> wtf do these people think they are appointing themselves fit to hand out trinkets and baubles on behalf of global scientific achievement?

https://www.kva.se/en/prizes/nobel-prizes/the-nomination-and...

https://www.kva.se/en/about-us/members/list-of-academy-membe...

> who are they to award such a prize on behalf of physics?

They're not awarding anything in the name of physics, they're awarding a prize in the name of the Nobel committee.

Altough of course you're right, let's play devil's advocate an imagine a world without Nobel prices.

Laypeople needs a simple way to know who's who in advanced research fields, without Nobel prices (or any other commitee) we don't get to have that.

If people gets to ignore (more) such topics, it's likely politicians, and universities react accordingly, and funnel funds to other enterprises.

All these prices (I'd say writing prices are much worse) are typically super corrupt, but at least keep the field in people minds.

>> Laypeople needs a simple way to know who's who in advanced research fields, without Nobel prices (or any other commitee) we don't get to have that.

I think first you're underestimating "laypeople" which seems to include many scientists who are not physicists, and second you are forgetting that many of the scientists the "lay" public knows as the greatest of all times never received a Nobel, or any other famous prize: Einstein, Newton, Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo, etc etc.

Einstein received the Nobel prize:

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1921/summary/

Neither for relativity nor mass-energy equivalence though, which laypeople are much more likely to know about than the photoelectric effect (what the price was actually awarded for).

Ah. My mistake. Thanks for correcting me.

Einstein received the Nobel prize in 1921, but your point is still correct.

Do laypeople know Kepler?

Depends on the quality of the '"lay" public' I guess.

Where I live, in my estimation the 'educated "lay" public' would probably have heard of all the names mentioned, but with even worse notions of what their actual contributions were for Kepler.

The economics of this topic have always been interesting to me, especially when compared to various other fields. What is there to incentivize people to enter STEM fields, and especially research?

As a point of comparison, there are ~540 premier league football players, with an average salary of 3.5 million pounds. (Yes, that's average, not median, but there's less than 20 of them that earn under 200k.) It's not _that_ exclusive of a club, and the remuneration is insanely disproportionate, compared to academics - I highly doubt there are hundreds of researches earning millions.

So, yes, it's pretty odd to have some random people dish out these prizes, and they are a drop in the pond. However, I personally feel it's way too little, and that the targets of the prizes are far more deserving - even if it's a popularity contest - than random entertainers (even if they are quite entertaining). But, it's up for argument, and the markets obviously don't seem to agree with me.

Weirdly, if you sniff the XHR from [0] (when it loads a new page), it claims there's 1171 players for 24/25. Except if you look at a few of the teams individually, they're between 30-35 players. Which is much more in line with your ~540 than their 1171.

> the remuneration is insanely disproportionate

I once pointed out that Kevin De Bruyne, on his own, gets paid almost half as much (~21M) as the entire salary cap of the Rugby Union Premiership (~2022, 50M) (to make the point there's much more money in football than rugby.)

[0] https://www.premierleague.com/players

"I highly doubt there are hundreds of researches earning millions." -- by doing purely academic research, maybe not. But, the number of people who have moved from academia to industry off the strength of their research and made millions is probably much larger than you think. I'd wager just in ML you could round up a few hundred between OpenAI, Anthropic, Google/DeepMind, NVidia, Meta/FAIR, etc.

If Physicists could split atoms with only their arms and legs with some safety equipment, I bet they would get paid even more than 3.5 million pound salary.

Splitting atoms? Nah, that's the easy one, you can do that yourself even if you're quadriplegic and in a coma.

Even fusion is high school science fair stuff.

Spallation, antiprotons, quark gluon plasmas? Now you're talking.

If this was true then we would find that jobs with physical labor pays much more than what it currently pays.

> Laypeople needs a simple way to know who's who in advanced research fields

What need of a layperson does knowing "who's who" in advanced research fields fill?

Here's another good question related to that: Who is qualified to simplify that so that the need is filled?

They need to know, to sate the egos of physicists.

Google scholar rankings of conferences or individuals by H-index or citations is a perfect way for both lay people and academics to measure each others achievements.

And who are the Oscar’s to give out awards to movies?

You can hand out the MJBurgess awards for non-NN-related physics today!

Even though the many of the Oscars nowadays feel rigged (with full lobbying arms from the studios behind them), my understanding was that the "Academy" (from the Academy Awards) consists mostly of your fellow filmmakers.

So it is an honor bestowed by your peers, the ones who would most appreciate the quality of the work and the work that went into it.

It does look like the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences is mostly professors: https://www.kva.se/en/about-us/members/list-of-academy-membe...

That goes to the latest work by researches in Gaussian processes, of course.

In the old days, you’d get a knighthood or a peerage for such achievements.

But honestly, I’d still prefer cash.