European Nobels in Perspective

There's been a bunch of talk about the apparent European dominance in Nobel Prizes this year, and whether it means that American science is in decline, blah, blah, blah. I'm a little surprised at this-- nobody took last year's abundance of American laureates as a sign of the collapse of European science, after all-- but then, there seem to be large numbers of people who will seize on anything at all to be evidence of the end of American dominance in whatever area.

In some ways, the proper reaction to the whole thing is probably the reaction of a colleague of mine in Economics. I asked him who he thought was going to win the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, and his response was (paraphrased slightly):

Oh, I don't know. It doesn't matter anyway, it's always to boring old stuff that was done twenty years ago.

I would dispute that a little, at least in physics-- the recent prizes to work in AMO physics have all been stuff that was done relatively recently (the '97 prize for laser cooling was for work done in the mid-to-late 80's, the '01 prize for BEC for work in '95 and later, the '05 quantum optics prize for experiments done in the late 90's). But it's true in a general sense-- the Nobels reward work whose significance is well established, not the real cutting-edge stuff that is the true indicator of the health of a field.

More broadly, though, I'm not sure why I should really care if European science is catching up to American science. What matters is that quality science is being done, not where it's being done. If European science-- or Asian science, African science, South American Science, Antipodean science, whatever-- is improving, then that's great news. Science is not zero-sum.

It might be a bad sign if the Europeans were catching up due to an active collapse of American scientific activity, but aside from the apocalyptic noises coming from the high-energy physics crowd, I don't see any sign of that in physics. Physics in general continues to advance, and there are new groups and new results coming from the US all the time. Any decline in American physics is a relative one only, a matter of making progress less quickly than physicists in Europe and Asia.

So, really, I don't see what the fuss is about.