There are too many extremely important scientific discoveries in the world, but they have never won the highest honor in the field of science, the Nobel Prize. So we asked popular science bloggers, science editors, and selected contributors on the National Geographic Phenomena Science Salon website to pick out their favorite advances or inventions that failed to win the Nobel Prize. Here are the eight that they think were not Nobel Prize-winning, but deserved inventions or discoveries. The world owes them a Nobel.
World Wide Web
This article is provided by Virginia Hughes, a phenomena blogger
When someone at National Geographic asked me what discovery should have won the Nobel Prize and failed to do so, my first instinct was to go to Twitter and ask my fans. After seeing a few testimonials, I Googled "Velcro", "Dark Matter", "Embryonic Stem Cells" and so on... Then I suddenly realized:
The inventions on which we rely to understand other inventions —
World Wide Web ("World Wide Web" (abbreviated "WWW"),
Why didn't this god invention win an award?
Since the 1960s, researchers in the U.S. federal government have created computer communication networks that have the potential to evolve into the Internet. But I want to award the Nobel Prize to Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist. In 1989, he first proposed the idea of the "World Wide Web" and in 1990 he founded his first website (a page about the World Wide Web).
The first genome atlas
This article is provided by Jamie Shreeve, Executive Editor, National Geographic Sciences Department
Many wonder why the Nobel Prize was not awarded to one of the most significant achievements of the scientific community: the atlas of the human genome, completed in 2001. Maybe it's because the results are too great.
In 2001, the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Japan and China participated in the international cooperation on the large-scale sequencing of 23 pairs of chromosomal DNA in the human genome, and finally drew an accurate map of the human genome similar to the periodic table of chemical elements.
(Image from Wikipedia)
Despite its significance, the human genome is not a discovery or invention — it's an engineering project that needs to take the automatic sequencing of DNA to an industrial level.
Black hole death theory
This article is provided by Timothy Ferris, a National Geographic contributor and author of The Science of Liberty
One night in 1970, when Stephen Hawking climbed into bed, an idea popped into his head, and he later called the moment a "moment of ecstasy."
The black hole image reveals the black hole at the center of the supermassive galaxy Messier 87 in the Virgo Cluster. The black hole is located 55 million light-years from Earth and has a mass of 6.5 billion times that of the Sun.
(Image from NSF)
Hawking believes that the immortal black holes that people have known before may gradually lose mass and eventually evaporate, exploding into gamma rays.
GIF from the game "Kids")
The problem is that this view cannot be verified. Black holes are so long-lived that humans can't observe the moment of their death now.
However, Hawking's research on black holes is now really incorporated into theoretical physics. This theory is combined with relativity and quantum mechanics to promote the development and progress of information theory. If nature can provide observable and confirmatory information, hawking is well worthy of the Nobel Prize.
Stephen hawking
(Image from BBC Richard Ansett)
But it won't be billions of years before the first star-sized black holes begin to explode that it's possible and it's possible to be confirmed.
Above, at the center of the Milky Way is the Sagittarius A* black hole. Stephen Hawking's theory of the fate of black holes has had a great impact on the physics community, but it cannot be confirmed by observation.
X光图片：NASA/CXC/UCLA/Z.Li et al; Radio: NRAO/VLA
periodic table
This article is provided by Erika Engelhaupt, National Geographic Online Science Editor
I want to take you to see something basic. But what could be more fundamental, fundamental, and essential than the identification of chemical elements?
The periodic table is not just an organizational chart, it reveals the order of protons, neutrons and atoms in all matter, and even predicts their properties.
It was inconceivable that such an earth-shattering discovery would not win the highest prize in science, but that was the reality when the first Nobel Prize was announced in 1901. That year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Jacobus H. van't Hoff in recognition of his outstanding achievements in the field of physical chemistry. Van Tohoff's work shows how elements are linked and moved between each other.
Mendeleev
In contrast, the periodic table published by Dmitri Mendeleev in 1869 certainly looks a bit old-fashioned. Mendeleev still had hope: in 1905 and 1906 he was nominated for the Nobel Prize, but failed to win because one judge thought his work was too old and too famous.
The 1906 Nobel Prize was awarded to Henri Moisson, who discovered fluorine, whose existence had already been predicted by the periodic table.
The following year, Mendeleev died, and he never won the Nobel Prize. However, the periodic table has become the most useful poster in the scientific community, hanging on the walls of the laboratory for generations and will continue to be posted.
light bulb
This article is provided by Dan Vergano, a writer of national geographic sciences
I hope to be able to award the Nobel Prize to it – the light bulb.
The picture shows the light bulb in 1879, which was designated as the day of the invention of the electric lamp on October 21 of that year.
Courtesy photo: SSPL, GETTY
The light bulb was the invention of Thomas Edison – although Joseph Swan first patented it in the UK, it was Edison who made it practical. It has built the modern economy (and also led to sleep deprivation) and created a large demand for electricity, and it is electricity that has created the various states of our modern people.
Edison (left) and Tesla (right)
供图：BRIDGEMAN, ACI (LEFT); POPPERFOTO, GETTY (RIGHT)
When Edison died in 1931, he never won a Nobel Prize in his life, and even the invention of the electric light bulb, which was a symbol of scientific inspiration, did not bring him the Nobel Prize, which is an injustice of history. At the time, Alfred Nobel wanted to give prizes to certain inventors and inventors as he wished, but the judges preferred to give prizes to "flashy" things, such as the theory of the expansion of the universe or the legendary so-called "God" particle that would only make physicists furious. Reissue a Nobel Prize for the light bulb, which may be exactly what Mr. Nobel, the inventor of explosives, wanted!
quark
This article is provided by George Johnson, a contributor to National Geographic and the author of Strange Beauty
Murray Gell-Mann
Courtesy of Michael Wuertenberg
In 1969, Murray Gell-Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize for "discoveries and contributions to the classification of elementary particles and their interactions." However, he did not win the Nobel Prize for his most famous discovery, the quark.
A proton consisting of two upper quarks and one lower quark. A quark is an elementary particle that participates in strong interactions and is the basic unit that makes up matter.
(The image is from Wikipedia)
At that time, the wording of the award given to Gell-Mann was vague and could even be considered a lifetime achievement award awarded to him, even though he was only 40 years old. The speech at the time of the awards just skipped the topic of quarks. Some physicists have even suggested that he should be awarded another Nobel Prize.
dark matter
This article is provided by Nadia Drake, a blogger on the Phenomena website
If we're going to dig into history, many astronomical discoveries deserve a Nobel Prize. For example, Kepler's law of planetary motion, the theory of cosmic expansion proposed in the early 20th century, and the method of classifying stars using spectral fingerprints.
But the discovery of dark matter is probably one of the most overlooked achievements of modern science by the Nobel Prize jury. In the 1970s, Vera Rubin and Kent Ford discovered that stars at the edge of galaxies move at the same speed as stars near the center of galaxies. In other words, these galaxies are spinning too fast and too fast, and they should have fallen apart... Unless something unseen creates a gravitational pull that holds galaxies together.
The picture shows the imagination of the Earth surrounded by a dark matter package
This invisible thing is dark matter—this mysterious matter that accounts for 90 percent of the mass of the universe. It does not emit light, does not reflect light, and does not react with other conventional substances. It is because of this mysterious and cunning property that the dark matter particles themselves remain a mystery. In other words, scientists can't yet determine exactly what this kind of thing is. And it is this uncertainty that may be the reason why the Nobel Prize selection committee did not award it.
Dinosaur Renaissance
This article is provided by Brian Switek, a blogger on the Phenomena website
In 1969, John Ostrom, a paleontologist at Yale University, named one of the most important species ever discovered. He called this 110 million-year-old dinosaur: Deinonychus (meaning terrifying claws). The creature was about the size of a human, with clawable front paws and sickle-like upturned toes on its long hind feet.
Dinosaurs such as dinosaurs such as dinosaurs are active and even gregarious creatures, which rewrites the previous image of dinosaurs in people's minds. However, paleontology has not been recognized by the Nobel Prize.
摄影：DE AGOSTINI PICTURE LIBRARY/GETTY
What's more, Ostrom knew that dinosaurs were very different from the slow, clumsy, quagmire-dwelling images of dinosaurs in general. He believes that dinosaurs are agile and may be gregarious, and this hunter's lifestyle must have been very active. His proposal later led to the emergence of the "dinosaur renaissance" theory, which still bears fruitful scientific results today.
Unfortunately, no branch of paleontology, or in the field of natural history, has ever won a Nobel Prize, and dinosaurs have not been able to get what they want.