What Nobel Prizes Have Been Proven Wrong?

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Speaker 1: So you know, the gold standard in science, the absolute pinnacle you can reach in your career, of course, is the Nobel Prize. Once you get one, people think that you can't make a mistake, that you're a genius, that everything you do is fantastic. It's like a stamp it just on your forehead that says genius. That's right. But here's a question. Okay, so can the Nobel Prize be wrong? I'm gasping at even the idea their or hey, that the highest prize in science could ever ever have a flaw in it, But apparently it has happened a couple of times in history. Even this very top level prize in science is sometimes awarded erroneously. Can you get the Nobel Prize Nobel Prize errors? Can you get a Nobel Prize for podcasting? Podbill Prize? Him? And I'm Daniel, and I'm a cartoonist, and I do not have a Nobel Prize. I'm a particle physicist, and I also do not have a Nobel Prize. I have fewer than one Nobel prizes. So Nobel Prize is this amazing cultural icon now right, Like it's kind of the the name that means your genius. That's right. It's covered in the news. You know, whoever wins it is a breathlessly described in the New York Times, and it's announced on television. You know, there's really no other prize like it. Like, if you made a list of the most important prizes in science, would be like number one. Nobel Prize, number fifty would be the next thing. Right, there's just like nothing else even comes close to y has good brand recognition across the board. Sorry, whoever is running that pr campaign has really earned their money. I don't even know how that's happened. They should get a Nobel Prize for the marketing efforts. It's the gold standard in science. But today on the program, we're going to ask a pretty controversial question. Can the Nobel Prize be wrong? Has anybody ever won the Nobel Prize for something which turned out to not be good science? Yeah? Nobel oops, Nobel oops. And I think this is a really important question. We're not here to run down science. Obviously, we're both scientists and we love science, and science is a fantastic way to explore the universe. But we also don't want to pretend that science is always definitive right, you do some experiments, you make a claim, even if it's backed up, and then later you win the biggest prize in all of human intellectual achievement. It could still be that your results are wrong. Yeah, it's amazing to think that the Nobel Prize could be wrong, right, Like you think that it's done very carefully, right, But like everything else, it's a human endeavor, right, And anything that's done by humans is most likely sometimes going to be wrong, you know. And it's important as scientists that we don't just enshrine results that are know about prize winning as definite fact. Right. We should always keep an open mind because anything we think is true could turn out later to be wrong, or could turn out to have been you know, just seeing the wrong way, or true in some circumstances, but not generally true. And so I think it's very important that we that we question these things, that we always look back on what our predecessors have discovered and think could that be wrong? Yeah? And so to kind of show you how crazy this idea is, we went out there and ask people do you think the Nobel Prize can be wrong? Here's what they had to say. I have no clue of that. Yes, I haven't heard of any discoveries like that. No, okay, personally, no, I don't. Okay, awesome, I know that it's happened before. I don't have any specific examples, but I know what's happened. Yeah, I don't. Are there many? Not many, but a few. That's all right? So overall, still pretty good branding, right, Like, nobody thought the Nobel Prize could be wrong like that? That just seemed unthinkable to some people. Yeah, it's shocking. I remember that. You should have seen these people's faces when I asked them that. Um yeah, they're like, what, No, come on, the Nobel Prize wrong? Did they look at you? They think maybe you're one of these science deniers. Yeah, and then there's no evolution, and climate change the hoax, and the Earth is flat. It's the right. I was kind of worried about this episode. It's like, are we gonna be bashing on science and the Nobel Prize. No. But there's a huge difference between saying some of the conclusions of some scientists could be wrong and saying, like the very foundations of science are flawed. Right, It's it's in fact, it's the process of science to disprove old results. That shows you that science is robust. If no discoveries from Nobel Prize winners had ever improven to be wrong, then you might be suspicious. Right, It's like, m do you expect them occasionally to make a mistake or for something later to come out? Right? I think my favorite reaction was the woman who said, I've never heard of that, but I bet if there were there, there would be in physics. Why do you go straight to physics? If anyone's going to make a mistake, it's not the literature people. It is not the economics people who are out wrong like all the time. It's medicine, you know, I know it's got to be the physicists. What do you think she went there? Did she? Did she know you were a physicist? Like? Did she look? Were you dressed like a physicist? I think I look well, I mean that's a question for you, maybe not for me. Do you think I look like a physicist? Like if you have to pick a physicist out of a crowd, would you say that guy over there, he looks like a physicist. I would probably guess poetry or physics. You know, you got you got the hair, that's insightfuled because you maybe you didn't realize, but I actually do write poetry. All right, yeah, yeah, you should have recite some of you. Yeah, let's let's just do that for the rest of the episode. Okay, folks were switching gears. We're trashing the whole concept of the podcast. We're going into pure poetry. Daniel is in trouble with this pouse. He needs to make up some romantic points here. That's right. I don't know why you're laughing. I'm very serious about my poetry. No, um I am. I am not a poet, and this woman certainly didn't know that I'm a physicist, so that's probably why she gets I don't think she was trying to impu in the entire edifice of modern physics. I think she was just thought I was leading her on. Oh all right, yea, let's start with this question then, um, if it, if it's possible that it can be wrong. Let's talk about how Nobel Prizes are awarded, Like, do you know what the process is for who gets one, who gets nominated, who decides who gets a Nobel Prize? M yeah, I think the gates of heaven open and the angels sing and it just sort of descends on this glowing cloud. It says you you have won themselves. Flies down, that's right, little golden wings, you know, just little lands. Um right, I mean I think people would like to believe that, right, if you would like to think that there's something greater, something superhuman, something above us. That's like you know, anointing these geniuses. But in the end, it's just people, right, It's got to be people, obviously, there's no other way to do it. Not just so it's sweets, right, I mean they are a kind of I don't know how to take that, not just people. It's sweet. They're kind of superhuman, It's what I mean. The same they are. They are angelic. Oh, I see you're you're saying swedes are basically the best of us. Um No, it's it's um it's not just sweets. Okay, So it's it's concentrated in Scandinavia. But so this is a two step process, right. So the first step is you gotta get nominated, okay, And to be nominated you have to be either nominated by somebody on the Nobel Prize Committee or a member of the Swedish Academy of sciences, or you have to have a Nobel Prize, right, or there's a select group of other people who they will take nominations from, basically like you know, internationally famous physicists from around the world. Right, So all those Nobel Prize winning listeners we have out there, you should tell him your name and your address, right, that's right, that's right. It's a very select group. And you know they've done these studies where they say, like, what's the best way to get a Nobel Prize. Well, it's to have your advisor win the Nobel Prize. You know, to work for somebody who has the Nobel Prize, because then they can nominate you. Right. Yeah, it's like the oldest boy of the oldest boy clubs in the world. Right, it's the only group of of of self reinforcing um accolades. So you have to be you have to get nominated. Some people have to know your work, and you have to sort of know somebody in the note Yeah, exactly. You have to be nominated. So then you're on the list, right, and you're in the list of people they consider. And then you know the Nobel Prize committee, which is a bunch of Swedes and you know, maybe some other folks from from Scandinavia. They get together and they just us it and they argue about it, and you know, they solicit input from the people they know. But in the end, it's subjective, you know, like how do you compare discovery A versus discovery B. Every piece of research is totally different. It's not like there's some metric you can use to to give them points where it's really fair to to establish. And even if it were, it's still subjective. It's still like how important is this, how groundbreaking is it, how innovative is it? Right? Well, what's the standard? What's supposed to be the standard? The standard is the greatest contribution to humankind, right, yeah, exactly, And I think that those are the words originally in the will, right, But I think more recently the committee is focused on things that are like deep innovations or or things that would change the direction of the field, right truly, like ground shaking discoveries um and in physics at least, it's sort of alternated between like crazy theoretical ideas that turned out to be correct, even if they haven't really had any impact on humanity, like they this boson, right, If you don't know what the Higgs boson is, you can listen to our whole podcast episode about that. But recently people won the Nobel Prize for the Higgs boson because it was discovered at the large age On collider. I hadn't really had any impact on humanity other than you know, people hearing about it. Um, But it's it's a big breakthrough in theoretical physics. Yeah, it's a big deal. It's a big deal. And then sometimes it's something very practical, you know, like inventing a new technology like blue l e eds. That one the Nobel prize years ago. Blue l d s. Yeah, that's a Nipple prize. No, not the yellow, not the green, not the cyan, No, not the turcoise, the blue LEDs. Imagine me in the discover of the red l D and be like, what the it spent all my time on the purple l e d s. What a mistake? Oh my god? Big blue. No, blue was particularly difficult because of that wavelength, and so there was a lot of you know, interesting innovation along the way. It's not just like hey, we really needed this technology and they figured it out. There was some interesting physics going on inside the blue LEDs um. But in the end it's it's political. It's chosen by a committee of people, chosen by committee people and people campaign. You know, there are yeah, you know, this is a group of This is just a community people and they talk and they chat, and when the prizes are coming up and the decisions are being made, you hear people. If you're in the physics community, you hear people talking maybe blah should get me, but blah blah should get it, and they and people go around and give presentations. And I remember when everybody knew that the Higgs Boson discovery was going to yield a Nobel Prize the following year, and people were jostling for a position because we knew also that you could only get give it to three people. So everybody knew Higgs was going to get it, that was for sure. And the question was who were the other two theorists that we're going to win it? Yeah, because there are rules to the Nobel price, right, like they you can only pick at most three people for a discovery, and they all have to be alive. They all have to be alive exactly. And um, there were you know, there was Higgs of course, and then there was a couple of others. There were two other people who everybody agrees made contributions sort of at the same level of Higgs. But then one of them died, so there was sort of like an empty slot, and a lot of folks, a lot of the folks in the theoretical physics community started going around giving seminars about how important their work was in that era and the contributions they made to the Higgs boson discovery. And because it can be kind of fuzzy, right, like this idea that discoveries are made by one scientist in a lab yelling eureka, I mean that's sort of been going away for a while. Discoveries are kind of made in groups, and people contribute little things and little bits here, some ideas, and then the ideas get shaped, and so like who actually gets credit for something is getting harder and harder, exactly, And sometimes it's somebody with a really genius idea comes along just like shatters the field, like Einstein. Right, there's a crazy new idea. Other times it's a bit incremental, and you could say, well, you know, if Bob hadn't done it, then Sally would have done it two weeks later, and if I only hadn't done it, then you know, Samantha would have figured it out or something. Sometimes an idea has its time and it's sort of like the field is slowly rolling down the hill towards it and eventually somebody's going to figure it out. In that case, it's hard to know, Like you can't give the credit to everybody, so they just sort of pick somebody or three. They picked three people to win it for a discovery. So why do you think they need to be alive and they can't be dead, you know what I mean, because then they need to go to that fancy ceremony in Sweden and you know, we're a tuxedo and give a speech and uh and all that kind of stuff. It's just one of the things in the will. But you know, they need to be alive when the prize is is um determined, not when the prize is awarded. And it was a case of a guy who was given the award of the Nobel Prize and then two days later he died right um, and so before they could award it to him, he was dead, and it was like a big controversy, but they decided he was alive and we made the decision. He gets to keep it. But he knew he knew he had won. Yeah, you knew you so maybe that maybe maybe holding out for it. He's like, all right, I'm done. Oh. There's definitely cases of that, you know that, like people survive um to like to see birthdays and like grandchildren's graduations and stuff, to people like who are about to die. I can hold out for like one last event. Wow. So if I convinced myself that I'm going to win one, I just have to hold out for it. I might live forever. Yeah was the last time? Who won the Nobel Prize for Cartooning last week? And I don't remember. I'll be the Bill Watson. I'll just convinced to myself I'll be the first one, and then you know, I'll live forever. Right, and then you can nominate yourself for every subsequent one, right, because you'll be the only winner. I'll just start my own committee of Swedish people. Exactly. I think the point people should come away with is that this is a committee people and their humans, and they're influenced by fads and politics, and you know they're doing their best to try to find something which is pure, something which will last. Right. But in the end, you know, they're making human decisions, right, But they do take it very carefully. You know, they take like a whole year or two to make this decision, right. Yeah, I think that. You know, they wrote all the names on the wall, and they passed out the darts and they throw them very carefully. You know, they very precise measurements. Yeah. Um, no, I would love to be in the room and here, like, what kind of arguments are made? Are they like, you know, appealing to you know, this is more fundamental than that, or they're just like, hey, you know, Bob really deserves it because he got you know, his wife left him, or like, what kind of arguments are being made? I have no idea. Look how cool this blue led looks. I mean, come on, stop shining that blue led in my eyes. We'll give him the prize if you can stop shining that my eyes. Yeah, I've actually been in the room. Did I tell you this story? I was. I was in the room for the noble where they decide Nobel Prize in medicine. Not while they were deciding, I just toured towards the Carolans get Institute. They showed me the room. Oh wow, yeah, it's just the room that's that makes me feel like I'm one step close to the Nobel Prize because I know you and right, and I've been in the room. So yeah, And hasn't your work actually been mentioned specifically by the Nobel Prize Committee? This is not a joke. Yeah, that's right. The video and the comics that you and I made about the Higgs Boson, the Higgs Boson Explained, which is on YouTube you can watch and if you want, that video was quoted in the Nobel prod the official Nobel Prize poster. So the Nobel Prize folks make a poster every year of the discovery, and so we were mentioned in that poster. Pretty cool, that's right. It's probably the only time the Nobel Prize Committee will ever cite any of my work, But hey, I'll take it. Or a cartoon, right, a cartoon exactly. You definitely broke ground there. You probably the only cartoon ever cited by the Nobel Prize Committee. Yeah, but that's another association. So they know who you are, Daniel, Oh my gosh. Yeah. So I'll just you know, I'm gonna stay up every every night I'm waiting for that phone call from Sweden. Yeah, don't don't die. Don't die. That's now my number one reason to keep living because it's potentially Nobel Prize. Okay, so that's kind of how they decide to get the Nobel Prize. And so can this process somehow be awarded to somebody or for a discovery that turned out to be wrong? And so we have two stories to tell you today of a Nobel Prize gone wrong. But first let's take a quick break. Okay, so what's the first instance of a Nobel Prize being wrong. One of my favorites is a Nobel Prize which went to somebody who was definitely a certified genius and made lots of contributions to physics, but won the prize for something which later turned out to not be accurate. And that's Neil's Bore. And you know this strikes close to home for Scandinavians because bores Danish and he's like the grandfather of Danish science. And you know, the Nobel Prize is a Scandinavian cherished Scandinavian um tredy, and but Bore is famous for coming up with what's known as the Bore model of the atom, right, not the Boring model, but the Boring company, right exactly. He's not the Elon Musk hundred years ago. Um, No, Neil's Bore b o Hr. Yeah. This was in the early part of the twentieth century, right when we didn't really know what atoms were made out of or what they were structured. Like, right, that's right. We had recently discovered that electrons exist, right, there are particles had negative charge. Um. That was just like twenty years earlier. And then Rutherford discovered that there's a positively charged particle also in the atom, and so um, we had this concept like, okay, there's some positive charges, there's some negative charges. How does it all work? We need a different kinds of atoms. Did we know that they were all the same atom with just with different numbers of protons and electrons and stuff. No, No, not at all. We just had this table of different kinds of stuff, right, like you know, these metals and those metals and the other metals. We know all we knew they all weigh different amounts um and so that was a clue and we knew that somehow electrons were involved and somehow these positive particles were involved, but we didn't know what the structure was inside that. We didn't know how an atom worked, like what did it look like if you zoomed in and back? Then the technology to see inside these atoms was really rudimentary, and so it was it was a big puzzle like how does the what is it inside the atom? And how does that explain all the different elements? That was basically the question that was at the top of the list of physics wish list at the time, and so Boar came up with an answer to that question. Yeah, Boor took inspiration from planets, you know. He said, well, the Sun and the Earth, right, that's a system, and the Earth moves around the Sun and they're attracted to each other, um. But the Earth doesn't fall into the Sun, right, because it moves in an orbit. It has enough energy that it's whizzing around the Sun. It doesn't fall in. And so he said, well, that's cool. Maybe that explains how you can have a positive charge and a negative a charge inside the atom, right, and have the whole atom b neutral but not have the positive negative charge just you know, collapse and annihilate each other. So he had this idea that the electron is orbiting the positive charge, that the positive charge would be the Sun and the electron would be the Earth. That's right, because Earth doesn't fall into the Sun. We just keep spinning around it. Yeah. I haven't looked outside recently, but last I checked, we did not fall into the Sun as as of the data this recording. Oh man, you should get a noble price for that, as long as we don't fall into the Sun before I can collect it yet. Um. And this is a cool idea. And it's always nice, you know, when you get inspired by one area of physics to say, well, look, this is the way it works over here. Maybe something similar works over there. And when it when it clicked together like that, it's a wonderful moment in science when you're like, look, there's something universal, something general that's like, this is a structure the universe likes. We can apply these ideas in multiple places. That's always a nice feeling. And it was a super powerful idea, right like it explains in the periodic table of elements. Yeah, and even more so, it explains something that people have been puzzling over, which is why atoms give light only in certain wavelengths. If you get atoms hot, you know, they will give off light, they will glow. But if you look at the glow, if you look at the at the wavelengths of light that come out, they don't glow in every single color, right, It's not like the glow totally white um where every single color and the spectrum is represented. Different kinds of stuff glow with different colors. So you get these lines where you like, hydrogen has you know, a few different colors it will shine with, and helium has a different set of colors. And that was a puzzle. People are like, why is that? What is it about hydrogen that makes it only glow with these colors and helium glow only with those colors. The cool thing about bars model was that it explained it and he kind of gave the Basically, he kind of invented the icon for science, right like the whenever you see anyone talking about science or you know, branding science, they always used this little model of the atom where it's like a little thought in the middle and these hula hoops with little electrons in each one. That's right the way to go straight for the cartooning implications or is discovered. Right, that's no, you're but you're absolutely right. That is like the icon of science, especially in movies, especially when you have mad scientists bent understooing the world, they always have a company whose icon is like that Bore model of the atom, right, because that's somehow like powerful and dangerous. And the cool thing about this model is that explains why those atoms give off different color light. And that's that the electron has these orbitals, right, the electronic and orbit hydrogen, and it can and it can only do it in complete wavelengths, right. So the electron wiggles as it goes around and um, so it has various energy levels because it needs to wiggle either five times or it needs to wiggle six times or seven times. It can't wiggle like five and a half times. And so it has these specific orbitals that can it can go around um the atom in, and then it can jump between one and then the other one. The color of the light that it gives off reflects the energy of the light that's sent out, which comes from the energy difference of those electron orbitals. If the gas gets hot, the electrons move up in those orbitals, and then when it cools down, they jumped down, and they give off a certain frequency of light. And so people had measured the spectra, and they had all these equations to describe the spectra, and there were these patterns that nobody could explain. And so then Bore come up with this model, and with just a few lines of mathematics, he was able to predict those equations and and and his model perfectly described um a lot of the spectra that we saw, which was amazing, right, It was like a big open puzzle in physics. And he came along with his cool idea that was beautiful because it reflected what the planets were doing and also explained the experiments we were seeing, and it made a lot of sense. And so it was just very quickly very popular. Like for all practical purposes, it was true, like this model describe what was going on inside of the atom as far as they need exactly. And you know, as far as people had tested at the time and as far as it had probed at the time, it was true, Like it worked, it made sense, it predicted experiments. What else could you ask for from a theory, right, And so of course he won the Nobel Prize for right, but it turned out to be wrong. That's right. It turned out to not be what's actually happening. So there's a couple of problems with bores theory. One is it's not what's actually happening, right, Um, that's a problem um. Problem number two is that it violates quantum mechanics because you know, electrons don't actually have these orbitals um. And problem number three is that it didn't work for more complicated atoms. You know, it worked really well for hydrogen, but once you get into multi electron atoms it didn't really work. So it seemed really promising, but then as we dug deeper, it turned out it didn't work. Okay, so let's think. Let's dig a little bit into that first one. So it violates quantum mechanics. What does that mean? Yeah, well, quantum mechanics tells you that electrons don't have classical trajectories. I mean you, a classical trajectory is something where you know the position and the velocity of a particle, right like you throw a baseball up in the air. You know where it is and you know it's velocity, and that allows to you to predict where it's going to go. And we naturally think of everything is having a location in a velocity, right, like everything is somewhere at a certain time. That's the way you like to think about stuff. But electrons don't act that way, right. They don't have a path where they say I'm here and then I'm here, and then I'm here and then I'm here. Insteads as you can learn about if you listen to our podcast about the universe being random. They just have a probability distribution right there, like I might be here and I might be there, and when you ask them where are you, then they say, okay, I was here, I was there, I was over here. But they don't travel in between those locations, right, They just have these probability distributions. So the idea that it's going around in a like a clean orbit is just wrong because nothing really at that level at the small this goes in at such a perfect little loop, I know. And that's a shame because that was one of the beautiful things about his theories, that it mirrored the planetary dynamics, right, But it turns out that parts pretty much the most wrong part, right, that electrons don't move in these circular orbitals, and um and it's not even just that their their motion is a little fuzzy, right, their motion is not circular. Now that we know more about how electrons move, there all these weird shapes that they move in, you know, as the atoms get more and more complicated, to have all these pedals and s and d M and P waves. And for those of you who know chemistry, you know that electron orbitals can get very complicated. They look more like clouds, right, like little balloon cloud. So you can't say an electron is moving in an orbit and the way planets moving in orbit, because electrons are fundamentally just really different kinds of things than planets or even rocks. Right, But could you say that kind of his model was conceptually generally right, you know, like maybe they're not traveling in a perfect circle, but it's like the it's a good analogy for what's actually happening. Yeah, And that's a fair defense of him, right, Like it's like saying, well it was Newton wrong. No, I mean, newton theory didn't generalize, but it predicts the way apples fall from trees, and it predicts the way things moved through the air. And so Einstein came along and generalized and showed where it would break down. But you know, to a reasonable approximation, it was correct. And everything we do in physics is only correct up to some point. Will always be something we discovered which shows us that it's wrong. In some regime, were very high energy, you're very high mass or something, and so it's a fair point to say, like, look, given the data at the time and our understand of the time, it worked and it explained the what we observed, and so there's nothing wrong about it is just improved later. But my problem with with Boars models that it fundamentally misses the mark because it imagines that electrons are moving in these classical orbitals and they just really don't. The real problem with Boars models that it just doesn't work. As the atoms get more complicated, you have multi elector you have more than one electron in there, it just doesn't work. It doesn't describe the data. It's amazing for a model which is conceptually and fundamentally wrong that it worked so well. It's like, it's incredible that it predicted the results of experiments perfectly even though it was wrong. To me, It's like an amazing coincidence. But the funny thing to me is that that's what most people think of when they think of an atom, is the bore model. Yeah, and I think that's what most physics cartoonists keep drawing and perpetuating this incorrect idea. Yes, that's right. Before we keep going, let's take a short break. Al right. So that's the first story of how someone got the Nobel Prize wrong. Tell us about the second story. So the second one is Enrico Fermi. Rico Feremi also a staggering genius of science, and the last thing I want to do is besmirch his legacy because he's made so many important discoveries and contributions to physics. Um. But he played an important role in the discovery of nuclear fission, but he didn't realize it. So this is in the thirties when people are understanding radiation and trying to figure out like can you break the atom? Or what happens if you hit this atom with this particle, And you know, this is just a few years before in the Manhattan Project and the atomic bomb and nuclear energy, and he was trying to understand, like what happens when you shoot a slow neutron at uranium. He was trying to get uranium to capture another neutron. He was trying to make something heavier than uranium, like to absorb it. Yeah, to absorb it, maybe have it turned into a proton. He didn't really understand how it worked. And so they had this beam of neutrons and they would slow them down by passing them through a lot of wax. The ideas that like, if you slow it down, then maybe as it passes the nucleus is a better chance of sort of getting grabbed and held in there. He's trying to build a bigger atom. Yeah. Yeah. They call them trans uranium elements, which is a pretty awesome name for a band. Like just throw stuff at it so it stakes a gets bigger. Yeah, And he's like trying to gently toss neutrons at the uranium atom so they stick rather than flying by really fast. And um, you know, he got something to work. He slow, He shot these slow neutrons at uranium, and he got something out which was definitely not uranium. And so he thought, oh, look I've created trans uranium elements. I've I've done it. Um and he won the Nobel Prize for that. Uh, it turns out he had not created trans uranium elements. I mean he even like named this new element which he had not did not created um. Too much fanfare. But it turns out what he had done was he had discovered fission. He had broken the uranium atom into two. Oh. So he shot these things at it and it started behaving differently. So he thought, hey, I did what I was what I thought I was doing. But actually he broke uranium. Yeah, instead of making something heavier, he made things lighter. Right, So he just turned uranium into barium and crypton. Right, uranium breaks up into two smaller, lighter elements, and that's fission, and that's hugely important and it's like really consequential, and that triggered like the nuclear age. And you know, people who came later who won the Nobel Prize for discovering fission were definitely worked on the on the shoulders of fami. So, I mean, it's it's really important work. But it's like he just thought he discovered A. Turns out he discovered B. But he took credit for A and he got Nobel Prize for A, when in fact he had discovered something else totally different but but the Nobel Prize committee at the time thought that he had done it. That's right, Like, they looked at his data, they looked at what he had done, and he said, yeah, yeah, he made a bigger uran uranium. He should win the prize. Yeah, that's right. They gave him the Nobel Prize for discovering trains uranium trans uranic elements. But he hadn't. Um. He had of course done something really important. But so how did they figure out that he had not done it? Well, people came along later, um and um, you know, Lisa Mightner and Otto Hahn, and they actually figured out they're like trying to reproduce it, and they had more details, and they studied what came out of the experiments and they realized, oh, this is not something heavi or this is something lighter. And so the follow up work revealed that what had happened with something totally different and even more interesting, even more consequential. Right. So that's the thing about this discovery is that he was wrong, but he was also wrong about how important it was. He underestimated how important it was. He understood it and still got a Nobel Prize. But even though he basically did it first, he didn't get the Nobel Prize for fission for the thing he accidentally did. Like, you have to do it on purpose, right to win the prize. The secret rule secret you have to do it on purpose. You don't have to do it on purpose, but you have to recognize that you've done it. A lot of Nobel Prizes um or rewarded for things people did accidentally and discovered, like oops, you know, but the discovery the cosmic marcrowave background radiation totally an accident, but then they recognized what they had done and read a paper about it, and then they were given the Nobel prices. You have to pretend you did it on purpose. There you go, that's the rule. I'm sure that's somewhere in Alfred Nobel's will. Yeah, I'm sure there's a Swedish translation to what I just said exactly. Okay, Google translate RhE into Swedish in real time. Okay, So can you imagine being the scientists who basically are just trying to like replicate with this Nobel Prize project and then you figure out that it's wrong. Yeah, I know. And Feremi was he was you know, he's staggering he was a huge figure in physics at the time. He was well, he was famous and internationally respected, and so you know, disagreeing with Faremie or going up against Faremer claiming that Fremie was wrong is uh, it's a pretty big deal. That took some guts. They must have been pretty confident in their data. So yeah, that's a pretty um kind of a big error in the Nobel Prize committee. Yeah. Yeah, I think looking back, they probably wish they had waited a couple of years to give that Nobel prize. Yeah, exactly, although you know, for me certainly should have won a Nobel Prize for something or something. Okay, So it's not like it's unjust that he wins a Nobel Prize. It's not like he's undeserving. It's just not really for what they actually gave it to him for. They don't feel bad bad, No, I don't think they feel too bad having for me be one of the Nobel Prize winners. And though I think it feels pretty good. It's sort of like Einstein, right, he won the Nobel Prize for the photo electric effect explaining this tiny, weird little thing. He never won the Nobel Prize for relativity. He didn't write general relativity or special relativity. Now Nobel Prize for that, I don't know. It's just like it's the idiosyncrasies of the Nobel Prize committee. You know, they didn't think that was worth it, and then later they gave it to him for the photo electric effect, which is like sort of like making it up to him. You know. It's sort of like al Pacino getting the Lifetime Oscar even you know, like, well, we should have given you the Oscar for this one, and we didn't, and so here you're gonna have this other one. That's why the Oscars have that Lifetime Achievement award, right, Yeah, that's the oops. Oscar Award should be a lifetime Achievement Nobel Prize. Okay, So those are two examples of a wayne you can get the Nobel Prize wrong, meaning that you make a discovery but then later it turns out to be not quite right. But we were talking earlier that there's other ways in which you can get the Nobel Prize wrong, right, Yeah. The other direction, which is you can fail to give it to people who are clearly deserving of it, right, And that's you know, almost as big a mistake in my view. Yeah, there's lots of examples of people who were kind of who are known to be crucial part of the team and the discovery, but they for some reason didn't get it. Yeah. And I think one of the biggest examples is Vera Rubin. She's an astronomer who everybody credits with making huge contributions and establishing the dark matter is a thing. Right, She's the one who went out and made careful measurements of how galaxies are rotating and really proved that there's huge blobs of invisible matter in these galaxies. Um. And so she's a huge figure in astronomy and in in dark matter is one of the biggest discoveries ever. But she never won the Nobel Prize for it, right, And she's passed away now, so she can't. And um, it's pretty widely acknowledged that that was because as of you know, gender bias on the committee and in the field in general. You know, this is a field of men, and it's the committee's mostly men, and in the history of the Physics Nobel Prize only a few have ever been given to women. It's terrible, it's shameful, it's shameful. A lot of these things you sent me of people who should have gotten the Nobel Prize are were female. Their women, right, Roslyn Franklin, And yeah, exactly, Rosin Franklin. You know, she's the one who made that amazing X ray pictures of d N A and which Watson and Crick basically stole and then used to claim the discovery of DNA for which they won the Nobel Prize. And then she died of due to radiation disffuse a few years later. Um, so they really stood on the backs of her hard work. They stole her data and won a Nobel Prize. Um. That's really embarrassing. And there's other examples, you know, there's some Jocelyn Bell she um was a graduate student and she discovered pulsars. The problem is that her advisor got the Nobel Prize for and she was out. They're doing all the work. I know, how did how did they justify that? You know, at the time, I think they just thought it would be demeaning to the Nobel Prize to give it to a graduate student or something. It makes no sense. It's to me, it's really embarrassing. And but but in in some karmic justice. She won the Breakthrough Prize last year, UM, which is which is great, and she donated, like there's more than two million dollars in prize money, she donated all that money to UM supporting women and underrepresented minorities in science. So like she's really a stand up kind of person. That's awesome, and that's bigger than the money you get from the Nobel Prize. Yeah, exactly. I think the Breakthrough tries the prize is trying to buy its way into cultural relevance by having more money than the Nobel Prize. Al Right, well again, UM, we don't want to badge the Nobel Prize or science. It's still the most awesome thing to learn about the universe and to know what's true and not. And we know that the committee out there is doing its level best and they've made a lot of X choices, and the folks that they have elevated Nobel Prize winners are almost all entirely deserving, even those for whom the prize was incorrectly awarded, they're still deserving, um, And so we commend them for doing their best. But of course it's a human endeavor and science is a human endeavor and sometimes we make mistakes. And one of the best things about science is that it's self correcting. We will go back and we look at these things, we understand them better, and we make improvements. Just like this podcast, we hope to get better and better every time. All right, well, thanks everyone for listening, See you next time, See you next time. If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge That's one word, or email us at Feedback at Daniel and Jorge dot com tw