I’ve been thinking a lot about this Obama – Nobel Peace Prize business today, actually I’ve been trying to ignore it but I’ve run into several people today who think it’s a great idea and going to spur Obama to do something good… or at the very least spur him to not do something really, really bad.
But that’s not the way any of the other Nobel prizes work. Willard Boyle (one of this year’s Physics laureates) got it because 40 years ago he invented the CCD, which is an enormously valuable piece of technology. Herta Müller got the literature prize because she wrote some poetry people really liked.
Suppose the selection committee gave the Nobel Prize in Physics to some high school student in the hopes she’d be inspired to do something great. Suppose they gave the Prize in Medicine to an entry level employee at some drug company in the hopes he’d eventually discover something really useful. Wouldn’t we think they were putting the cart before the horse?
