Nobel: The Man and His Prizes

Abstract

This exciting volume fills the need for an authoritative account of Nobel's life, the manner in which laureates are selected, and the place of prize-winning researches in man's increasing understanding of nature and his place in the world. The life of Nobel is the story of an unhappy genius, a man without a country, who linked his name with the foremost creative minds of this century and with the highest honor the world can bestow on them. The selection of prize-winners is an intricate, painstaking process, involving months of labor. There is an orderly timetable of nominations, screenings, evaluations, investigations, further screenings, and final selections. Although individual selections may be sometimes questioned, a better scheme for arriving at selections would tax the most ingenious person. In the sciences, the prize-winning experiments are recounted in the context of the then current scientific thought. A background of research progress by others is