科學家和工程師可獲獎項逐年增加
ONCE a year, on December 10th, Stockholm hosts the dishing out of the Nobel prizes. It is quite a party: the white-tie award ceremony itself, complete with orchestra, happens in the city’s concert hall and is broadcast live on television. Some 1,300 lucky luminaries then transfer to the city hall for a banquet, also broadcast (a fashion expert even provides a running commentary on the gowns worn by the women). Finally, students at Stockholm University host a less formal but more raucous after-party for the laureates and their guests. For that, mercifully, the TV cameras are switched off.
每年的十二月十日，各個學科的諾貝爾獎就會在斯德哥爾摩頒出。頒獎活動可謂是一場盛宴，莊重正式的頒獎典禮在該城市的交響樂廳舉行，全程由交響樂團伴奏，在電視上直播。典禮結束後，大約一千三百位幸運的傑出人士前往市政大廳共赴佳宴，也在電視上直播（甚至有位時尚專家提供實時評論赴宴女士的着裝）。最後，斯德哥爾摩大學的學生們還會爲獲獎者與其賓客舉辦一場較爲隨意、喧鬧的加場派對。不過，謝天謝地，這個派對是不會直播的。The Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, a brand-new award, is a conscious attempt to sprinkle a similar kind of stardust onto engineering, which has long worried that it is seen as a bit of a poor relation to more academic science. At a half-hour ceremony held on March 18th at the Royal Academy of Engineering in London, the prize committee honoured Marc Andreessen, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf, Robert Kahn and Louis Pouzin, all of whom were instrumental in the development of the modern internet. The Swedish-style pomp and circumstance will come on June 25th, when the queen will host the winners at Buckingham Palace. (London’s various universities, alas, have yet to announce any kind of student-run after-party.)
伊麗莎白女王工程獎是一個全新的獎項，設立該獎是爲了讓工程學這門似乎被主流學術科學研究邊緣化的學科也沾點星光。三月十八日，在位於倫敦的皇家工程學院舉行了長達半小時的授獎儀式。評委會將本屆獎項頒發給了Marc Andreessen、Tim Berners-Lee爵士、Vint Cerf、Robert Kahn和Louis Pouzin，他們都對現代因特網的發展有卓越的貢獻。瑞典式的大排場儀式將會在六月二十五日舉行，屆時，女王會在白金漢宮宴請諸位獲獎者。（啊，倫敦各大高校還尚未宣稱要舉行學生組織的加場派對。）While the prominence of the Nobels makes them excellent publicity for the fields they honour—chemistry, physics and physiology or medicine, not forgetting the less scientific endeavours of economics, literature and peace—they miss out large swathes of science. The result (see chart) has been a proliferation of similar prizes in other fields, many of which are quite open about their intent to mimic the Nobels.
聲名顯赫的諾獎爲其所嘉獎的領域帶來了絕佳的宣傳效果——化學，物理，生理學或醫學，還有非科學類的經濟學，文學和和平事業。但是，科學界的許多其他領域卻未被涵蓋。這導致其他領域的類似獎項種類激增，其中很多獎項毫不掩飾模仿諾獎的野心。
Computer scientists, for instance, aspire to the A.M. Turing Award. The 2012 award, announced on March 13th, went to Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio Micali, both of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mathematicians have the Fields Medal, given every four years to particularly brilliant researchers under the age of 40. They also have the better-remunerated Abel prize (this year’s winner, announced on March 20th, is Pierre Deligne of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton). Other awards are more n hosts the Asahi and Kyoto prizes, for instance, which honour outstanding contributions in any area of science, alongside prizes for the arts.
比如，計算機科學領域設立了圖靈獎。2012年的圖靈獎於三月十三日頒給了麻省理工大學的Shafi Goldwasser和Silvio Micali。數學界有四年一屆的菲爾茲獎，頒發給四十歲以下的青年才俊。數學界還有獎金更高的阿貝爾獎（三月二十日，本屆獎項頒發給了普林斯頓高級研究所的Pierre Deligne）。還有比這個獎更大方的。比如，日本設有朝日獎和京都獎，獎勵文理科所有門類的傑出貢獻者。Some of the newest prizes on the block come from Yuri Milner, a Russian billionaire, who has attempted to upstage the Nobels by offering $3m to each winner, nearly three times what the Nobel Foundation pays. The Fundamental Physics Prize, given by Mr Milner’s foundation, has so far honoured nine people. As The Economist went to press, the next batch was being announced at a ceremony in Geneva (see for news of the winners). A similar Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, this time a joint effort between Mr Milner, Sergey Brin (co-founder of Google), his wife Anne Wojcicki (who founded 23andMe, a genetics-testing firm) and Mark Zuckerberg (who started Facebook), honoured 11 winners, and paid them each another $3m, in February.
最新的獎金有一部分來自俄羅斯富豪Yuri Milner。這位富豪試圖爲每個諾獎得主追加三百萬獎金，這個數額幾乎是諾獎獎金的三倍。Milner基金會設立的基礎物理學獎迄今爲止已經有九位獲獎者。在本期《經濟學人》付梓時，該獎正在日內瓦舉行最新的授獎儀式（請登錄網站關注該獎最新消息）。與之類似的生命科學突破獎至今獲獎者已有十一位，本次授獎由Milner先生、Google聯合創始人Sergey Brin與其夫人基因測試公司23andMe 創始人Anne Wojcicki、Facebook創始人Mark Zuckerberg共同出資，獎金額度達到三百萬美元，於二月授予。Despite the deep pockets of Mr Milner and his friends, the Nobels still rule the roost when it comes to prestige. But financial muscle is not the only way an award can differentiate itself from the competition. The satirical Ig Nobel prize, established in 1991 by an American magazine called the Annals of Improbable Research, has honoured investigations into, among other topics, the spermicidal properties of Coca-Cola and the pain-relieving effects of vigorous swearing. But there is often a serious point, too: the Ig Nobels aim to celebrate research that “first makes people laugh, and then makes them think”.
儘管Milner先生和他的好友們出手不凡，若論聲望，諾貝爾獎仍然獨佔鰲頭。除了給出高額獎金，各個獎項還有別的方法各領風騷。專司諷刺的搞笑諾貝爾獎是美國《不可思議研究年報》雜誌於1991年開創的，獲獎項目包括對可口可樂殺精屬性的研究、罵街的止痛效果等等。不過這個獎的出發點也有嚴肅的一面，就是要表彰那些“乍看令人忍俊不禁，然後發人深省”的研究。Last year, for instance, an Ig Nobel was won by a group of neuroscientists who had put a dead salmon in a brain scanner and showed it some pictures. They demonstrated something that looked a lot like electrical activity in the fish’s brain—a gentle reminder to their fellow researchers to beware of false positives in the fashionable and tricky field of brain-imaging.
比如，去年，一羣神經科學家獲得了一項搞笑諾貝爾獎，他們將一條死三文魚放在腦部掃描儀下，給它看了幾張圖片，魚的大腦裏竟然產生了一些類似腦電波之類的東西。這些科學家展示這些結果，用一種輕鬆的方式給同行們提了個醒——在流行又複雜的大腦成像領域，一定要小心假陽性因素。
