No bell prize

Last week was Nobel week, with daily announcements of the honourees. Not all of them are for science, of course. The last one was Economic Sciences. Really?

The Nobel Prize holds a prominent place in the public imagination when they think of science, sort of like the Academy Awards, the Olympics, or the World Cup. Although the prizes are considered the height of achievement, most scientists have no chance of winning one, not because they are not smart enough (we are of course all smart enough), but because they do not work on the right thing. No one in my field has ever won a Nobel Prize, although we sometimes claim reflected glory for a couple of prizes awarded to people who happened to do some experiments with organisms in the same Kingdom. Actually, there is no specific Nobel for biology like there is for physics or chemistry, but instead a narrowly defined focus on Physiology or Medicine. Others need not apply.

Every field has its awards, however, some more prestigious than others. It is not unusual to hear these major awards marketed as, "The Nobel Prize of <insert field here>." Those who win these awards, however, are not interviewed on the national news in their countries, possibly not even on their local news. It might get mentioned to the in-laws as an aside over Thanksgiving dinner, bringing an abrupt end to casual conversation, spoons frozen in mid air. Then the prize winner will again have to explain what it is he or she actually does, expecting that the niece's new boyfriend will try to score some points by quipping, "You get paid to do that?"

In Canada, real Nobel Prize winners in science do become celebrities of a sort. We don't get a lot of them here, so it's always exciting. If they have any hint of an interesting personality, Nobel laureates do well in the media by talking about things other than science, or by demonstrating that they know how to play the violin. They attend formal galas, drop the opening puck at hockey games, appear on the news when a scientific pundit is required, and complain as much as possible that there is not enough funding for scientific research.

At the Fictional Scientific Conference I attended a few months ago, I was presented with an award that no one could characterize as anything close to a Nobel Prize. The Master of Ceremonies whispered beforehand that they would prefer I not try to say anything while accepting the plaque so they could maximize the time available for the fundraising auction. I had been hoping to pretend to be a pundit for a minute or two, and say something profound, or perhaps play the guitar, but no luck there. A few friends congratulated me afterwards, but everybody else either looked embarrassed or ignored me. Even in my own esoteric field, our intellectual passions are so fractionated into subfields and subsubfields that it sometimes seems that no one is interested in anything that anybody else does. We're polite about it, but when you win the "like the Nobel Prize of <insert subsubfield here>", you won't be toasted by the King of Sweden, and the President of the Society might try to rush you off the stage.

Postscript: A proud tip of the beaker to this year's Nobel Prize winner for Literature, Canada's Alice Munro.