As a sample because I can't answer your question more broadly: Peter Higgs proposed the Higgs boson nearly 50 years before winning the Nobel Prize. Just the theory without confirmation wasn't enough. Then when the LHC detected it, he (along with an LHC scientist) won the Prize basically immediately.
Quantum dots have an increasing relevance to display technology, so it feels reasonable to look back and reward a discovery which was more important than it seemed at the time.
An important consideration is that Nobel prizes are for "great benefits to humankind", it usually means practical discoveries, and never theoretical work.
The world becoming more and more complex, the time span between the theoretical framework and the first experiments to the realization of something genuinely useful tends to become longer and longer. There are some fields where, with the time to become an expert plus the time for the discovery to become Nobel-worthy, it may become difficult to get a Nobel in a lifetime (so, at all).
Sometimes the importance of the original discovery only becomes clear over several decades. Quantum dots have been in development for various technological uses for a long time but there have been many breakthroughs in the past decade, e.g. (2017)
> "The researchers used cadmium–selenium dots 3nm in diameter to seamlessly replace iridium and ruthenium catalysts in five different bond forming reactions including β-alkylation and β-aminoalkylation. What’s more they needed orders of magnitude less catalyst than conventional metal ones. ‘We were pleasantly surprised by the level of performance by just substituting, without any optimisation, a very simple quantum dot into these reactions,’ says Krauss.
> "The dots have some other advantages: they are easy to synthesise, cheap and ‘you can tune the photophysical and redox properties of the catalyst just by changing the dots’ dimension’, Ceroni explains."
> Nobel's will provided for prizes to be awarded in recognition of discoveries made "during the preceding year". Early on, the awards usually recognised recent discoveries. However, some of those early discoveries were later discredited. For example, Johannes Fibiger was awarded the 1926 Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his purported discovery of a parasite that caused cancer. To avoid repeating this embarrassment, the awards increasingly recognised scientific discoveries that had withstood the test of time. According to Ralf Pettersson, former chairman of the Nobel Prize Committee for Physiology or Medicine, "the criterion 'the previous year' is interpreted by the Nobel Assembly as the year when the full impact of the discovery has become evident."
My own comment: Since there is a large queue of potential awardees, I suspect there is a preference for older scientists who might die soon since being alive is also a requirement for award.
Chandrasekhar got a Nobel in 1983 nominally for the white dwarf work he published in 1929. Of course, he did a LOT in between, changing fields every 10 years. There was always chatter that this hurt him due to the committee "not knowing what work to award." His uncle, the experimentalist C.V. Raman, won it a couple of years or so after the experimental results of the effect that bears his name.
Laremere|2 years ago
Quantum dots have an increasing relevance to display technology, so it feels reasonable to look back and reward a discovery which was more important than it seemed at the time.
GuB-42|2 years ago
The world becoming more and more complex, the time span between the theoretical framework and the first experiments to the realization of something genuinely useful tends to become longer and longer. There are some fields where, with the time to become an expert plus the time for the discovery to become Nobel-worthy, it may become difficult to get a Nobel in a lifetime (so, at all).
aqme28|2 years ago
photochemsyn|2 years ago
https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/quantum-dot-first-for-ca...
Pretty impressive stuff:
> "The researchers used cadmium–selenium dots 3nm in diameter to seamlessly replace iridium and ruthenium catalysts in five different bond forming reactions including β-alkylation and β-aminoalkylation. What’s more they needed orders of magnitude less catalyst than conventional metal ones. ‘We were pleasantly surprised by the level of performance by just substituting, without any optimisation, a very simple quantum dot into these reactions,’ says Krauss.
> "The dots have some other advantages: they are easy to synthesise, cheap and ‘you can tune the photophysical and redox properties of the catalyst just by changing the dots’ dimension’, Ceroni explains."
hn8305823|2 years ago
> Recognition time lag
> Nobel's will provided for prizes to be awarded in recognition of discoveries made "during the preceding year". Early on, the awards usually recognised recent discoveries. However, some of those early discoveries were later discredited. For example, Johannes Fibiger was awarded the 1926 Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his purported discovery of a parasite that caused cancer. To avoid repeating this embarrassment, the awards increasingly recognised scientific discoveries that had withstood the test of time. According to Ralf Pettersson, former chairman of the Nobel Prize Committee for Physiology or Medicine, "the criterion 'the previous year' is interpreted by the Nobel Assembly as the year when the full impact of the discovery has become evident."
My own comment: Since there is a large queue of potential awardees, I suspect there is a preference for older scientists who might die soon since being alive is also a requirement for award.
OldGuyInTheClub|2 years ago
jjtheblunt|2 years ago
Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier had a much shorter delay, for example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Doudna
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuelle_Charpentier
cm2012|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
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