Nobel Prize (1901-)

And the articles that really matter:

Web of Stories contains amazing interviews with many (mostly American) winners.

See Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman chapter Alfred Nobel's Other Mistake's amazing comments about the Nobel Prize.

TODO who is the digital switch person he mentions?

Some views:

Understand and explain amazingly every single Nobel Prize in physics, chemistry and biology. Since in particular the Nobel Foundation is unable to do that for any at all, especially of the key old ones, e.g. www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1965/summary/. Hopeless.

To be fair, those in theoretical physics at least basically come down to reading a bunch of books. But perhaps anything slightly more experimental could have

Cryogenic electron microscopy, which was developped in the 70's.

For super-resolution microscopy.

This could have been a Nobel Prize in Physics as well!

For the discovery of green fluorescent protein.

To Peter D. Mitchell for the discovery of the mechanism of ATP synthesis in the mitochondria, a central part of cellular respiration.

Myoglobin structure resolution (1958) by X-ray crystallography.

This was almost a two-in-one Nobel for a single dude: both for chemical bond theory and secondary structure theories such as the alpha helix! A beast.

Official page: www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/1954/summary

Gas chromatography.

It is quite amusing that the starting point to identifying the heat one was capsaicin, as it stimulates the exact same receptor!!!

Discovery: induced pluripotent stem cell.

This was the most obscene Nobel Prize of all time. They were completely swept away by the AI boom, and gave this ridiculous prize completely unrelated to Physics.

Official announcement: www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2023/summary/

This one took a while! Major developments were from the 70s! Perhaps it took the Internet revolution to make its importance clear.

For Fractional quantum Hall effect for $\nu =1/m$.

This was so hot (no pun intended) and reproducible that the prize was awarded one year after discovery. Quite rare in those days already.

To Brian Josephson for the prediction of the Josephson effect.

The key initial quantum electrodynamics experiments:

Nuclear magnetic resonance work:

Early electron diffraction experiment from 1927 that drastically confirmed the matter wave hypothesis.

Discovery of:

To Ernest Lawrence for the cyclotron.

Atomic theory.

Niels Bohr for the Bohr model.

Einstein for the theoretical explanation of the photoelectric effect from 1905, notably published as on a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light by Einstein (1905).

Not only did this open the way for X-ray crystallography, it more fundamentally clarified the nature of X-rays as being electromagnetic radiation, and helped further establish the atomic theory.

Pieter Zeeman for the Zeeman effect.