Albert Einstein was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics a year late, in November 1922, “for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.”
It had taken almost two decades, and sixty-two nominations before the committee for physics acknowledged Einstein’s ground-breaking contributions. When it did so, the award was pointedly not for his most important achievement─the theory of relativity.
The committee’s failure year after year to award Einstein the Nobel Prize in Physics has an unseemly backstory.
According to the science historian Robert Marc Friedman, some committee members were prejudiced again Einstein as a theorist, a Jew, and a pacifist. They were determined to prevent him from ever receiving a Nobel Prize. This eventually led to an impasse in 1921 when Einstein was nominated fourteen times for relativity theory; the Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded no physics prize that year.
This meant that two prizes would be available the following year. In 1922, Einstein received a record-breaking sixteen nominations for relativity theory. The committee’s members realized they would have to recognize him in some way to protect the committee’s (and undoubtedly their own) reputation.
A seventeenth nomination, made by Carl Wilhelm Oseen, provided a way out of the committee’s conundrum. His nomination was for Einstein’s explanation in 1905 of the photoelectric effect, which described light as behaving as particles or quanta with discrete energy content.
Oseen argued that Einstein’s work on the photoelectric effect was not a theory but a fundamental “law” of nature. According to Friedman, Oseen exaggerated the supposed link between Einstein’s law of nature and Niels Bohr’s quantum theory of the atom (since Bohr’s nomination was his primary motivation.) “In one brilliant stroke, he saw how to meet the objections against both Einstein and Bohr.”
On November 10, 1922, the Nobel Committee awarded the 1922 prize to Bohr and the delayed 1921 prize to Einstein. Although the head of the committee had given Einstein advance notice that he should plan to be in Stockholm in December, Einstein proceeded with a scheduled trip to Japan and skipped the award ceremony. When he gave his acceptance speech the following July, it was not to the Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm or on the subject for which he won the prize (as was customary). Instead, he presented his speech to the Nordic Assembly of Naturalists in Gothenburg entitled Fundamental Ideas and Problems of Relativity Theory.
Most people consider the Nobel Prize the most significant honor one can have. But Einstein didn’t mention it years later when citing his most valued awards. After almost two decades of rejections, it seems the only value of the Nobel Prize to Einstein was financial as he had promised the award money years earlier to his first wife, Mileva, in their divorce settlement.
Read more about Einstein’s Nobel Lecture
