• Question: Do you hope to ever have a Nobel Prize? If you did get one what do you think it would be for?

    Asked by Lottie to Chris, Josh, Rebecca, Rob, Susan on 17 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Susan Cartwright

      Susan Cartwright answered on 17 Jun 2015:

      Most likely not, because experimental particle physics takes place in big international collaborations, and the Nobel Prize can be shared among at most 3 people. So, for example, the recent prize for the Higgs boson went to the theorists who devised the mechanism, not to the two teams of 3000 scientists who actually discovered the particle.

    • Photo: Rebecca Dewey

      Rebecca Dewey answered on 18 Jun 2015:

      It would be lovely to win a Nobel Prize – but I don’t expect that I ever will! The Nobel Prize is given for making a new discovery – and I can’t think of anything in my area that really needs “discovering”.

      I’ve met a few Nobel Prize winners though, and I once went for dinner at the house of the Swedish inventor, Alfred Nobel!

    • Photo: Josh Meyers

      Josh Meyers answered on 18 Jun 2015:

      I was actually voted ‘most likely to win a nobel prize’ at my sixth form prom. I have come to realise that it is highly unlikely that I will actually win the thing! A small part of me still has its fingers crossed though (maybe I’ll move into finance and win the nobel prize for economics?!).

      The nobel prize (for chemistry, medicine and physics) is often awarded for new discoveries. My science involves applying existing science to the problem of cancer (and drug discovery) and therefore is unlikely to be nominated.

      So yeah, economics.

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