Each autumn, when the Nobel laureates are named, there is a quiet pattern beneath the surprise: the sciences often build their own roads toward recognition, one discovery laying the stones for the next. Dr. William Brown, who has spent years guiding local readers through these prizes at the Niagara-on-the-Lake library, argues in Niagara Now that many science awards are less mysterious than they appear. Tracing gravitational waves, black holes and gene-editing, he suggests that the Nobel committee often honours what the human story of inquiry had already made visible, even if the wait for that
The Domino Effect: How Science's Major Breakthroughs Make Nobel Prizes Predictable
No one had actually seen one — until 2019.
Mark
Brown says science Nobels are sometimes predictable. What's his core pattern?
Mimi
A theory predicts something, then it takes years to build the tools to confirm it, and the prize follows quickly after confirmation. Gravitational waves detected in 2015, prize in 2017. A black hole photographed in 2019, prize the next year.
Mark
And the applied side?
Mimi
Gene-editing and mRNA vaccines. The uses were obvious, so the prizes looked like a matter of time.
Luke
Worth noting this is an opinion column. He says "obvious," but the piece offers no data on how often predictions like his hold. It's a handful of well-chosen hits.
Mark
Fair. He does concede many prizes don't follow the pattern.
Mimi
Yes. Most nominees wait years while the committee links bodies of work together. Lithium-ion batteries in 2021 and autoimmunity last year are his examples.
Luke
And that's arguably the larger group, by his own words, though he says "perhaps the majority" without counting.
Mark
What about the human cost of waiting?
Mimi
Hawking died in 2018, two years before the black hole prize. There are no posthumous Nobels, and a three-laureate cap in the sciences.
Luke
Whether Hawking would have won is not established. The piece only says he died shy of the prize, and I'd leave it there.
Mark
And the problem of credit?
Mimi
Gravitational waves, the Milky Way black hole and the Higgs rested on hundreds or thousands of people. Brown suggests group prizes, like CERN, would be reasonable.
Il Polso
- A theory predicted in 1915 sat unproven for a century until instruments sensitive enough to hear space-time ripples were finally built after three decades of stubborn effort.
- Black holes, once only mathematical shadows, became visible in a 2019 photograph, and the Nobel committee moved with unusual speed to honour the work behind them.
- Prizes are constrained by a three-laureate limit and a ban on posthumous awards, so hundreds of contributors to giant collaborations must be reduced to a few names or a defined group.
- The landing point is a fair but uneasy settlement: the committee rewards clear chains of discovery, while many deserving nominees wait years for their moment to arrive.
Each autumn, when the Nobel laureates are named, there is a quiet pattern beneath the surprise: the sciences often build their own roads toward recognition, one discovery laying the stones for the next. Dr. William Brown, who has spent years guiding local readers through these prizes at the Niagara-on-the-Lake library, argues in Niagara Now that many science awards are less mysterious than they appear. Tracing gravitational waves, black holes and gene-editing, he suggests that the Nobel committee often honours what the human story of inquiry had already made visible, even if the wait for that honour can stretch across decades and sometimes beyond a laureate's life.
Every fall, Dr. William Brown runs a Nobel Prize series at the Niagara-on-the-Lake Public Library, walking audiences through physics, chemistry, medicine, economics, peace and literature as the winners are announced and the ceremony approaches in December. In his latest opinion piece for Niagara Now, he draws on that yearly exercise to make a simple argument: in the sciences, the winners are sometimes easy to see coming.
His first case is gravitational waves. Ripples in space-time, a by-product of Einstein's general relativity from 1915, were expected for a century but remained unproven until extraordinarily sensitive instruments were built after three decades of effort. The detection of waves from two colliding black holes arrived in 2015, and a physics prize followed two years later.
Black holes followed a similar road. Long considered theoretical, they were finally photographed in 2019, and the committee acted swiftly, honouring the discovery of a giant black hole at the Milky Way's centre the following year. In chemistry, Brown sees the 2020 gene-editing award as an obvious choice, given its promise for diseases like thalassemia and sickle cell, and he notes that mRNA vaccines, which powered rapid COVID-19 responses, now reach toward cancer as well.
Not every prize is so direct. Many nominees wait years for their work to be woven into a shared recognition. Sometimes the wait is too long: Stephen Hawking died two years before the black hole prize, and since the Nobel is never awarded posthumously, some work simply goes unhonoured by that stage. Large collaborations pose another puzzle, since a three-laureate limit forces the committee to choose names or to point toward a group like CERN.
Brown concludes that the Nobel organization, despite its 125-year history of occasional missteps, offers a remarkably faithful map of scientific progress. Readers curious to explore further can visit Nobel.org, and those who want to hear more can join the next session on this year's medicine laureate at the NOTL Public Library on Wednesday, November 11, at 2 p.m.
Every fall, Dr. William Brown runs a Nobel Prize series at the Niagara-on-the-Lake Public Library. The winners are announced in early October. Starting in late October, Brown presents the physics, chemistry and medicine prizes. David Elkins follows with economics and peace, and Valmai Elkins closes in December with literature. The award ceremony is held on Dec. 10. In an opinion piece for Niagara Now, Brown draws on that annual exercise to make an argument: in the sciences, the winners are sometimes easy to see coming.
His first example is gravitational waves. Ripples in space-time from colliding masses were a by-product of Albert Einstein's general relativity, published in 1915. They were expected but unproven until extraordinarily sensitive instruments were built to detect them, work that took three decades of sustained effort and funding. Detection of waves from the collision of two black holes came in 2015, and a Nobel Prize in physics followed two years later.
Black holes, another theoretical consequence of general relativity, followed a similar path. If a mass is large enough, space-time can collapse into a gravitational field so strong that not even light escapes. Roger Penrose, Stephen Hawking and others did much work on the idea, Brown writes, but no one had seen one until a black hole was photographed and the image published in 2019. The Nobel committee moved quickly. The next year, a prize recognized the discovery of a giant black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, and by implication most galaxies, along with Penrose's key mathematical studies of black hole shape.
Chemistry offers its own examples. Brown calls the 2020 award to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna for gene-editing an obvious call, since the technique promised a way to treat genetically transmitted diseases. Refinements since then have, he says, transformed prevention and treatment of thalassemia and sickle cell disease. He also points to mRNA vaccines, originally developed to treat cancer. They became an off-the-shelf platform that produced highly effective COVID-19 vaccines in under a year after the virus emerged in China in late 2019. The technology continues to be used against a range of diseases, including cancer, where a small clinical trial recently showed effective treatment of malignant melanoma.
Not every prize is so direct, Brown says. For many, perhaps most, nominees wait years until the committee finds a way to link several bodies of work into one shared prize, or until a body of work finds its moment. He cites the 2021 chemistry award for lithium-ion batteries and last year's medicine award for foundational studies of autoimmunity.
Sometimes the wait is too long. Stephen Hawking died in 2018, two years before the black hole prize. Laureates are often in their late 70s, 80s or even 90s, decades after the work that earned the honour. No Nobel is awarded posthumously, and science prizes are limited to three laureates.
That limit creates what Brown calls one of the tricky aspects of any science prize: deciding who did what. The gravitational wave prize, the shared prize for the Milky Way black hole and the work confirming the Higgs particle each relied on hundreds or even thousands of contributors. In those cases, he argues, giving the prize to a defined group is reasonable. For the Higgs, it could have gone to CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or the Large Hadron Collider group.
Brown allows that the Nobel group, like any human organization, makes mistakes, but he says surprisingly few in the sciences over its 125 years. Reading the history of the physics and chemistry prizes, he writes, amounts to reading the most important landmarks of those fields. He recommends Nobel.org, with its scientific and biographical material on cosmology and quantum physics, as a resource for the curious.
The next session, on this year's medicine laureate, is at the NOTL Public Library on Wednesday, Nov. 11, at 2 p.m. Registration is at notlpubliclibrary.org.
Citazioni salienti
Looking back over the history of Nobel prizes, especially in physics and chemistry, is to look back at the most important landmarks in those sciences.— Dr. William Brown, Niagara Now
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