More on the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics

In a New York Times opinion piece, Sean Carroll argues persuasively that in the future, the Nobel committee should consider institutions and collaborations for award of the Nobel Prize in Physics.  He states that there is a self-imposed tradition of only awarding the prize to 3 living individuals per year.  This seems to be consistent across the Nobel science prizes, but not the Peace Prize.  (The literature prize seems to go to a single living author each year.)  As long as the terms of Alfred Nobel's will are adhered to, Carroll's argument is persuasive with me, and this year's prize to Englert and Higgs, to the exclusion of others, certainly makes the case quite vividly.

There is only the logistical difficulty of how an institution or collaboration would make use of the prize money.  An institution could certainly put the money in its endowment or operational fund, and the Nobel Peace Prizes awarded to institutions provide a precedent.  How about a more loosely defined 'collaboration'?  This is certainly less clear.  Would all its members be considered 'Nobel laureates'?  Some have tried to take that approach with IPCC individual members when the IPCC won half of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.  (IPCC stands for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.)  I felt this was highly unjustified.

In the case of the Higgs theorists (setting aside for now the two experimental groups who made the discovery last year), one of them was dead by the time of the prize, and the others could be divided into at least 3-4 groups of collaborators; a number of others had done precursor work such as Anderson, Goldstone, and Nambu.  Laureates Englert and Higgs represented two of the pivotal collaborations; a third led by T.W. Kibble was completely excluded from the Prize.  So, no single 'collaboration' could be credited for even the theoretical proposal of the BEH (Brout-Englert-Higgs) mechanism.

Thus, while Carroll's proposal is a sound one, it is not clear to me how it could be applied to the discovery of the Higgs boson, an achievement which nicely reflects the messy nature of scientific discovery.  Could up to three 'collaborations' receive the award?  If so, would all members be considered Nobel Laureates?  Would the qualified individuals need to be identified by name by the Nobel Committee?   Carroll's piece is a good start to the conversation, but the proposal needs to be fleshed out more thoroughly before it could be seriously considered.