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Comment by jackgavigan | Hacker News Reader

Some will be disappointed that this year's Prize was not awarded to Ronald Drever, Kip Thorne, and Rainer Weiss, in recognition of their work on LIGO. Ronald Drever is in poor health and there are some who fear that, despite being deserving of a Nobel Prize, he may never receive one.

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Nobel's will actually directed that the prize to go "those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit to mankind" by a discovery or invention. The previous-year part isn't even mentioned on the Wikipedia page. (I get that it's hard to judge.)

https://www.nobelprize.org/alfred_nobel/will/

Isn't the "previous year" part usually interpreted to mean that the benefit is in the past year, rather than the work being done in the past year?

I don't know; I wondered about that too. But this proviso hardly seems to come up at all in what I read, and that's interesting -- I wonder how often unusual wills get carried out to the letter.

I believe on Wikipedia it is mentioned that the price was originally awarded soon after the discovery. However, after several occasions where a discovery awarded the Nobel price was later invalidated Kama they switch to the present practice of interpreting it as the benefits becoming clearer in the past year, rather than the discoveries.

Thanks for pointing that out -- the relevant section is the middle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize#Recognition_time_l...

I believe the announcement of the Black Hole discovery came after the nominations for the Nobel had closed.

Correct. Still this was a disappointment.

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