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Comment by maaaats | Hacker News Reader

How normal is it for the Nobel Prizes to be for something done so recently? Often I feel the stuff is at least a decade old, if not decades.

(Other than the Peace one, which is supposed to be for the last year).

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Well, let's put it this way: some of my friends (who unlike me didn't drop out of physics) were discussing if LIGO would get the Nobel Prize this morning, and the main point wasn't whether it was deserved (everyone agreed to that), but that the Nobel Prize doesn't get awarded that quickly most of the time.

I'm just a casual observer so I'm probably way off, so grain of salt but, I believe we'll see more prizes get awarded more quickly as the people who initially lay out the theoretical physics and design the experiments to test their hypothesis are no longer living long enough to see the results of their experiments because the technology to test their ideas lags so far behind what would be needed. Just think of Higgs and the fact that the LHC had to be planned, funded, built, and then used to confirm the Higgs-Boson. Same deal with LIGO.

The big piece of LIGO was the incredible effort that went into data analysis and verification. The second these things were detected a monumental effort went into confirming it meaning when it happened again the methods were already in place. This heavily contributed to how quickly these results were accepted.

The high-Tc superconductor prize was almost instantaneous. BECs were quick, too.

The Nobel committee wants to be really certain that work is correct and impactful before making an award.

It often takes a long time for the importance of a work to become clear.

the theory and prediction of gravitational waves has been around forever. and the work to do experimental detection has been going on for many decades. so the actual detection was just a sort of check mark that validated many, many years of work. plus, the people involved are getting quite old, and the nobel prize isn't awarded posthumously. for example, ronald drever died earlier this year and could have probably been named instead of barry barish.

In the distant past there have been bloopers- results that have stood the test of time. And there are results that become more significant and durable after decades have passed.

The Higgs particle experiment was awarded the Nobel just a year after the discovery.

The awards went to the theorists who did the work in the 60s.

I think the key is that it must be clear that the work had impact on the progress of science. If the Higgs would not have been found, it would have been a costly dead end. With LIGO, the theoretical foundations have been defined decades ago too.

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