No proof, no prize

Stephen Hawking won accolades from his peers for having one of the most brilliant minds in science, but he never got a Nobel Prize because no one has yet proven his ideas.

The Nobel committee looks for proof, not big ideas. Hawking was a deep thinker — a theorist — and his musings about black holes and cosmology have yet to get the lockdown evidence that accompanies the physics prizes, his fellow scientists said.

“The Nobel Prize is not given to the smartest person or even the one who makes the greatest contribution to science. It’s given to discovery,” said California Institute of Technology physicist Sean Carroll. “Hawking’s best theories have not yet been tested experimentally, which is why he hasn’t won a prize.” with the world of subatomic particles.

For Hawking, the search was almost a religious quest — he said finding a “theory of everything” would allow mankind to “know the mind of God.”

“A complete, consistent unified theory is only the first step: our goal is a complete understanding of the events around us, and of our own existence,” he wrote in “A Brief History of Time.”

In later years, though, he suggested a unified theory might not exist.

He followed up “A Brief History of Time” in 2001 with the sequel, “The Universe in a Nutshell,” which updated readers on concepts like supergravity, naked singularities and the possibility of an 11-dimensional universe.

Hawking said belief in a God who intervenes in the universe “to make sure the good guys win or get rewarded in the next life” was wishful thinking.

“But one can’t help asking the question: Why does the universe exist?” he said in 1991. “I don’t know an operational way to give the question or the answer, if there is one, a meaning. But it bothers me.”