The Prize and many firsts

IN the 107-year-history of the Nobel Prize, this year’s Physics award is unique for the several records that it will be tagged with. At 96, Ashkin is the oldest Nobel laureate ever to win the award, which was long overdue to him. Even as many Nobel awards have been given to works that would not have been possible without his groundbreaking invention made during the 1970s and 1980s, Ashkin himself had been overlooked all these years. Steven Chu, Claude Cohen-tannoudji and William D. Phillips were awarded the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics for the development of methods for cooling and trapping atoms with lasers, an immediate consequence of Ashkin’s invention of the “optical trap”.

Optical trapping also forms the basis of the realisation of Bose-einstein condensation (BEC), the subject of the 2001 Nobel Prize. This, in a way, speaks of the system by which nominations are made, considered by the Nobel Committee and final selections made for the Nobel awards.

When the technique of optical cooling of atoms got the 1997 Nobel Prize, many, in fact, thought that Ashkin had been passed over. As the physicist C.S. Unnikrishnan at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai, who has worked on optical traps and atom cooling, told Frontline by email: “I myself thought… why the community did not remember him ... each time ‘trappers’ of atoms and the kind got Nobel prizes. He should have been given [the prize] already in the 1990s, after tweezers became an essential tool in biology. But there is more… he was the motivator and drive for the joint experiment with Steven Chu at Bell Labs that led to the atom trapping and cooling developments…. I suppose Ashkin, of engineering and invention mindset, got sidelined in the wake of spectacular advances by physicists, who are seen and heard more through conferences etc.

“Also, there was another USSR lab of Letokhov, which was also in focus, doing similar trapping experiment by [the] mid 1980s. Letokhov himself was bitter that the credit for many original discoveries was going to others in Europe and [the] U.S. Anyway, the path to Nobel Prize is complicated and the committee needs sustained nominations… I think it was an unfortunate oversight and a very delayed recognition.”

In his post-announcement telephonic interview to the website nobelprize.org, when asked how it felt to be the oldest ever laureate, Ashkin said: “So I just about made it, huh? Because you can’t be dead and win…. If you are a winner of the National Inventors Hall of Fame you can be dead. I won that prize a couple of years ago and I was very proud of that. That is, I would say, the most important prize I’ve won”—obliquely suggesting that he did not value the Nobel award much.

The other record, which is perhaps the first ever, is that the very first scientific paper Donna Strickland ever wrote has won her the Nobel. But, more pertinently, from the perspective of the increasing consciousness about gender equality and discrimination against women in science, the award to her comes 55 years since the last Physics award went to a woman (Marie Goeppert-meyer shared the award in 1963). Interestingly, she is only the third woman to get the Nobel award in Physics after Marie Goeppert-meyer and Marie Curie, who won it in 1903 along with Henri Bacquerel and her husband Pierre Curie, that too upon the insistence of the latter. (Marie Curie was also awarded the Chemistry Nobel in 1911.)

This statistic triggered off a storm of comments and celebration on social media. It is also of interest to note that shortly before the 2018 Nobel awards were announced, the Nobel Committee had “taken measures” to ensure more nominations of women scientists for the 2019 awards. Göran K. Hansson of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences took pains to clarify that these measures did not influence this year’s award selections. Perhaps even more interesting is the fact that just the day before the announcement of the Physics Nobel, the European nuclear research centre CERN had suspended Alessandro Strumia from all his involvement with the centre after he gave a presentation saying “physics was invented and built by men”.

The very first scientific paper Donna Strickland ever wrote has won her the Nobel, but the award to her comes 55 years since the last Physics award went to a woman. Marie Goeppertmeyer shared the award in 1963.