Nobel Prize Nomination Abstract In this paper I will discuss the Nobel Prize as a most popular and considerable nomination today. Also I will analyze Nobel Prize not as an abstract nomination but as an experience of people. So I want to find out about some particular winners while doing this paper. Because Nobel Prize has been created for people who just work persistently and have success doing that. In his 1985 will, Alfred Nobel, a Swedish industrialist who made his fortune by inventing and selling dynamite, left to posterity a sizable prize fund, stipulating that it be used each year to recognize those individuals “who shall have contributed most materially to benefit mankind.” Today, the Nobel Prize is the most prestigious and coveted award in the world. It is the undisputed arbiter of greatness in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and peace–the five fields specified by Nobel–as well as in economics, which was added in 1968.
Winners earn not just a gold medal and great sum of money–more than $900,000 last year–but also a considerable measure of intellectual and moral authority. “The awards seem almost to issue not from mere Stockholm,” Burton Feldman writes in his engaging and comprehensive history, “but from some timeless Realm of Objective Judgment.” Feldman, a professor of English recently retired from the University of Denver, celebrates the genuinely outstanding achievements that the Nobel Prize has so often served to recognize. But he is wary of the award’s unparalled influence–and its carefully cultivated image of critical rigor. As he ably demonstrates, considerations other than mere excellence have long played a role in the bestowal of the world’s most sought-after laurel. It is not easy to explain the success of the Nobel Prize. The Templeton Prize for progress in religion is more lucrative, and the Fields Medal in mathematics, awarded just once every four years, is harder to win. Moreover, the institutions that administer Nobel’s legacy–three Swedish academies and the Norwegian parliament–are not otherwise thought to possess any special competence in discerning the heights of human achievement.
The Term Paper on Nobel Prizes in Chemistry
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded 104 times to 163 Nobel Laureates between 1901 and 2012. Frederick Sanger is the only Nobel Laureate who has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry twice, in 1958 and 1980. This means that a total of 162 individuals have received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Click on the links to get more information. 2012 – Robert J. Lefkowitz and Brian K. Kobilka ...
What, then, accounts for the prize’s prestige? Feldman gives much of the credit to the grand ambitions of Nobel himself, who wished to honor excellence without regard to national or disciplinary boundaries. Against the balkanizing tendencies of the modern intellectual world, Nobel established “the first important regular prize to include not only the arts and sciences, but also politics in the form of `peace.'” Nor has it hurt that during this century of astonishing scientific progress, the prize’s recipient’s for chemistry, physics, and physiology constitute a “steady procession of greatness,” from Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, and Werner Heisenberg to James Watson and Francis Crick. Nonetheless, Feldman shows, the Nobel’s track record is far from unblemished, even in the vaunted picks for science. During the prize’s early years, for instance, the kingmaker on both the physics and chemistry juries was Svante Arrhenius, the most famous scientist in Sweden. He backed the physical chemists in their turf war against organic chemists and helped shut geo- and astrophysics out of serious prize consideration. Such prejudices have diminished, but even so, neither the astronomer Edwin Hubble, whose observations provided evidence for the expansion of the universe, nor the geologist Alfred Wegener, who proposed the theory of continental drift, ever won the prize.
In addition to oversights like these, there have been several questionable recipients, like Maurice Wilkins, who shared the 1962 prize with Watson and Crick despite having contributed little to uncovering the structure of DNA. He was included, Feldman reports, because of the behind-the-scenes maneuvering of a previous laureate who considered Wilkins the victim of “frightfully bad luck.” The problem is not just that several of the awards have become subservient to politics, though Feldman might have said a great deal more about the influence of racial and ethnic concerns on the literature prize in recent decades and the transformation of the peace prize into an endorsement of the liberal cause du jour, even when that cause has been embodied by such dubious heroes as Mikhail Gorbachev and, worse, Yashir Arafat.
The Essay on The Nobel Prize And Its First Laureates
Alfred Nobel was a Swedish industrialist, and inventor. In 1866 he invented dynamite, which made him very wealthy, but he left all of his money to establish a fund for the Nobel Prize. The Nobel Prize is awarded annually for achievements during the previous year, in the categories of physics, chemistry, medicine, or physiology, literature, and the promotion of peace. Each winner receives a set ...
The more serious charge against the awards for peace and literature alike is that they have seemingly given up on the idea that excellence forges its own criterion, independent of ideology or political fashion. In this respect, the prizes do not “make us a bit more … reverent of greatness”; they make us a lot more cynical. Nothing could be farther from the intentions of Alfred Nobel, which have been traduced to a greater extent than Feldman cares to admit.
Bibliography:
George Thomas Kurian The Nobel Scientists: A Biographical Encyclopedia Prometheus Books, October 2002 J. Michael Bishop How to Win the Nobel Prize: An Unexpected Life in Science Harvard Univ Pr, June 2003 Istvan Hargittai, James D. Watson The Road to Stockholm: Nobel Prizes, Science, and Scientists Oxford Press, May 2002 Marc Abrahams The Ig Nobel Prizes: The Annals of Improbable Research E P Dutton, September, 2003.
