Abstract
When scientists become Nobel laureates, they become famous in science and public life, but few studies have examined the nature of their scientific celebrity. This article examines how Scientific American portrayed laureates in order to identify and explain core features of Nobel fame. It examines the portrayals of seven laureates – Francis Crick, Linus Pauling, Hans Bethe, Murray Gell-Mann, Brian Josephson, Philip Anderson and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar – in magazine profiles written between 1992 and 1995 by science writer John Horgan. Its textual analysis finds the scientists are portrayed as combining the sociological characteristics of genius, including enormous productivity and lasting impact, with the representational characteristics of celebrities, such as the merging of public and private lives. Their form of scientific celebrity is grounded in their field-changing research, which is presented as a product of their idiosyncratic personalities. Nobel science is presented as knowledge created by an ultra-elite of exceptional individuals.
Keywords
When scientists become laureates, wrote Harriet Zuckerman (1996: 209) in Scientific Elite, her path-breaking study of Nobel winners, they become ‘celebrities, outside science as well as within it’. They were instantly elevated within science to what she called ‘a scientific ultra-elite’ (p. 11), the peak of the research hierarchy, where they enjoyed unrivalled status that granted them great authority and power within research communities. Their public profile also experienced a dramatic change. Now prominent outside their fields and outside science, they experienced an instant deluge in requests for public speaking, as well as the opportunity to contribute to science policy debates. Zuckerman comprehensively identified and explained the sociological characteristics of laureates by tracing the trajectory of their scientific careers. But it was in public life, she speculated, that the prize had its greatest impact. ‘I am inclined to think’, she reflected, ‘that the principal effect of the prize on science in the large is indirect; its influence on the public’s image of science probably counts for more than its function as incentive for scientific accomplishment’ (Zuckerman, 1996: xxviii). If the prize, as she noted, is ‘the supreme symbol’ of scientific achievement (Zuckerman, 1996: xiii), then laureates, as the individual embodiments of the prize, are the supreme public symbols of science. The images they convey as celebrities therefore communicate powerful ideas not only about the nature and meaning of the Nobel, but also about the more general nature and meaning of science in society.
Despite her emphasis on the public celebrity of laureates, Zuckerman did not identify the features of Nobel fame. And scholars writing after Scientific Elite have not given sustained attention to the particular celebrity of laureates. The major exceptions have been the scholarly analyses of the world-historical fame of iconic scientists, such as Albert Einstein and Marie Curie (Hemmungs Wirtén, 2015; Missner, 1985), and the analyses of historical scientists especially prominent in their national contexts, such as Paul Ehrlich (Hüntelmann, 2011). This shortfall in scholarship constitutes a major gap in the research on laureates, as celebrity has proved to be a powerful concept for explaining how other types of scientists have been portrayed in a personality-focused media culture. Celebrity has been used to examine the fame of scientists, like Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker, who communicated with non-specialist audiences through books and television shows, often on controversial issues such as science and religion and the scope of biological explanations for behaviour (Fahy, 2015). Celebrity has been used as a way to examine prominent scientists in particular national and regional contexts (Hochadel, 2013). And celebrity has been used as a way to interpret the portrayal of laureates on the annual Nobel banquet broadcast on Swedish public television (Ganetz, 2016). To address this shortfall in scholarship on laureates, I draw on ideas of celebrity to examine the representations of laureates in Scientific American, one of the world’s most prestigious science magazines, an outlet that has published the work of more than a 100 laureates (Fahy, 2010). As an influential and authoritative producer and processor of images and ideas about science, the magazine’s portrayal of laureates will illuminate core features of Nobel fame.
1. Laureates as Scientific Elite
As Scientific American has historically produced accurate and authoritative journalism about the scientific world, its portrayal of laureates is likely to reflect the observed characteristics of laureates as working scientists. Zuckerman’s Scientific Elite, first published in 1977, systematically identified the sociological characteristics of American laureates. The book found that scientists awarded the prize between 1907 and 1972 had similar career trajectories. They attended an elite university. They sought out esteemed scientists, many of them laureates, at the same or other elite institutions, to work under as postgraduate students. Working with eminent masters profoundly influenced laureates. The experience socialised them into high-performing scientists, developing what Zuckerman called ‘scientific taste’. They developed this taste by assimilating the ways their mentors worked, developing in the process their own skills, standards and self-confidence. They delivered on their identified promise. From early in their career, they typically published a large volume of research papers (Zuckerman, 1996: 127).
Laureates, the book showed, accumulated advantage within science. Their association with eminent scientists located them in established scientific networks that provided opportunities to publish and get jobs. They not only published a lot, but their research was also quickly recognised by other researchers as superior to general work in the field. It spread rapidly through the scientific community as it was cited in the work of other scientists. As a result, future laureates developed a strong reputation in science early in their careers, which led to better facilities, better students, better colleagues and collaborators, all of which allowed the future laureates do more and more high-quality science. They remained at elite institutions for most of their careers, gaining access to research resources and opportunities in the form of grants, awards and fellowships, exercising authority within science by editing or serving on the editorial boards of important journals, awards bodies and grant committees. The pattern of their accumulated advantage in science followed the pattern of visibility in science identified by Robert K. Merton (1968). A scientist earned visibility through their papers and the impact of those papers, which led over time to more professional rewards and resources, more visibility and status. The Nobels demonstrated this pattern in the extreme.
Laureates produced knowledge of lasting significance. Their status within the scientific community was evaluated, Zuckerman argued, by four factors. First, laureates produced impactful work, as measured by citations, before they received the prize. Second, they proved themselves to be versatile scientists, making several contributions that could, on their own, be considered worthy of the prize. Third, their peers agreed overall that they merited the prize. Fourth, their work continued to be influential, in most cases, after they received the prize. When they received their prizes, they were eminent scientists, esteemed worldwide for their consequential contributions to scientific knowledge. The prize also had the potential to disrupt the scientist’s psychology: It gave the researcher evidence that their work had value, which had the effect on some recipients, Zuckerman noted (1996: xxvi), of ‘inflating already substantial egos beyond what is good for their work or for those in their vicinity’.
The sociological research on laureates has been used as persuasive evidence by scholars seeking to define and elucidate the concept of genius. Notably, psychologist R.S Albert (1992) argued that the basis of genius was behaviour. A genius could be identified, he argued, by their work behaviours that led to knowledge, such as research papers, whose impact could be traced, quantified and evaluated. Regardless of other characteristics they possess or are claimed to possess, a person of genius, he argued, is someone who ‘produces, over a long period of time, a large body of work that has a significant influence on many persons for many years’. Those people who encounter this work must ‘come to terms with a different set of attitudes, ideas, viewpoints, or techniques’ before they come to a ‘sense of resolution and closure’ about the topic or issue (Albert, 1992: 64).
Albert’s behavioural model presents a systematic way to identify and evaluate genius. A clear definition of genius is necessary, as laureates have routinely been referred to, often without explanation, as geniuses. On the annual televised Nobel banquet in Sweden, for example, the most common word used for decades to describe a successful scientist has been the word ‘genius’ (Ganetz, 2016: 242). Moreover, genius has been used as convenient shorthand for exceptional intellectual achievement (see Feldman, 2012). Scholars who examined the portrayal of scientists as geniuses have tended to focus on exceptional historical scientists, viewing scientific genius as similar to literary genius, as a form of spontaneous creativity that arose from exceptional personalities (Schaffer, 1990). As the paradigmatic example, Isaac Newton has been portrayed as ‘the archetypal example of a scientific genius, transcending any simple rules and methods to grasp new laws of nature’. His genius was portrayed as combination of ‘imagination, reason and intuition’ (Yeo, 1998: 278 and 262). While scientific genius has been associated with these abstract ideas, as well as with notions of originality and creativity (Murray, 1989), the behavioural model of genius, by contrast, offers a more empirical way of analysing genius. As Albert (1992) noted, it offers a way to understand the events and factors that underlie genius, as well as measuring the behaviours associated with genius and tracing the influence of the products of those behaviours.
In summary, laureates share sociological characteristics. They attended elite universities and sought out esteemed mentors. From these mentors they developed scientific taste. They accumulated advantage in science. They produced a voluminous amount of work, much of which has been of lasting significance and influence. In addition, psychologically, many laureates developed large egos. These characteristics combined to underpin a behavioural concept of genius.
2. Laureates as celebrity scientists
The concept of scientific celebrity is complex. Zuckerman (1996) viewed scientific fame sociologically, arguing that laureates’ fame was evident inside science in the esteem and authority granted to them by their colleagues. It was manifested outside science by the sudden bulk of requests to give speeches and participate in science policy debates. Other researchers argued that scientific celebrity was tied to the mass media. Goodell (1977) argued that a new type of scientist emerged in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s – the visible scientist. These scientists became prominent, not for their research or for their popularisation work but for participating in science policy debates, as played out in the mass media. The scientists who became visible were the ones who could attract journalistic attention because they had ‘media-oriented characteristics’. They were controversial and articulate. They had a colourful image and a credible reputation in science. They had a specialist topic that was newsworthy. These scientists cultivated these characteristics in order to influence, via the media, science policy debates. They demonstrated that the mass media, particularly journalism, was central to the formation and presentation of scientific fame. Visibility, for Goodell (1977), was synonymous with celebrity.
But since the 1970s, researchers from cultural studies and communication studies defined and expanded the concept of celebrity (see Turner, 2004). Drawing on these ideas and building on the concept of visibility, Fahy and Lewenstein (2014) identified six salient characteristics of celebrity scientists. (1) Their media portrayal featured a blurring of their private and public lives. (2) The scientists were tradable cultural commodities, in that they were brand-name authors or television presenters, whose names could be used to advertise other cultural products, such as books by other scientists. (3) The scientists’ public images were constructed around discourses of truth, reason and rationality. (4) The scientists were emblematic of the social, cultural and political tensions of their times, their media images coming to represent and embody abstract ideas and issues and ideologies and processes. (5) The scientists’ representations featured a recurring tension in that their public status was often viewed as exceeding their scientific status. (6) The scientists’ celebrity status allowed them comment on areas outside their realm of expertise.
Fahy (2015) drew on these characteristics as he analysed the fame of a set of prominent contemporary British and North American scientists, including Stephen Hawking, Susan Greenfield and Neil deGrasse Tyson. These scientists became celebrities, he argued, largely as a result of their popularisation work, as they all communicated with wide audiences through popular books, television shows and journalism. These scientists remained in the public eye over decades by consistently producing new popular work and remaining figureheads whose views on current science-related issues were sought by journalists. None of the scientists examined in the book were laureates. Ganetz analysed laureates using ideas from celebrity studies and gender studies to study how laureates were portrayed over time on the televised Nobel banquet, broadcast each year on Swedish public television. On these broadcasts, the typical laureate was, she wrote, a white man of high education whose fame has been reached through hard work in competition with others of the same kind. (Ganetz, 2016: 234)
The rich set of ideas from the sociology of laureates and the representations of scientists as celebrities can be combined into a conceptual framework to analyse the profiles in Scientific American. Such a combination is crucial in order to make sense of the representation of laureates. As Bucchi (2015: 244) argued, laureates are the most prominent example of how a scientist’s reputation among their peers cannot always be divorced from their celebrity status among wider audiences. In contemporary scientific culture, in certain circumstances, scientific reputation and celebrity status overlap and reinforce each other.
3. Scientific American as critical case of Nobel coverage
The few studies that have examined journalistic representations of contemporary Nobels have focused on newspapers. Stories about laureates in the high-circulation Italian newspaper Il Corriere della Sera, for example, found stories were often framed around ideas of nationality or national pride. The coverage conformed to a wider trend where intensive coverage of laureates occurs in the country where they live or were born (Bucchi, 2012). Newspapers, as well as focusing on nationality, also conveyed models of scientific work. French newspapers, in their coverage of two successive Nobel wins by French physicists in 1991 and 1992, presented different levels of scientific detail, depending on the expectations of their readerships. While some newspapers avoided explaining the science, others offered one of two broad views of scientific knowledge production. In one, an individual model described the laureate as peerless, ‘a genius qualitatively different from his colleagues’. In the second, the science is created collaboratively, and the laureate is excellent but not ‘qualitatively different’ from their peers (De Cheveigné and Veron, 1994: 142).
However, scholars have neglected how more specialised publications covered Nobels. In response, this study presents Scientific American as a critical case study. The magazine was chosen as a critical case for several reasons. It has been recognised, since its first publication in 1845, as one of the world’s most prestigious and influential science magazines. Its audience consists mainly of scientific, intellectual and engineering elites, an audience that expects high quality and authoritative editorial coverage. It plays a vital role, noted an editorial in Science, in the circulation of ideas within the scientific community (Rubinstein, 1995). It has an agenda-setting function within science, directing the wider research community to important work in specialist disciplines that merit wider attention. This function can be seen in the close historical association the magazine has had with laureates. ‘It has been said of Scientific American’, wrote Zuckerman (1996: 33), ‘that, in its coverage of a much greater diversity of science than is recognized by the Nobel prizes, it published the work of forty-two prize-winners before that work won them their prizes’. The magazine is important to study also because of its editorial perspective. It has strongly supported the scientific enterprise and the role of science as a positive social force in the modern world. It wrote about new scientific developments. Scientists, teamed with editors, wrote its articles. As Lewenstein (1992) argued, from the middle of the twentieth century, the magazine was ‘a monument to the vision of science as saviour of the world’ (p. 51).
When Jonathan Piel started his 10-year-tenure as editor in 1984, he modernised the magazine (Rubinstein, 1995). During Piel’s tenure, the magazine hired John Horgan in 1986 as its first staff reporter. Horgan, a graduate of English who studied at Columbia Journalism School, had been a reporter at an engineering trade magazine. He worked at Scientific American until 1997 when he left to work as a book author and freelance journalist, becoming widely known for writing the controversial book The End of Science. During his time at Scientific American, he won the Science Journalism Award of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1992 and 1994 and the National Association of Science Writers Science-in-Society Award in 1993. His journalism was published in The Best American Science and Nature Writing and The Best American Science Writing. 1 As part of his original work for the magazine, he interviewed and wrote profiles of several of the era’s scientific luminaries, a collective that included the physicists Roger Penrose and John Wheeler and the philosophers Karl Popper and Paul Feyerabend. As Horgan (2013) said in an interview, he was not interested in interviewing scientists who had made a small advance in knowledge, even if their work was scientifically excellent and crucial to their field. Instead, he was interested in scientists who, in his words, wrestled with big ideas with philosophical dimensions, such as the origin of the universe, the theory of everything and the limits of scientific understanding.
As part of this wider intellectual project, Horgan interviewed seven Nobel science laureates. One was the biologist Francis Crick, who won the Nobel Prize for medicine or physiology in 1962. One was the chemist Linus Pauling, who won the prize in chemistry in 1954. The other five were physicists from different sub-disciplines who won the physics prize: Hans Bethe (1967), Murray Gell-Mann (1969), Brian Josephson (1973), Philip Anderson (1977) and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (1983). Horgan also profiled George Smoot in 1992 – years before the physicist won a Nobel in 2006. The journalist also profiled three Nobel nominees: Astrophysicist Fred Hoyle, physicist Freeman Dyson and information theorist Claude Shannon. Published between 1992 and 1995, his laureate profiles reached a wide audience, as the magazine’s circulation in the mid-1990s was more than 600,000.
Horgan wrote about the laureates in a particular journalistic genre: The profile. As a genre, the profile seeks to present a detailed portrait of a well-known or prominent individual, describing their background, qualities, accomplishments, impacts and personality. The profile merges the subject’s public and private lives in order to illuminate their personality, showing how their character influenced their work and vice versa. The journalist who writes a profile gathers information from interviews and observation of the subject in one or more settings, often presenting their interaction with the subject in detailed scenes (Stocking, 2011: 86). The profile is an understudied genre of science journalism, but because of its in-depth focus on a scientist’s life, it can reveal ideas about the sociology of laureates and the celebrity of Nobel winners. Compared to the study of particular newspapers, or the study of newspapers in one country or across countries, the analysis of individual science journalists is an understudied area of science communication. A notable exception that demonstrates the value of this analysis is the study of a mid-twentieth century Danish science journalist who pioneered in the country a form of journalism that stressed the role of science in solving social problems (Nielsen, 2008).
To overcome these shortfalls in scholarship, and within the overall effort to illuminate the characteristics of Nobel celebrity, I purposefully sampled Horgan’s laureate profiles in Scientific American. A set of seven in-depth profiles published over several years by a single prominent journalist in a prestigious magazine offers a rich corpus of evidence to examine the portrayal of laureates and the contribution made by a single journalist to the public understanding of Nobels. The analysis of these profiles can answer several questions related to the nature and impact of Nobel celebrity and the public image of laureates. What are the common characteristics of laureates as portrayed in these profiles? What composite image of a laureate is communicated? What image of scientific work is conveyed by the representations of laureates? At a conceptual level, what does the portrayal of laureates reveal about the particular nature of Nobel fame and the more general nature of scientific celebrity?
To answer these questions, I undertook a thematic textual analysis of the seven profiles to identify the recurring themes or patterns of representation. Drawing on the methodological insights on thematic analysis from Fereday and Muir-Cochrane (2006) and Boyatzis (1998), I identified these themes in a systematic, three-stage process that combined deductive and inductive logic. The first stage was deductive and theory-driven. I read each profile several times, coding portions of the texts that conformed to the ideas in the conceptual framework derived from the literature on laureate sociology and the literature on celebrity scientists. From these codes, I developed recurring themes. The second step was inductive. I read each profile several times, identifying and coding parts of the texts that did not fit with the a priori ideas derived from the theoretical framework, and which emerged from my line-by-line reading of the profiles. From these codes, I identified more themes. In the third and final step, I combined the themes developed through the deductive and inductive process into a set of overarching themes that captured the rich and complex phenomenon of Nobel celebrity.
I supplemented the textual analysis with interview evidence from John Horgan, to help understand why he chose to profile these laureates, something not usually discernable through textual analysis. There is strong precedent for textual analysis and interview-based analysis in the study of prominent scientists (Fahy, 2015; Goodell, 1977). The analysis takes a critical realist epistemological position, arguing that the journalist portrayed real features of the scientists and their lives and their social identities, but presented these features through the conventions and style of the journalistic profile, a representation that is tied to the sensibility of Horgan, the editorial identity of Scientific American, and the magazine’s understanding of the characteristics and expectations of its readership (López and Potter, 2001).
4. Findings
Across the seven profiles, I identified six recurring themes.
The laureates had great influence because they produced work that fundamentally changed their fields
The dominant theme across the profiles was the pioneering nature of the laureates’ work. Each profile described how the scientist fundamentally changed their fields through the production of research that has been enduringly influential. In several cases, the laureates produced several path-breaking ideas. As an example, the profile of Crick noted how the biologist became famous after he and James Watson unravelled the structure of DNA. It noted that Crick went on to demonstrate, with less public notice, how genetic information is stored within DNA – another foundational scientific accomplishment. He then went on to work on the topic of neurobiology and the brain, where much ‘of his impact has come from his brush-clearing critiques of approaches he feels are misguided’ (Horgan, 1992a: 33). Similarly, describing his interaction with Pauling, Horgan (1993) wrote, When I express the hope that we can touch on all the important aspects of his career during our interview, he looks at me skeptically and replies, ‘How many days have you got?’ Fair answer. Pauling not only helped to lay the foundation of modern chemistry, biochemistry and molecular biology, he also erected much of the edifice. A supreme theorist and experimentalist, he recast chemistry in the mold of quantum mechanics and pioneered techniques such as x-ray and electron diffraction for deciphering the structure of molecules. (p. 36)
In another example, the profile of Gell-Mann (Horgan, 1992c) discussed how he was one of the primary architects of the Standard Model in physics, as well as coming up with the idea that sub-atomic particles are made up of more fundamental particles, quarks. Gell-Mann won his prize not for his work on quarks, but for inventing a property – strangeness – that explained the behaviour of hadrons in particle accelerators. This description of Gell-Mann’s multiple innovations showed how some laureates could have received prizes for many different pieces of work, a fact recognised by laureates and their peers (Zuckerman, 1996). The same idea was reflected in the profile of Bethe. He received the prize in 1967 for work on stellar energy that he developed in 1938, but he told the journalist that his finest paper was the one he wrote in 1930 on how electrons give energy to atoms. Bethe said, ‘It’s kind of sad to admit that nothing later was better’ (Horgan, 1992b: 32).
The laureates demonstrated enormous career-long productivity around a set of linked core problems
All but one of the profiles detailed laureates’ enormous scientific productivity. Much of the text in each profile was devoted to description and explanation of the laureates’ scientific contributions, often across several decades, many of them fundamental. The profiles showed how laureates worked on a linked set of core problems. As a representative example, Horgan (1994b) described Chandrasekhar’s research career as following a discernable pattern: this pattern – total immersion in a subject followed by an abrupt swerve toward ‘other things’ – was to become characteristic of Chandrasekhar. After his stellar evolution phase, he spent five years considering the motion of stars within a galaxy, demonstrating that stars exert a kind of friction on one another through their gravitational interactions. From 1943 through 1950 he contemplated the transfer of radiation within stellar and planetary atmospheres. Then came periods devoted to the properties of fluids and magnetic fields and to ellipsoids, geometric objects whose properties have proved useful for understanding galaxies. Between 1974 and 1983 he explored black holes, coming back full circle, in a sense, to the work that had launched his career. (p. 33)
With Pauling as an example, Horgan (1993) showed the scientist’s productivity was linked to his disciplined and focused work habits: He does his best work in Big Sur, Calif., where he owns a 160-acre ranch on a wild stretch of coast overlooking the ocean. On a typical day there, Pauling rises before dawn and works through the afternoon writing papers and letters and making calculations. After watching the evening news on television, he spends several hours reading science journals ‘looking for things I don’t understand’. (p. 40)
The exception to this pattern was the represented career of Brian Josephson. As a 22-year-old graduate student at Cambridge, he made a field-changing discovery about the physics of superconductivity, which was subsequently called the Josephson effect. But to the dismay of his colleagues, he abandoned mainstream physics to study mystical and psychic phenomena (Horgan, 1995).
The laureates were socialised into scientific greatness
All the profiles described in detail laureates’ early-career development. Profiles noted the elite institutions where selected laureates attended, such as Cambridge, MIT and Harvard. Each profile described how the scientists came to their fields, often serving apprenticeships with major figures, many of them laureates. On Bethe, for example, Horgan (1992b) wrote, ‘Born and raised in Strasbourg, Bethe studied under some of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics, including Enrico Fermi in Rome and Niels Bohr in Copenhagen’ (p. 32). The profile of Chandrasekhar noted that one of his mentors at Cambridge was Arthur Eddington (Horgan, 1994b). The relationship between Brian Josephson and Philip Anderson was described in their respective profiles. Josephson studied under Anderson, himself a future laureate (Horgan, 1995). Anderson was described as having a slightly different form of elite socialisation, as he left Harvard with a doctorate in physics and worked in Bell Laboratories, where theoreticians and experimentalists worked together on problems that Anderson felt had a more practical relevance (Horgan, 1994a). Elite institutions were portrayed as the incubators of laureates.
The laureates were presented as individuals whose public and private lives merged in the profiles
Each profile focused on a single individual. All were men. Each profile merged their public and private lives, often through a carefully chosen description of the scientist’s physical appearance. The effect was to show the reader, through description, how the scientist’s personality connected to their science. The opening sentences of Bethe’s profile, for example, described the then 86-year-old physicist’s physical state to hint at his intellectual stature: Hans A. Bethe moves slowly now. His left arm dangles at his side, the shoulder wasted more than a decade ago by a degenerative muscle disease. But his husky, low-slung build, that of a chronic mountain climber, still exudes power, gravity’. (Horgan, 1992b: 32)
The description of Crick linked his mischievous, ‘Mephistophelian’ face with his delight in puncturing what he considered poor science. ‘His bushy white eyebrows flare out like horns’, wrote Horgan (1992a: 32). ‘His ruddy face flushes even darker when he laughs, which he does often and with gusto. Crick seems particularly cheery when he is skewering some product of wishful and fuzzy thinking.’ Introducing readers to Anderson, Horgan (1994a) wrote that ‘like some exotic alloy in an unstable state, his mood can flip in an instant between different modes’ (p. 34). Horgan also described a scientist’s personal dress to illuminate their stature and standing. Describing Brian Josephson, Horgan (1995) wrote, ‘He wears a black T-shirt bearing the digitized likeness of Alan S. Turing, another British prodigy whose relations with the scientific establishment were troubled’ (p. 40).
The profiles also linked the laureates’ achievements to idiosyncratic aspects of their psyches and personalities. Horgan portrayed several laureates as having large egos. Gell-Mann’s science was tied to his ultra-competitive nature. At the end of the profile, Horgan (1992c) described an exchange with Gell-Mann at New York’s LaGuardia airport as the physicist caught a flight: Gell-Mann then rushes toward the departure gate. ‘I like to be the first one on the plane’, he says. Trailing behind him, I finally muster enough courage to mention that some scientists, while acknowledging that he is very smart, also suggest that he is, well, sort of a know-it-all. ‘I don’t know what that means’, Gell-Mann snaps over his shoulder. A few seconds later he declares, ‘I do know a lot about a lot of things, it’s true’. (p. 32)
Earlier in the article, Horgan (1992c) reported some of Gell-Mann’s sharp opinions: Science writers, and journalists in general, are ‘ignoramuses’ and ‘a terrible breed’. British scientists have a tendency ‘to be more concerned with being clever and paradoxical than with being right’. Gell-Mann also offers less than glowing assessments of some prominent scientists. ‘But I don’t want to be quoted insulting people’, he says. ‘It’s not nice. Some of these people are my friends’. (p. 30)
A similar theme is evident in two other profiles. ‘Crick’s hubris is legendary’, wrote Horgan (1992a). ‘Crick suggests that if he is a mite bumptious at times, well, that is because he wants so badly to get to the bottom of things. “I can be patient for about 20 minutes”, he says, “but that’s it”’ (p. 32). On Philip Anderson’s reputation for being abrupt and blunt, Horgan (1994a) wrote, Anderson insists that he never tries to stir up trouble. ‘I just call ‘em as I see ‘em’, he remarks. He recognizes that he is sometimes perceived as being ‘excessively dogmatic and authoritarian’. That perception distresses him. ‘I’ve been a rebel so often’, he says in an uncharacteristically pleading tone. (p. 34)
The laureates symbolised reason, rationality and truth
The fame of celebrities in different professions is tied to different discourses. The fame of musicians, for example, is tied to notions of authenticity (Marshall, 1997). The profiles presented the scientists and their work in discourses connected to more specific ideas of reason, rationality and truth. In a prominent example, Horgan asked Chandrasekhar if he wanted to talk about his book on Newton’s Principia, but Horgan (1994b) warned him that he could not include much interview material, as the profile would likely run to two pages: His eyes grow darker still. ‘You think you can summarize Homer’s Odyssey in two pages?’ he snaps, jabbing first one, then both, impossibly long forefingers at me. ‘You think you can write about the Sistine Chapel in two pages?’ His voice quavers with incredulity, disgust … in that moment of anger, he has revealed the incompressible passion – not only for scientific truth but for beauty, which in Chandrasekhar’s mind are fused – at his core. (p. 32)
This theme is a prominent feature of the fame of scientist authors (Fahy, 2015), but it is less pronounced in the Scientific American profiles. However, the profiles do present the laureates as practitioners of different forms of rationalism. Anderson’s talent was presented as a fusion of intuition and experimentalism. As Horgan (1994a) wrote, Anderson’s ‘preternatural ability to intuit the meaning of experiments has made him a “commanding presence” in condensed-matter physics for more than 40 years, in the words of one colleague’ (p. 34). Crick’s rationalism is tied to his way of doing science. Horgan (1992a: 32, 33) called him ‘one of modern science’s most pitiless reductionists’ whose work is guided by a ‘relentless materialism’. Bethe’s scientific work combined with his personal character to enhance his influence. Horgan (1992b) paraphrased a comment from historian Silvan S. Schweber that ‘Bethe’s reputation for integrity as well as brilliance has made him one of the most admired physicists of the 20th century’ (p. 32).
The laureates demonstrated the social power of scientific celebrity
The profiles highlighted how the prize granted laureates enhanced power and influence – both within science and within society. Gell-Mann used his Nobel-bestowed authority to support research in different physics disciplines. Horgan (1992c) wrote, ‘He is a cheerleader for – rather than active developer of – superstrings’ (p. 31). He studied complexity theory and helped found the Santa Fe Institute where researchers study complex systems. Gell-Mann had a history of public involvement, the profile noted, including time as a science advisor to the Pentagon. That involvement continued after he received the prize, as he became in 1979 the public-facing director of the philanthropic MacArthur Foundation, where he established programmes for conservation, population control and sustainability. (Horgan, 1992c). Pauling’s anti-nuclear weapons advocacy earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962 after he won the chemistry prize in 1954. Pauling’s fame enabled him to make scientific claims that might otherwise be dismissed. His stature as a scientist and laureate added credibility to his long-held, but vigorously disputed, arguments that taking high doses of vitamin C protected against disease (Horgan, 1993). Like Gell-Mann and Pauling, Bethe was, the profile noted, involved in public debate on nuclear weapons (Horgan, 1992b). Scientific celebrity was also portrayed as having a malign social influence. As Horgan (1995) wrote about Josephson, Unfortunately, the painfully shy young physicist was ill equipped to handle his fame, according to former colleagues. One remembers Josephson’s bolting across the street to avoid encountering him and his wife … [Josephson] does recall feeling no great joy when he learned that he had received the Nobel Prize. ‘Mainly it was nuisance, the amount of attention I got’. (p. 41)
5. Conclusion
The Scientific American profiles presented a composite portrait of the celebrity Nobel laureate. The portrait combined some sociological characteristics of laureates with the representational characteristics of celebrities. The laureates were shown to have studied at elite institutions, worked under esteemed mentors, been socialised into science, developed scientific taste and produced path-breaking research that addressed fundamental problems in their field, creating scientific knowledge that went on to have lasting impact in science. In common with other star scientists, the laureates were portrayed as distinctive individuals in profiles that fused their public and private selves. Their often-idiosyncratic private selves were presented as an essential driver of their achievements. They were represented, to a degree, as symbols of science, associated with more specific science-related ideas of rationality, truth and beauty. With the combination of these two patterns of representation, the laureate was portrayed as a celebrity genius.
A distinctive feature of the Nobel celebrity, as compared to the fame of scientist authors, was the pronounced focus on the nature and impact of the laureate’s work. The profiles showed that the fame of the laureates was not based on an involvement in public controversies or on any popularisation activities, but was based primarily on the foundational contributions they made to scientific knowledge. The profiles contributed to the public understanding of elite science by showing the career trajectory, work routines and habits of mind that led to the production of field-changing research. Laureates have been loosely referred to as geniuses, but these profiles – although they do not use the word genius – show what scientific genius looks like. A scientific genius is someone who has demonstrated career-long productivity and has produced foundational work of lasting impact. With their representation of these clearly identifiable characteristics, the profiles demystify the concept of scientific genius.
The profiles also point to a further two ways that the fame of laureates differs from the fame of other star scientists. The laureates were not criticised, from within science, for having a public profile that exceeded their scientific reputation, a characteristic that was probably attributable to their undisputed scientific status. More importantly, the laureates were not tied in the profiles to marketing and selling. They did not make themselves available for interview because they had written a popular book and were seeking publicity. This lack of commodification most likely resulted from the process by which most of the scientists came to public attention. Unlike scientist authors, their fame was not dependent initially on performance or recognition within a wide public arena or a cultural marketplace where they routinely had to sell or promote their work and, by extension, themselves.
Because this study’s interpretations are based on the work of one journalist in a single genre at one publication, they are not generalisable to all Nobel coverage. Nor, despite Scientific American’s global stature, do the interpretations apply universally. However, the ideas of celebrity and genius that were found to be a feature of the magazine’s profiles have been found to occur in other media genres (Ganetz, 2016), lending further evidence to the argument that these concepts are central to Nobel fame, an argument that future scholarship can explore in other media in other national and global contexts. A further line of research could build on another feature of this study: The power of a single journalist to fashion public images of science. Although Horgan’s work was aligned with the aims of the magazine and the expectations of its readers, he brought to these profiles his own sensibility. He wanted to explore the psyches of prominent scientists to see how their personalities shaped their science. The profiles, as a consequence, presented a clear image of elite scientific work. Contrary to recent trends in research and Nobel awards, the profiles presented Nobel science as knowledge created by an ultra-elite of exceptional individuals, even though those individuals were embedded in vast interpersonal and institutional networks. The magazine portrayed one model of Nobel science. Future research could determine the presence of other possible models in journalism and other media forms. The more models of Nobel science that are presented in public, the richer the understanding of the Nobel’s public image.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The interview with John Horgan, approved by the university ethics board at American University, the author’s former employer, was conducted in person by the author on 21 October 2013.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.