Note on the 2006 Physics Nobel Prize
Domingos Soares
Departamento de Física, ICEx, UFMG
-- C.P. 702
30123-970, Belo Horizonte -- Brazil
E-mail: dsoares@fisica.ufmg.br
October 08, 2006
The endeavor of COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) was extraordinary
and the investigators which are responsible for it -- physicists
John Mather and George Smoot -- were quite important in the tremendous
scientific effort that involved hundreds of
technicians, engineers, physicists, astronomers, etc.
But it represents a technological development about something already
known, the Microwave Background Radiation (MBR), whose discovery has
earned a Nobel prize in 1978.
There was already the suspicion that the MBR spectrum was thermal -- it
was brilliantly confirmed under John Mather's leadership.
There was already the suspicion that there would be inhomogeneities in
the MBR spectrum -- it was brilliantly confirmed under George Smoot's
leadership.
It is clearly a development of technological nature and of experimental
improvement. There is nothing new as far as physics is concerned.
Would not anyone in sane conscience expect to find inhomogeneities in
the microwave background? Would it be necessary to look for them in the
isotropic blue background of our daylight sky?
The connection with the Standard Cosmology Model is the key in order to
understand the behavior of the present Nobel physics committee, marked
by a clear ideological-partisanship bias.
Such attitude is inadmissible to honest scientists that are supposed
to deserve the heritage of a Tycho Brahe, of a Robert Hooke and of
Isaac Newton.
The relationship between COBE's achievements and the Standard Cosmology
Model (the Hot Big-Bang model) is totally inappropriate. The committee
responsible for a prize of such historical significance as is the case
here -- the Nobel prize -- must surround itself of all due precautions as
it had been done in the past, sometimes even with exacerbated
conservatism.
The reason for that is because one has here -- in the above-mentioned model --
a theory "in construction". There is absolutely no definitive evidence,
be it either experimental or observational, of its validity with respect
to predictions concerning the main observables which are expected from
a decent cosmological theory.
It is extremely distressful to watch the Nobel committee curved under
influences of a political nature in scientific matters.
When one thinks about the Nobel prize given to Einstein in 1921, and in the
Nobel committee's scruples in explicitly mentioning the Special Theory of
Relativity, and that, 16 years after its formulation, it is indeed
awkward the shameful submission to spurious influences, not scientific
in character, that the committee submits itself now.
If the criteria used in the award of the Nobel prize in other areas are
similar to those used in the physics Nobel prize, then we have lots of
reasons to be disappointed and very worried about what will come next.
Domingos Sávio de Lima Soares
Oct 08 2006