Ten Nobel Prize Winners in Physics, and What They Actually Discovered
Since 1901 the Nobel Prize in Physics has gone to 227 people. Most are known, if at all, for the wrong discovery. Here is what ten of them actually did — and why it mattered.
Alfred Nobel left instructions in his 1895 will to fund a prize for whoever, in physics, "made the most important discovery or invention." The first was awarded in 1901, to Wilhelm Röntgen for the discovery of X-rays. Since then it has gone to 227 people, and the list reads as a rough map of how the modern world was built: nuclear energy, the laser, the transistor, GPS and MRI scanning all trace back to prize-winning physics.
Most laureates are not household names, and the ones who are tend to be remembered for the wrong reason. Einstein is the clearest case: he is popularly associated with relativity, but his 1921 Nobel citation names the photoelectric effect — the discovery that light arrives in discrete packets of energy, not a continuous wave — because relativity was still considered too unproven by the committee of the time. Marie Curie won hers in 1903, eight years before a second Nobel, in Chemistry, made her the first person to win the prize twice.
The prize also has a well-documented blind spot. Chien-Shiung Wu ran the 1956 experiment that proved parity is not conserved in weak nuclear interactions — the 1957 Nobel went to the two theorists who had asked her to test it, not to her. Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered the first pulsar as a graduate student in 1967; the 1974 Nobel for that discovery went to her supervisor. Both cases are widely discussed in the history of science as examples of how the prize has, at times, credited the theorist and not the experimentalist who did the work.
Reading the physics behind any of this usually means one of two things: a textbook chapter written for someone already studying the subject, or a biography long enough to cover a whole life, only a fraction of which touches the discovery itself. There is not much written for a reader who wants the actual moment — what was tested, what it proved, and why the world was different afterward — in the length of a short story.
Why the list of laureates doesn't quite match the list of people who made physics happen
Part of the gap traces back to the prize's own rules. Nominations are kept sealed for fifty years before they're published, no prize can be awarded after a laureate has died, and no more than three people can share a single year's award — a hard cap that becomes a real problem when a discovery involved a larger team, or when credit itself was contested at the time. Of the physicists who have won since 1901, only three have been women: Marie Curie in 1903, Maria Goeppert-Mayer in 1963, and Donna Strickland in 2018 — a fifty-five-year gap between the second and third. Statistical analyses of the prize's history have found the pattern is unlikely to be explained by chance alone, which is part of why cases like Wu's and Bell Burnell's are treated in the history of science not as isolated oversights but as examples of a structural blind spot in how the prize has, at times, credited a discovery.
Ten of these stories, illustrated
Wonder Science, one of the twelve WonderBooks libraries, tells ten of these as short illustrated stories — one discovery, one sitting, a page of narrated audio alongside the text. Here is what each one is about, in the order the prize was awarded.
1. Albert Einstein — 1921
Awarded for the photoelectric effect — the discovery that light behaves as discrete packets of energy, not the relativity work he is more often remembered for.
2. Marie Curie — 1903
Awarded for her research into radioactivity, shared with Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel — eight years before her second Nobel, in Chemistry, made her the first person to win the prize twice.
3. Niels Bohr — 1922
Awarded for his model of how electrons are arranged inside an atom, which reconciled decades of conflicting experimental results.
4. Max Planck — 1918
Awarded for discovering that energy is emitted and absorbed in fixed packets rather than a continuous stream — the idea that opened the field of quantum physics.
5. Erwin Schrödinger — 1933
Awarded for a wave equation that describes the probability of where a particle is, rather than its exact position — one of the founding tools of quantum mechanics.
6. Paul Dirac — 1933
Awarded for an equation combining quantum mechanics with special relativity that predicted the existence of antimatter years before it was observed.
7. Enrico Fermi — 1938
Awarded for his work demonstrating new radioactive elements produced by neutron bombardment, foundational to nuclear physics.
8. James Chadwick — 1935
Awarded for discovering the neutron — the electrically neutral particle present in the nucleus of nearly every atom.
9. Donna Strickland — 2018
Awarded for developing a method for generating high-intensity, ultra-short laser pulses, now used in corrective eye surgery and precision manufacturing.
10. Andrea Ghez — 2020
Awarded for observational evidence for a supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who has won the Nobel Prize in Physics more than once?
No individual has won the Physics prize twice. Marie Curie is the only person to win two Nobel Prizes in different sciences — Physics in 1903 and Chemistry in 1911 — but her second award was not itself a Physics prize.
Why have so few women won the Nobel Prize in Physics?
Only three women have won it since 1901: Marie Curie (1903), Maria Goeppert-Mayer (1963) and Donna Strickland (2018). Statistical studies of the prize's history point to a real, measurable bias rather than chance, compounded by cases like Chien-Shiung Wu's and Jocelyn Bell Burnell's, where the prize went to the theorists who proposed a test rather than the physicist who carried it out.
Can a scientist win a Nobel Prize after they have died?
No — the Nobel Foundation's statutes do not permit posthumous awards, which is one of the structural reasons some major discoveries never received the prize even when the discoverer's contribution was widely recognized during their lifetime.