The Nobel Prizes for the most eminent scientists

Every year since 1901 the Nobel Prize has been awarded for achievements in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and for peace. The Nobel Prize is an international award administered by the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm, Sweden. In 1968, Sveriges Riksbank established The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, founder of the Nobel Prize. Each prize consists of a medal, personal diploma, and a cash award.

The Nobel Prize is the brainchild of Alfred Nobel, a Swedish chemist who was best known in his lifetime for his invention of dynamite. Upon his death in 1896, a reading of his will revealed that over 90 % of his estate should be used to establish prizes in five categories: physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, and peace.

Alfred Nobel died in 1896. The first Nobel Prize was awarded in 1901. In 1895, scientists and the public were stunned by chilling images, showing the inside of a human hand. The images were created by a mysterious and invisible type of ray, discovered by Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, who later received the first Nobel Prize in Physics 1901. And what makes the sap of the oak tree rise? Jacobus H. van Hoff, the first Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, explains osmotic pressure and its importance in plant and animal life in his Nobel Lecture. Diphtheria took thousands of lives before a cure was found. In 1901, Emil von Behring was awarded the first Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on serum therapy, especially its application against diphtheria, "by which he has opened a new road in the domain of medical science and thereby placed in the hands of the physician a victorious weapon against illness and deaths".

Nobel instructed exactly how the prizes should be determined, and what bodies should be responsible for selecting and awarding prizes. According to Nobel's will, the Swedish Academy of Science was to award a yearly Nobel Prize in Physics and Chemistry. The Caroline Institute at Stockholm would award the Nobel Prize for medicine. The Academy of Stockholm would determine the Nobel Prize for literature. Five members selected by the Norwegian government select the recipient of the annual Peace Prize. The Peace Prize is awarded in Oslo, Norway, while the other Nobel Prizes are awarded in Stockholm, Sweden. Each award was to be given without regard to nationality, and was meant to represent the best and brightest contributors to each field, to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit to mankind. Here's a sampling of some notable Nobel Prize recipients of the past and present day, and what they accomplished.

Albert Einstein won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921 for discovering the cause of the "photoelectric effect". This was a perplexing phenomenon in which atoms, when bombarded with light, emitted electrons. In 1905, Einstein argued that light was divided into discrete packets (which we now call photons). He theorized that, when these light packets struck atoms, electrons in those atoms absorbed them, and, with the extra energy, wrested free of the atoms that bound them. The fact that light is composed of particles that are absorbed and emitted by atoms was just one of Einstein's many revolutionary discoveries. He also came up with the theories of special and general relativity, and discovered that matter and energy are equivalent (as embodied in the equation E = mc²). Marie Curie was the first person to win two Nobel Prizes, and is one of only two people in the history of the Nobels to win in two different fields. She and her husband Pierre, along with Henri Becquerel, won the Physics Prize in 1903 for their discovery of radioactivity. She then won for chemistry in 1911 for discovering the elements radium and polonium and investigating their properties. The 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to Sir Alexander Fleming, Ernst Chain and Sir Howard Florey for their discovery of penicillin, a fungus, and its use as an antibiotic. In 1946, an American named Hermann Muller was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering that radiation causes mutations. For the remainder of his life, Muller was a leading voice in the campaign against nuclear weapons testing and worked to diffuse the threat of nuclear war. Francis Crick and James Watson won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962 for their discovery that DNA is shaped like a double helix.

In 2017 the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine was awarded to Jeffrey Hall, Michael Rosbash, and Michael Young for their discovery of "molecular mechanisms controlling the circadian rhythm". The Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish, and Kip Thorne "for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves". The Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded to Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank, and Richard Henderson "for developing cryo-electron microscopy for the high-resolution structure determination of biomolecules in solution". The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel was awarded to Richard Thaler "for his contributions to behavioral economics".

These achievements are great indeed, and the winners join a list of some of humanity's finest representatives.