I wonder if they ever gave a Physics Nobel to a person who held a patent! People like Graham Bell never got recognized by the Nobel people. I get the impression that Physics Nobel prizes were more or less given only to University professors. They didnt seem to particularly care for people with grease on their hands
I don't really know what I'm talking about, but weren't there like 9 Nobel prizes awarded to Bell Labs engineers for physics? One of which (I think) being the invention of the transistor, which presumably had a patent.
You make several good points. However I'm not sure if Bell Labs people were different from university people in terms of their academic background. All three, Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain were Physics PhDs, two of them from elite universities. I was trying to say that brilliant engineers do not disproportionately figure in the list of Physics Nobel prize. In fact they are hardly to be seen.
A post from yesterday, complaining about Musk not receiving a prize despite (according to the author of that post) deserving it, has had me thinking about that too. Folks like Bell, Musk, Bezos etc are in many ways similar to Alfred Nobel, highly successful and very controversial businessmen, where their contributions to the world have had great positives and great negatives.
Putting aside the fact that it's also entirely reasonable to say that Musk, Bezos etc, while having changed the world, have not really personally made breakthroughs in fundamental science of the level as to deserve a Nobel prize; I wonder if the Nobel Foundation avoids figures like that because of the parallels.
Currently I'd flat out refuse to give any sort of prize to musk, that could be a tipping point for his mental "stability" completely breaking down. The last few years really had a toll on him. Fallen from idol to conspiracy rightwing idiot crashing his companies more and more.
Philipp Lenard had a patent on cathode ray tubes, Marconi on wireless telegraphy, Dalén had plenty of patents on the automatic lighthouse regulator he got the prize for, and many others.
