# Greatest scientists who never won a nobel prize

Fred Hoyle , George Gamow, Daniel Bernoulli , Michael Faraday , Joseph Louis Lagrange

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jtbell
Mentor
Note that one of the rules for Nobel Prizes is that they're awarded only to living people. So anyone who died before 1901 should be excluded from this discussion.

There are surely cases of people who would probably have won a Nobel Prize if only they had lived long enough.

CRGreathouse
Homework Helper
Not really a scientist, but Gandhi comes to mind as one of the greatest peacekeepers who never won a Nobel Peace Prize.

I'm glad Ghandi never got the Nobel peace prize. It would have given the prize an honor it doesn't deserve.

I'm glad Ghandi never got the Nobel peace prize. It would have given the prize an honor it doesn't deserve.

HAs anyone mentioned Newton or Corpenicus yet.The creator of the scientific method definetely. And any person who already made the scientific discoveries made by well known Scientists many years earlier but their work was undocumented and therefore not preserved. I totally agreed that gandhi should not received a nobel prize.He was basically the indian equivalent of the segregationist George wallace

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Otherwise, Brownian motion was discovered by him too.
Actually, that was Brown.
wiki said:
Jan Ingenhousz had described the irregular motion of coal dust particles on the surface of alcohol in 1785. Nevertheless Brownian motion is traditionally regarded as discovered by the botanist Robert Brown in 1827.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_motion" [Broken]

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Did you know that there weren't any Nobel Prizes EVER awarded for advances in theoretical General Relativity? Even Einstein himself got the prize ostensibly for the discovery of the photoelectric effect. Since then, the field was decidedly starved for prizes. In a related field of cosmology, there was one half the prize awarded for stellar evolution, one half for stellar nucleosynthesis, and a couple for CMB, but that only covers a tiny portion of the field.

I'd expect to have seen prizes awarded to:

- Hawking and Penrose

- Friedmann/Lemaitre/Robertson/Walker/Hubble or some subset thereof

- Gamow, the father of the Big Bang (and, incidentally, a student of Friedmann)

- Arnowitt, Deser & Misner

OBAMA!!!)*@#&$*(@#@$ WORLD PEACE ALREADY!!!! YAH YAH YAH

"Just like Obama, the LHC has gotten the nobel prize in physics for intending to find the higgs-boson"

Did you know that there weren't any Nobel Prizes EVER awarded for advances in theoretical General Relativity? Even Einstein himself got the prize ostensibly for the discovery of the photoelectric effect. Since then, the field was decidedly starved for prizes. In a related field of cosmology, there was one half the prize awarded for stellar evolution, one half for stellar nucleosynthesis, and a couple for CMB, but that only covers a tiny portion of the field.

I'd expect to have seen prizes awarded to:

- Hawking and Penrose

- Friedmann/Lemaitre/Robertson/Walker/Hubble or some subset thereof

- Gamow, the father of the Big Bang (and, incidentally, a student of Friedmann)

- Arnowitt, Deser & Misner

I'm assuming you're stating Hawking do to his contributions in theoretical physics with Hawking radiation? Like many have already stated it has to be experimentally discovered or experimentally verified.

I don't think Penrose directly contributed to the Big Bang. However, after reading very limited books on the subject matter, I believe he put forth the mathematical machinery (differential topology) in defining the big bang.

I'm assuming you're stating Hawking do to his contributions in theoretical physics with Hawking radiation? Like many have already stated it has to be experimentally discovered or experimentally verified.

I don't think Penrose directly contributed to the Big Bang. However, after reading very limited books on the subject matter, I believe he put forth the mathematical machinery (differential topology) in defining the big bang.

No, Hawking and Penrose are in the list because of their contributions to understanding of large scale structure of spacetime. For example, because of this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose–Hawking_singularity_theorems

Hawking radiation concept, while neat, is purely conjectural and can't be taken seriously unless you make strong assumptions about quantum gravity. I certainly wouldn't want to give any Nobel prizes for that (not unless it's somehow proven experimentally to exist in just the form Hawking predicted, which I consider unlikely). On the other hand, Hawking-Penrose theorems are rigorous and universally valid.

I'll go with Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, and Tesla---

I still think Einstein got his for the right thing----I think relativity isn't a sure thing

The only reason Einstein didn't get a Nobel for relativity is because it was way over the head of the committee and they gave him one for the photoelectric effect because he had a nice experiment to show how it worked and a nice data table . And someone told the committee you better give him a prize for the photoelectric effect or your look like fools .

Matterwave
Gold Member
Actually, that was Brown.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_motion" [Broken]

I'm sorry, I meant describe mathematically, or model mathematically, or made known or w/e he did, not discover. lol

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DrClapeyron
Benoît Paul Émile Clapeyron, need I say more?

After Nobel...uh I can only think of the one time Born was snubbed for the 1932 prize. Even though Born had worked jointly with Heisenberg (and Jordan) regarding the matrix formulation of QM, only Heisenberg was given the prize (possibly due to Jordan's connection with the Nazi's). No need to panic, though, since Born got one later for his statistical interpretation of QM.

Wasn't Heisenberg working for the Nazi's too? Wasn't this the reason the relationship between Heisenberg and Bohr broke down?