It鈥檚 Nobel prize time again, and all over the world, brilliant scientists are
on tenterhooks, waiting for The Phone Call.
The select few who receive it will hear that they have been chosen to join
the most exclusive club in science. But for most this will be yet another year
of disappointment.
We can all name scientists who should have won Nobels. Take Fred Hoyle, left
out of the 1983 physics prize for work on how elements form inside stars. Yet
all these hard-luck stories pale in comparison to the case of Baron Ernst
St眉ckelberg von Breidenbach, the most brilliant scientist you have never
heard of. So crucial were his contributions to particle physics that
St眉ckelberg should have won not one Nobel, but three.
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Born into a minor Swiss aristocratic family in 1905, St眉ckelberg began
making his breakthroughs in the early 1930s. The first centred on the nature of
the so-called strong nuclear force, which binds atomic nuclei together.
St眉ckelberg showed that the force could be explained in terms of a 鈥渃arrier
particle鈥� which flits around the nucleus, transmitting the force from place to
place. His mistake was to mention the idea to the brilliant but irascible
Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli, who dismissed it as ludicrous.
Crushed, St眉ckelberg dropped the theory鈥攐nly to see the same idea
emerge a few years later from a theorist in Japan, Hideki Yukawa. Yukawa was
awarded the 1949 physics Nobel for the particle exchange idea, which remains
central to our understanding of the fundamental forces of nature.
During the mid-1930s, St眉ckelberg was working on another major problem:
eliminating the mathematical inconsistencies that plagued the theory of how
electrons interact with light. The theory of quantum electrodynamics (QED)
constantly threw up meaninglessly infinite results and, years before anyone
else, St眉ckelberg discovered how to get rid of them. Unfortunately, his
approach was idiosyncratic, replete with symbols that even his colleagues found
obscure. Worse still, he chose to publish in French, in an obscure Swiss
journal.
It was a fatal combination. Today the history books record that the methods
were developed by three other physicists, who shared the prize in 1965.
St眉ckelberg seems to have greeted these misfortunes with equanimity. And
by the early 1950s, he made another seminal discovery: the so-called
renormalisation group, a set of mathematical tricks that has since proved useful
throughout theoretical physics. So useful, in fact, that two Nobels were awarded
years later for its development. Naturally, neither went to St眉ckelberg,
whose pioneering papers languished unread.
When he died in 1984, St眉ckelberg and his achievements were unknown
beyond a small coterie of theorists. Among them was American physicist Richard
Feynman, whose ebullience and fame made him the living antithesis of the quiet,
reserved St眉ckelberg. Yet, ironically, it was Feynman who paid the most
generous compliment to this forgotten genius.
In 1965, a few weeks after receiving the Nobel for his work on QED, Feynman
gave a lecture in Geneva. Among the audience was St眉ckelberg. Afterwards,
Feynman was mobbed by admirers, while the old man quietly left the lecture
theatre accompanied by his dog. Feynman then stunned everyone. 鈥淗e did the work
and walks alone towards the sunset,鈥� he declared. 鈥淎nd here am I, covered in all
the glory which is rightfully his.鈥�
But it changed nothing. In science, as in showbiz, winning recognition is
about being in the right place at the right time. The meek inherit nothing but
obscurity.