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Comment by sizzzzlerz | Hacker News Reader

Have any other Nobel Prizes been awarded to someone who only discovered some phenomena but didn’t do any further research to advance our understanding of it? It seems to me that that falls in the category of blind luck rather than research and shouldn’t qualify for the Prize.

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The nobel prize is granted for discoveries that advance human knowledge. Whether that discovery is through chance, sheer hardwork or some linear combination, what matters is the discovery. It is not not disputed (by anyone) that the discovery was important here. The theory of the Cosmic microwave background was already out there -- it just needed someone to confirm the theory !

One could argue that the microwave background radiation was discovered precisely by the nobel winning experimenters because they refused to explain away the "noise". They were persistent and kept trying to eliminate possible sources of this noise. Perhaps other similar horn antennae had the same noise but this noise was just explained away by the other experimentalist as being an artifact of the equipment ? One may never know.

Lastly, it has been my experience that luck seems to strike competent and fastidious researchers more often than average ones.

Here, here. We take it for granted now, but even such things as HBO’s white-noise intro, the echoes of creation, is a cultural artifact of their tenacious attention to detail.

Let's suppose for reasons of this discussion, that Bell labs had assigned a junior engineer to determine how noise was getting into the antenna, not a couple of PhD's who were well along in their careers. Further, let's also assume that, through sheer hard work, some innate brilliance, and maybe some consultations with his mentors, this engineer arrived at the same discovery. Do you think that he would be awarded a Nobel Prize or would he be ignored because he doesn't sport the right credentials?

Not a scientist chiming in, but I'd guess that the project had "lead" scientists who set everything up for the antenna experiment and any data from the junior scientist (what I think you meant) would need to be vetted and still fall under the purview of the lead(s).

Many. Just to give an example, the very first Nobel in physics was awarded to Röntgen, who discovered 'A new kind of Ray' (which only later named x-rays and were shown to be photons with a different wavelength). He noticed a detector going off even though his device was in a sealed box.

Btw X-rays are called "rentgenové záření" ("Roentgen radiation") in Czech.

In lots of languages, both are used (thought X-rays becomes more and more common).

I believe in German-speaking countries the X-ray machine is called Röntgen? E.g. in a hospital you will have directions for "Röntgen".

We call it "Röntgenstrahlung" (X-rays), "Röntgengerät" (X-ray machine), "Röntgenaufnahme" (X-ray picture). We even made a verb out of it, even though that's probably colloquial: "Wir müssen Ihr Bein röntgen" (we need to X-ray your leg).

Rentgen is a noun in Czech meaning 1. the machine, 2. the picture, the root of an adjective (rentgenový), Amd the root of a verb (rentgenovat).

a lot of languages call it Roentgen rays or similar

At my work maybe 10 years ago, we had a little trivia competition on a fun day, about 25 people taking part - one of the questions was "who discovered the X-ray?", and all 7 of the eastern Europeans got the correct answer, but none of the Americans, Indians, or Asians in the group got it right (except for me, but I'm special).

Discovery of penicillin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_of_penicillin

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