The anticipation has already begun. Every year, on the first Monday of October, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is awarded, followed by the Physics, Chemistry, Literature, Peace and Economics Prizes. The Nobels are so distinguished that they have become a byword for excellence – if there was anything like “the prize” it would be the Nobel Prize in these fields.
It is not that people actually work for the prize — C. V. Raman, goes the apocryphal story, was an exception and did in fact believe that he would be decorated. A few people shun prizes because of the hype around them. However, some discoveries go beyond awards and prizes and actually shift the gears of the machinery that is the field itself — such as Albert Einstein’s remarkable papers on relativity, the establishment of the foundations of quantum mechanics by Erwin Schrodinger and Werner Heisenberg, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, etc. There are some individuals who went even further and stood head and shoulders above the rest, such as Srinivasa Ramanujan or Isaac Newton.
In this spectrum of achievements, looking only at those who revolutionised a field, it is perhaps not surprising that the authors of these revolutions had to undergo a virtual transformation of their own bodies and souls before they were able to think differently and come up with their brilliant ideas.
