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Similarly, in the will of the Swedish dynamite magnate Alfred Nobel… | blogjou

Murray Gell-Mann

The Quark and the Jaguar
31 Aug 2021

Similarly, in the will of the Swedish dynamite magnate Alfred Nobel...


Similarly, in the will of the Swedish dynamite magnate Alfred Nobel, who established the Nobel prizes, the science prizes are listed with physics first, chemistry second, and physiology and medicine third. As a result, the physics prize is always awarded at the beginning of the ceremony in Stockholm. If there is just one physics prize winner and that winner is a married man, it is his wife who comes into dinner on the arm of the King of Sweden. (When my friend Abdus Salam, a citizen of Pakistan and a Muslim, received a share of the physics prize in 1979, he turned up in Sweden with his two wives, np doubt causing some problems of protocol to arise.) The winner or winners in chemistry rank second in protocol, and those in physiology and medicine third. Mathematics is omitted from Nobel’s will for reasons that are not really understood. There is a persistent rumor that Nobel was angy with a Swedish mathematician, Mittag-Leffler, for stealing the affections of a woman, but, as far as I know, it is only a rumor.