Hearing that you have won a Nobel Prize is amazing to most people. For others, it only ruins their sleep

[ad_1]

“In the previous experience, the only phone calls at this time of night are bad news,” he said. This was great news.

“Do you know about the Bob Dylan fiasco?” He said in a telephone interview with CNN. “It could have put them in the wind. “

Besides being ubiquitous on college campuses in the 1960s, little connects Peebles, an expert in theoretical cosmology, with Dylan. But one of the starkest contrasts might lie in their reactions to winning a Nobel Prize – and the songwriter is far from the only laureate whose crowning has proven to be a tricky affair.

The five committees are notoriously secretive, fiercely protecting their choices from the outside world – including the winners themselves, who are notified of their victories minutes before they are announced to the public.

This tight-lipped mantra can lead to encouraging surprises, as happened with Benjamin List – the co-winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry – who was having coffee with his wife when he received the news.

Canadian-American astrophysicist, astronomer and theoretical cosmologist Jim Peebles speaks at the 2019 Nobel Prize banquet.

“Sweden appears on my phone, and I look at her, she looks at me and I run coffee in the street… you know, it was amazing. It was very special. I will never forget,” he said. he declares. told reporters on Wednesday after the announcement of his victory.

It can also be a lot less festive. “I was lying in my bed and my wife woke up and heard my phone ringing. And she yelled at me because my phone was waking her up,” said David MacMillan, who shared the award with List, on BBC Radio 4 Thursday.

“100% [I] missed the call. Classic Scottish person. I [didn’t] I believe this is happening, so I went back to bed, ”he added – probably the most relevant sentence ever uttered by an expert on chiral imidazolidinone catalysts.

And for some, the sudden rise to the rank of Nobel Prize winner is an entirely unwanted intrusion. “Oh my God,” Anglo-Zimbabwean author Doris Lessing said when reporters arrived outside her house to inform her that she had won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007. “I’m sure you would like some remarks uplifting of some sort. “

“It’s a wonderful thing,” Reinhard Genzel, an astrophysicist who won the Nobel Prize in physics last year, told CNN of his victory and the months that followed. “But it’s also a chore.”

What is it like to win a Nobel Prize

Few of the Nobel Laureates can honestly say their life hasn’t changed when they got the phone call.

As long as they believe it, of course. “These days you get those cold calls, and I thought it was another one,” Abdulrazak Gurnah, winner of this year’s literature award, told the BBC on Thursday.

“This guy said, ‘Hello, you won the Nobel Prize for literature,’ and I said, ‘Come on, get out of here. Leave me alone,'” Gurnah said. “He dissuaded me from this and gradually persuaded me.”

Often the winners cannot be contacted at all, leaving them to discover their victories through the news, their family or even their next door neighbors.

Economist Paul Milgrom was woken up in the middle of the night in California by his colleague Robert Wilson knocking on his front door. “Paul, this is Bob Wilson. You won the Nobel Prize,” he shouted into the intercom. “Yeah, did I? Wow,” replied a completely confused Milgrom, in an exchange captured by a doorbell camera.

Genzel’s phone call came while he was in a Zoom meeting with colleagues last October. “I had absolutely no idea,” he said. “I thought, my God… obviously that’s a fantasy.”

The secretary of the committee told him that he “couldn’t say anything for 15 or 20 minutes”, so Genzel did his best to keep the news to himself. “I walked to our meeting room … (my colleagues) told me afterwards that I was tripping in there, looked at them lightly, telling them to turn on the television,” said he declared.

Malala Yousafzai, the youngest Nobel Laureate at 17, was halfway through a chemistry class at a school in Birmingham, England, when a teacher interrupted her to tell her she had won she told Reuters. She later told Vogue that she modestly left the fulfillment of her college applications because she “felt a little embarrassed.”

But there are also times when the winner isn’t as thrilled as the Nobel committee might imagine.

Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov

Dylan and Ernest Hemingway both skipped the annual Nobel banquet; the latter insisted on telling the Swedish Academy that he had “no facility in delivering speeches and no mastery of oratory”.

But it was arguably Lessing who had the most memorable reaction. She learned of her victory as she got out of a cab on her way home from the grocery store. “Did you hear the news? You won the Nobel Prize for Literature!” said an enthusiastic reporter. His eyes rolled back even before the reporter had finished his sentence.

Lessing – accompanied by a man she knew who stood beside her, puzzled, his arm in a sling and a single artichoke in hand – was clearly more interested in collecting her purchases than speaking to media around the world .

When asked how she was feeling, she expressed little enthusiasm: “Look, I won all the awards in Europe, all bloody.”

“Am I supposed to be excited, or elated, or what?” She pointed out. “We can’t be more excited than we are, you know? “

“I was treated like a rock star”

As soon as Genzel’s victory was announced last year, his face was on televisions around the world. The announcement of a Nobel Prize winner is making headlines and websites all over the place, throwing a sudden spotlight on little-known scientists and their complex research.

“Once the announcement is made, you lose your identity within half an hour,” said Genzel. “The phone rings all the time.”

Peebles had a similar experience just minutes after his early morning phone call. “When I got back to bed, my wife said, ‘What was it? I said ‘Nobel Prize’ and she said: Oh my God. “Within minutes the couple had a photographer outside their door.

Genzel suddenly found himself answering questions about politics on late-night German television, angering some of his friends with his responses. Peebles, meanwhile, spent much of the day perusing emails from all over the world: “Please come visit us, please read my manuscript. . “

“It’s one thing to say the Nobel Prizes get attention. It’s another to experience it,” he said.

Sometimes personal relationships change. “There is of course a lot of envy, on the part of some colleagues – many people close to me in the same field might very well say, ‘Why did he have it?'” Said Genzel. .

But before the Covid-19 pandemic scuttled plans for two consecutive years, the winners were also treated to a gala in Stockholm.

“I was treated like a rock star… I experienced what I expect from rock stars,” Peebles said of his banquet in 2019. “It’s a wonderful honor.”

“My attaché had an almost endless list of things to do,” he added. “‘Now you have to meet these influential people. Now you have to go to a press conference. Now we are going to have dinner with important people. And so on.'”

Genzel missed the festivities last year, but he had a low-key relationship in Germany. “The governor of Bavaria offered us his residency, (and) we had a pretty good event with the Swedish ambassador,” he said.

Two years later, CNN asked Peebles if his email inbox had finally shrunk to pre-Nobel volumes. “I should look at the data on this,” he replied, still an empiricist.

But for men, as for many other laureates, the most exciting part of the Nobel experience is simply that it gets people talking about science and culture.

“I almost find a need to tell the general public that there is truth, there is absolute truth,” Genzel said.

“What I hope is understood is the importance of the Nobel Prize in making people aware of the importance of science or the arts motivated by curiosity,” he said. “I think he must be unique.”

[ad_2]

Source link