Speaker
Description
The history of scientists that have been awarded a Nobel Prize is by now rather extensive, the history of scientists that have been awarded more than one Nobel Prize is (for that very reason?) also rather large. The list of scientists that have not been awarded Nobel Prizes is longer still. In this talk a 101 lesson on how the Nobel Prize institution works will be given by studying the prominent examples of Marie Curie (1867–1934) and Lise Meitner (1878–1968). Curie is famous for being awarded two Nobel Prizes, whereas Meitner is known for not being awarded one (though many people think she should have been). How were these two scientists nominated and how were they evaluated by the Nobel Institution, and what can we learn from this? By taking a close look at the original documents we will also discuss how the established historiography (Crawford, 1984; Quinn, 1995; Sime 1997; Rife, 1999) of these two scientists have overlooked some important sources and thus have partly constructed a misleading story of these two Nobel tales. Some of it is corrected in (Grandin, 2020).
References
1. Crawford, Elisabeth (1984), The beginnings of the Nobel institution: The science prizes, 1901–1915 (Cambridge University Press, 1984).
2. Grandin, Karl (2020), “Marie Skłodowska Curie – between physics and chemistry and two Nobel Prizes,” Historia Scientiarum, vol. 30–1 (2020), 3–18.
3. Quinn, Susan (1995), Marie Curie: A life (Heinemann, 1995).
4. Rife, Patricia (1999), Lise Meitner and the dawn of the nuclear age (Birkhäuser, 1999).
5. Sime, Ruth Lewin (1996), Lise Meitner: A life in physics (University of California Press, 1996).
