WASHINGTON, Mar 15: Stephen Hawking won accolades from his peers for having one of the most brilliant minds in science, but he never got a Nobel Prize because no one has yet proven his ideas, according to a report by www.ctvnews.ca.
The Nobel committee looks for proof, not big ideas. Hawking was a deep thinker -- a theorist -- and his musings about black holes and cosmology have yet to get the lockdown evidence that accompanies the physics prizes, his fellow scientists said.
"The Nobel Prize is not given to the smartest person or even the one who makes the greatest contribution to science. It's given to discovery," said California Institute of Technology physicist Sean Carroll. "Hawking's best theories have not yet been tested experimentally, which is why he hasn't won a prize."
Hawking has often been compared to Nobel laureate Albert Einstein, and he died on the 139th anniversary of Einstein's birth. But Einstein's Nobel wasn't for his famed theory of general relativity. It was for describing the photoelectric effect, and only after it was verified by Robert Millikan, said Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb.
The theory behind gravitational waves -- suggested by Einstein -- didn't win science's highest honour until there were direct observations of the faint ripples in space and time. And Peter Higgs' theory postulating the so-called "God particle" named the Higgs boson didn't win its Nobel until the actual particle was discovered by a massive European particle collider.
"In all cases, there was an experiment-verified prediction," Loeb said.
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