Editor's note, 5 October 2022: This visualization has been updated with nominee information through 1970.
Mystique has accompanied the Nobel Prizes ever since Alfred Nobel established them in a vague 1895 bequest. The voting process for the various awards, including the one in physics, is shrouded in secrecy. Prognosticators are usually wrong, and post-announcement analysts are often left scratching their heads. Most frustratingly, historians and others curious about how a given year’s winners were chosen have to wait 50 years for access to documentation about the nominees. Nearly a century and a quarter after Nobel’s bequest, the laureate selection process remains as mysterious as ever.
Read the rest of our series on the physicists nominated for the Nobel Prize.
Fortunately, although we can’t shed much light on any recent Nobel physics prizewinners, we can examine every person who was considered during the award’s first 66 years. Each circle in the array below represents a person nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physics from 1901 to 1966, the most recent year for which the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has made the nomination information publicly available. The size of the circle represents the number of nominations for that person. Search for a particular physicist or hover over the circles to explore all 495 nominees. You can highlight the nominees by whether or not they won, by country, and by gender.
About the data
- The data encompass only nominations for the Nobel Prize in Physics. Nominations for chemistry, medicine, literature, and peace are not included, nor are laureates of the other prizes designated as such. For example, Ernest Rutherford is not shown as a laureate despite winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
- The nomination data cover only the years 1901–66. Many of the nominees garnered more nominations in later years, but those data are not yet available. However, nominees who won the physics prize in later years are denoted as laureates.
- Nominees are assigned a country based on the nation most frequently cited in their nominations. For example, Enrico Fermi is assigned Italy because the majority of his nominations list his home institution as being in Rome rather than in New York or Chicago.
- The data for some nominees are incomplete. In particular, no nomination information is available for 1957 laureates Chen Ning Yang and Tsung-Dao Lee because they are still alive. Nobel policy states that “material relating to the research work of a named person may not be released during that person’s lifetime.” Yang and Lee are shown in the graphic receiving one nomination each.
Significant figures
- 495 people were nominated. 109 (22%) of them would go on to win the prize.
- 169 (34%) of the nominees were nominated just once.
- 9 (1.8%) of the nominees were women. Marie Curie (1903) and Maria Goeppert Mayer (1963) remain the only women to win the physics Nobel. Lise Meitner was nominated 29 times, the most for any woman through 1966, yet was never honored by the Nobel committee for her contributions to the discovery of nuclear fission. Chien-Shiung Wu (9 nominations) did not share in the 1957 prize, which was awarded for the discovery of parity violation, even though she performed the experiment that confirmed parity violation.
- 181 (37%) of the nominees were from the US, the most for any country; 44 of them became laureates. In an accompanying article, we explore how the physics prize's pool of nominators gradually became more international.
- The German theorist Arnold Sommerfeld was nominated more than anyone, 84 times, yet never won the prize. As Ashley Smart wrote in his breakdown of Nobel snubs last year, “the knock against Sommerfeld was that he had no single, great achievement that the committee could point to, even though his collective body of work stacked up to those of contemporaries who won the prize.”
- Two laureates, Nils Dalén (1912) and Charles Barkla (1917), won the prize despite receiving only one lifetime nomination. Dalén, who invented an automated lighthouse, won because of the rabid support of engineers in the Swedish Academy of Sciences. Barkla, who analyzed the spectra of light emitted by elements exposed to x rays, won due to the combination of a prestigious nominator (Ernest Rutherford) and a strong advocate within the Nobel committee (Svante Arrhenius).
- For all the legend surrounding Nikola Tesla, he received just one nomination, in 1937. That tied him with rival Thomas Edison, whose lone nomination came in 1915.
- Perhaps the most unexpected nominee is Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister from 1937–40, who had no physics background. The nomination came from French physicist René de Mallemann, who was invited to submit picks for the 1939 prize. “After a long reflection, I do not see, in the course of 1938, a work of decisive importance to deserve this high distinction,” he wrote to the Nobel committee. “Consequently, I venture to offer you a proposal of a somewhat peculiar character.” One of his choices was Chamberlain, “whose personal action has avoided a world war, and thus enabled all scientists to pursue their researches.” The committee dismissed the nomination for the lack of a discovery or invention. History has not been kind to Chamberlain, but he did rack up 11 Nobel Prize nominations—10 for peace, all in 1939, and one in physics.
Nominee photos are either in the public domain or from the AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives. Please do not reuse without ensuring you have the legal right to do so.