The Nobel Week has begun
Nobel Week starts, the prize in physics will be read to a Russian
IA "Rosbalt"STOCKHOLM, October 6.
The Nobel Week begins in Sweden, during which the laureates of the world's most prestigious scientific prize will be announced.
The winners of the award in the field of physiology and medicine will be the first to be known today, on Tuesday, the prize in physics will find its heroes, and on Wednesday — in chemistry. After the break for the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize (on Friday), next Monday, October 13, the laureates in economics will be announced. The timing of the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature will be announced later.
The prize in physics this year, for the development of the inflationary theory of the birth of the Universe, can be received by a native of Russia (although the chance of this is small), reports Newsru.com . The inflationary theory was announced in 1979 by a young Soviet scientist Alexey Starobinsky. Then, in 1981, the American Alan Gut used the term "cosmological inflation", and in 1982, the Moscow physicist Andrei Linde (who then changed his citizenship to American) proposed his model of the theory. The concept developed by three researchers was confirmed only in 2014 after the discovery of gravitational waves using the BICEP2 radio telescope.
However, as the author of the theory said, the question of awarding will be solved by rechecking the proof of the existence of primary gravitational waves. Unfortunately, the American scientists who announced the discovery earlier admitted a few months later that they were not sure about the results of their research.
By tradition, the world tries to guess the names of the laureates in advance. The most successful in this was Thomson Reuters, which correctly predicted the names of 35 out of 112 laureates from 2002 to 2013. In the current forecast of Thomson Reuters, 27 names of scientists working in 12 scientific areas are named. Of these, 17 are from the USA, three from Australia and one each from Canada, Germany, Great Britain, Japan, China, South Korea and Saudi Arabia.
It is not surprising, therefore, that at the end of the Nobel Week in Russia, conversations may well begin again that the committee in Stockholm discriminates against Russians. However, statistics do not confirm these accusations. If we take the international scientific prizes listed in Wikipedia, except for the Nobel, and look at how often Russian and Soviet scientists have received them, it turns out that since the beginning of the XX century, they, including emigrants, account for 58 out of a total of 953 different awards, which is 6.1%. According to the Nobel Prizes, the same ratio is 34 out of 636, that is, 5.3% (and if you do not take into account the economy, which is not in other prizes, you will get 32 out of 562 = 5.7%), Radio Liberty reports.
Thus, the share of Russian Nobel laureates differs little from the share of Russian winners of other prizes. Moreover, this value looks very significant, considering that the population and economy of the Russian Federation make up about 2% of the world, and the financing of science in the country is much lower than in economically developed countries.
The Nobel Committee presents the laureate with a gold medal with the image of the founder of the Alfred Nobel Prize, a diploma and a cash prize. The amount of the first awards in 1901 was 150 thousand Swedish kronor (6.8 million kronor in 2000), then the remuneration was reduced and only in 1991 reached the initial level, RIA Novosti notes.
In 2012, the amount of premiums was reduced to 8 million kronor ($1.1 million). In total, from 1901 to 2012, 862 laureates were awarded — 838 people and 24 organizations.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru06.10.2014