The physics Nobel waits decades to be sure a discovery really matters
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar worked out how stars are built and evolve during the 1930s, yet received his share of the physics Nobel only in 1983. That delay is deliberate: the prize demands that a finding be tested by time, which usually means about twenty years and sometimes means a discoverer dies before the call comes.
The first physics laureate, in 1901, was Wilhelm Röntgen, honoured for discovering X-rays. By 2025 some 229 people had received the award, which the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences judges under the will Alfred Nobel signed in Paris in November 1895. His executors, Ragnar Sohlman and Rudolf Lilljequist, created the Nobel Foundation to manage the money, and King Oscar II issued its statutes in 1900.
Selection begins each September, when roughly 3,000 professors, past laureates in physics and chemistry and others receive confidential forms due back by 31 January. Experts narrow the field to around fifteen, the committee reports to the academy's physics class, and the full academy chooses by majority vote. Names of nominees stay secret for fifty years. The long, demanding process is part of why the award became physics' top honour.
Rules on death have shifted. Before 1974, a candidate who died after being nominated could still win. Now posthumous nominations are barred, although someone who dies between the October announcement and the December ceremony keeps the prize. Up to three people and two separate works can be recognised in a year, and with three winners the money may be split equally or half to one and a quarter to each of the others.
Winners collect their diplomas from the King of Sweden at Stockholm Concert Hall on 10 December, the date Nobel died. The medal, shared in design with chemistry, shows Nature as the goddess Isis rising from clouds with a cornucopia while the Genius of Science lifts her veil. Its Latin motto adapts a line from Virgil's Aeneid praising those who improved life through discovery. The cash sum dropped from 10 million kronor in 2009 to 8 million in 2012 after the Great Recession.
Source: Nobel Prize in Physics
