Most people recognize that the Nobel Peace Prize is political in nature. But few people are aware that the same is true for the Nobel Prize in physics. Politics, economic interests, and scientific research are more intertwined than they have every been – huge funding grants being a prerequisite for scientific research. Having the right connections or the right politics seem to have become just as important criteria as one’s actual scientific merit. The prize has become a tool for promoting the personal careers of certain well-funded, well-connected scientists, rather than the advancement of science, indicating that we are entering the twilight of the scientific age, writes  Martín López Corredoira.

Alfred Nobel’s will was to endow “prizes to those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind”. Nobel Prizes were then created with the idea of giving recognition to some of the best developments or discoveries within some areas. In Physics for instance, some of the best researchers during 20^th century were awarded with a Nobel Prize for solid and remarkable discoveries. As a result, the Prize got a wonderful reputation worldwide as a sign of quality-guarantee.

These days the Nobel Prize has come to reflect the less remarkable times we live in and has fallen victim to economic and social pressures that mean the Prize is not what it used to be. When it comes to the Nobel Prize in physics, the committee seems to be increasingly awarding speculative hypotheses, rather than concrete discoveries – perhaps because there simply aren’t any discoveries of great note: physics in the 21^st century isn’t as exciting as physics in the last century.  But beyond that, we live in a time when political interests often get entangled with science. This is mainly due to the need for grants and other funding to carry out scientific projects, something that wasn’t true to the same degree in the past. This makes science more dependent than ever on economic and political forces, and as a result the major research centers have become strongly connected with the socio-economic interests. We are witnessing the symptoms of a twilight of the scientific age: Individual creativity is condemned to disappear in favor of big corporations of administrators and politicians of science specialized in searching for ways to get money from governments in megaprojects with increasing costs and diminishing returns.

The Nobel Prize has been adapting to our times, getting closer and closer to politics and further and further away from the spirit of scientific discovery.

The Nobel Prize has been adapting to our times, getting closer and closer to politics and further and further away from the spirit of scientific discovery. The politicization of the Peace Prize is remarkable; who can forget the award being given to Barack Obama in 2009, before he even had the chance to demonstrate his merits as a peace-building politician, merits which fell short of many people’s expectations. To a lesser degree, the Nobel Prize of literature is widely recognized as having become politicized too. But when it comes to physics one would not expect as much politics to enter into the award, since physics is relatively more removed from human and social affairs than other areas of inquiry. Despite that, the prizes of last decades show an increasing contamination of politics too.