(no subject)
Feb. 9th, 2026 09:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretCathedrals of Science by Patrick Coffey
I picked it up because Wikipedia says Gilbert Lewis was nominated for a Nobel Prize 41 times and never won and I was like, there's gotta be a story there. I couldn't find a bio of Lewis, but I did find this, which is a group bio of Lewis and a cohort of physical chemists who revolutionized chemistry in the early 20th century. Lewis is joined in the main cast by Arrhenius and Nernst and Langmuir and Seaborg, all names I'd heard before but didn't really know.
Lewis had some Massachusetts blue blood, but he grew up in Nebraska before returning to attend Harvard and finishing his studies in Europe. And it seems clear that he was always a bit of a social oddball, even once he established himself as the king of chemistry at Berkeley.
The book has some serious parts when it covers the intersection of chemistry and the world wars, and Lewis's strange and tragic death, but mostly it's about how amazingly petty chemists are. I loved reading about how they kept stealing credit from each other for discoveries and doing backroom deals to keep each other from winning Nobel prizes.
To be clear, because I still don't understand how Nobel Prizes are awarded, it's not that Lewis was nominated in 41 years and never won. He received nominations from 41 people over a span of something like 25 years, for multiple discoveries and theoretical advancements in the field. He also devoted those 25 years, and the 20 before, to publically trashing the science of several of the people who decided who would win the prize, or had influence on the decides. Coffey digs up amazing documentary evidence of the coordinated campaign against Lewis, but also makes you think maybe you don't blame them for it.
Anyway, a long running theme in this journal is the way science doesn't move in a sphere of pure ideas but is instead a function of imperfect personalities in collision, and this was a brilliant illumination of that theme.
And if you just think Chemistry: The Soap Opera sounds fun, this is the book for you.
I picked it up because Wikipedia says Gilbert Lewis was nominated for a Nobel Prize 41 times and never won and I was like, there's gotta be a story there. I couldn't find a bio of Lewis, but I did find this, which is a group bio of Lewis and a cohort of physical chemists who revolutionized chemistry in the early 20th century. Lewis is joined in the main cast by Arrhenius and Nernst and Langmuir and Seaborg, all names I'd heard before but didn't really know.
Lewis had some Massachusetts blue blood, but he grew up in Nebraska before returning to attend Harvard and finishing his studies in Europe. And it seems clear that he was always a bit of a social oddball, even once he established himself as the king of chemistry at Berkeley.
The book has some serious parts when it covers the intersection of chemistry and the world wars, and Lewis's strange and tragic death, but mostly it's about how amazingly petty chemists are. I loved reading about how they kept stealing credit from each other for discoveries and doing backroom deals to keep each other from winning Nobel prizes.
To be clear, because I still don't understand how Nobel Prizes are awarded, it's not that Lewis was nominated in 41 years and never won. He received nominations from 41 people over a span of something like 25 years, for multiple discoveries and theoretical advancements in the field. He also devoted those 25 years, and the 20 before, to publically trashing the science of several of the people who decided who would win the prize, or had influence on the decides. Coffey digs up amazing documentary evidence of the coordinated campaign against Lewis, but also makes you think maybe you don't blame them for it.
Anyway, a long running theme in this journal is the way science doesn't move in a sphere of pure ideas but is instead a function of imperfect personalities in collision, and this was a brilliant illumination of that theme.
And if you just think Chemistry: The Soap Opera sounds fun, this is the book for you.
(no subject)
Date: 2026-02-09 03:48 pm (UTC)Does the book talk about Marie Curie and her influence? What we see *didnt* happen is for her to be the lead of a big wave of acknowledged women in science, especially physical chemistry. How much was there a psychological backlash against her, I wonder: because she wasn't "just" a woman, she was a women who was *obviously better than they were*.
When the Nobel Prize Committees were first established, the first big inter-committee tussle was over who would get to give a prize to Curie, Physics or Chemistry, because they *both* wanted to validate their prize by associating it with her. Also because the question of whether P.Chem was going to be taught in Physics departments or Chemistry departments was a very active one.
(no subject)
Date: 2026-02-09 04:06 pm (UTC)FWIW, I think the fact that they mention it implies there's a story, but that that outcome is likely to be fairly normal.
The Nobel webpage says nominations are from "Each year, thousands of members of academies, university professors, scientists, previous Nobel Prize laureates and members of parliamentary assemblies and others ... chosen in such a way that as many countries and universities as possible are represented over time."
So you're likely to get nominated if you've done enough groundbreaking (or notable, or controversial) work in a field that *some* people think you deserve a prize, either your close colleagues, or random conspiracy-theorists who got elected to parliament, etc.
And then a committee decides who to award the prize to, without needing to tell anyone how they decided.
So "being a nominee" doesn't mean being on a specific shortlist the way that it does for some prizes, I think there's usually hundreds and hundreds of nominees, some quite random, and it doesn't really mean much. So I think describing someone as a nominee usually means "Rightly or wrongly, they are a bit obsessed with having been treated unfairly".