and Abdus Salam (1979), he sees no indications that the Nobel system has become more objective and less political. “In spite of sincere and meaningful efforts at improvement, the process of selection remains flawed,” he concludes.
Throughout the book, the message is that the Nobel Prize has very little to do with scientific eminence and very much to do with political power and manipulation. If this is really the case, how is it that the Nobel Prize is still considered so prestigious? Most physicists will probably agree that, in spite of some misses, the laureates have deserved their prizes and belong to the absolute elite of physics. Friedman is understandably puzzled why and how the laureates have become elevated to scientific semi-gods. Focusing on the selection and nomination processes, but paying almost no attention to the media coverage and reception of the prizes, he is unable to come up with a good answer.
Much of the book is permeated with a moral (and sometimes moralistic) concern that is made explicit only in the final chapter. Here, the author expresses his dissatisfaction with the modern culture of science, its competitive standards and disregard of “what is truly significant in life and in the life of mind.” The Politics of Excellence offers a detailed, coherent, and critical account of the Nobel science prizes—one that cannot be found in other works. Although it challenges many of the values cherished by scientists, Friedman’s book cannot be ignored and deserves to be read carefully by physicists and chemists. Other disciplines to which the awards apply will have to await another chronicler.
Helge Krach, professor of the history of science at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, is the author of Quantum Generations: A History of Physics in the Twentieth Century (Princeton U. Press, 1999)
