Behind the scenes of the Nobel Prize in Physics

Interview with Mats Larsson, member of the Nobel Committee for Physics in 2013 and from 2016 to 2023

You were a member of the Nobel Committee for Physics for nine years and have shared that your favourite moment has always been hearing the laureates’ reaction when they receive the magic phone call. Is it true that you call them only a few minutes before the public announcement? Which of those calls do you remember most vividly?

That is such an interesting experience, and every phone call is special in its own way. We call the laureates a few minutes after the decision has been made, although we do not always manage to reach them. Once we have finished the call, we line up for the press conference, and that is where we make the announcement. We are always happy if at least one of the Nobel laureates attends the press conference, because journalists have a lot of questions. But, as I said, sometimes we cannot speak to the winners, or we only manage to reach them in rather roundabout ways. In 2023, when we called the French-Swedish laureate Anne L’Huillier, we couldn’t talk to her. But it turns out that her husband is also a member of the Academy, so we called him and asked how we could get in touch with Anne. He immediately understood what was going on, and suggested that we wait a few minutes, because Anne was teaching at the time. Ten minutes later we were on the phone with her: she told us how delighted she was to hear that we had awarded her the prize, and then she dismissed us with a “Well, now I have to get back to teaching”.

The Nobel call always comes as a surprise: you cannot nominate yourself and the nominations are kept confidential. How does the nomination process actually work? And who is entitled to submit a nomination?

There is a list of the people that are allowed to send nominations, which includes, first and foremost, all members of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and professors of Physics in the Nordic countries. We then send a request for nominations to various universities, asking for each nomination to be submitted by a single qualified individual (we don’t want, for example, to have a faculty meeting where everyone is invited to vote), and we have also drawn up a long list of competent people who can submit nominations. Last but not least, former Nobel laureates are always invited to nominate someone. And usually, even going back through the archives, nominations submitted by really distinguished people carry a lot of weight. Then the quality of the nominations can vary considerably. There are very careful nominations, in which strong arguments in favour of the candidate are presented precisely, and extremely brief nominations, such as those sometimes submitted by Einstein. Naturally, if you are not a very prominent person, simply giving a name and a few lines doesn’t carry all that much weight, a well-considered motivation makes the difference.