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Row over “undeserved” Nobel in Physics
Published: 23 December, 2009, 17:45
Edited: 24 December, 2009, 12:05
TAGS: Scandal, SciTech, Physics
Former colleagues at Bell Labs are now involved in a bitter row over who deserved this year’s Nobel Prize for inventing the CCD matrix, the heart of modern digital imaging.
The Nobel Committee honored Willard Boyle and George Smith for the scientific advance they did back in the 1960s. However, not everyone seems to agree, Canada's Globe and Mail reported on Tuesday.
The two men’s former colleagues Eugene Gordon and Mike Tompsett have challenged the decision. They point to the fact that Boyle and Smith came up with the concept of the device, but neither built it in silicon and metal, nor even saw it as an image capturing technology. The Charge-Coupled Device was meant for information storage, not imaging, Gordon stressed.
Gordon alleged that the Nobel Committee made “a real mistake” while doing their research and wording their statement on the prize.
“If you take it all literally, the prize should have been given to me,” added Tompsett, who headed the engineering team responsible for CCD matrix development. “I think if their name is on it, mine should be, too.”
Commenting on the claims, Smith rejected the criticism.
“I have documentation that disproves most of what they are saying and the rest of what they are saying is not at all logical,” he said.
This is far from being the first controversy over the choice of Nobel laureates, both in humanitarian disciplines and scientific ones.
Some observers believe that the committee should review its procedures by allowing more collaborators to be awarded each year.
“Science these days operates very differently than it did more than 100 years ago. The days of gentleman scientists are over, and collaborations among groups of researchers have become the norm,” said Rajendrani Mukhopadhyay, associate editor at the American Chemical Society.
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We all know why the Nobel Price was invented for and what kind of interests to serve, but the history in not too far away, so just let it be and be entertain with the politically chosen winners from those who control the Nobel Price fund.
The Nobel Committee have shown they are more political people than anything else. Giving Nobel Prizes to Gore and Obama are prime examples of this.