Unsung Heroes in Physics.

 Was Lisa Meitner the smartest physicist without a Nobel Prize? (asked on Quora).

My answer.

“Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.”
― Thomas Gray,

I tend to avoid using the word smart as it is far too nebulous a qualifier. Lisa Meitner, a pioneer in Nuclear fission, was a brilliant physicist but there are many physicists who have made far more significant contributions than her and have never won the Nobel Prize. Remember the First Prize was only awarded in 1901 so the Nobels exclude all the greats from previous generations - Galileo, Newton, Young, Maxwell, Boltzman plus other pre-1900 legends.

Lise Meitner source: Wired

Having said that there are many physicists from the 20th century who never won it either. In this category I would include Georges Lemaître (Father of the Big Bang), Henri Poincare (first to propose Gravitational waves), Nikola Tesla (he was more of an Engineer but boy did he know to apply Physics), Edwin Hubble (quantified the expansion of the universe), Satyendra Nath Bose (his work in Quantum mechanics allowed for the development of Bose-Einstein statistics and the fifth state of matter…the Bose-Einstein condensate), Chien-Shiung Wu (conducted the famous Wu experiment that contradicted the law of parity), Jocelyn Bell (discovered the first rotating neutron star - pulsar) and Stephen Hawking (of Black Hole, Singularity and Hawking radiation fame)

George Lemaître - Belgium Priest and Astronomer source: Independent

Chien-Shiung Wu source: nsf.gov

Satyendra Nath Bose source: The Wire

Were their contribution greater than Meitner’s? It is difficult to say. One of the problems worth noting is that although there is a history of the Prize overlooking several figures (politics often plays a part) what also happens is that key contributors often pass away before their achievement is officially recognized at the Nobel Level. This is tragic.

Science though as an intellectual pursuit in and of itself, will forever be indebted to each and every one of them and this is what ultimately matters.