How does the Nobel Prize work?

Nobel Prizes are highly prestigious, valuable awards that have been given out to visionaries and pioneers in select fields since 1901. Tune in to find out more about the Nobel Prize in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Brainstuff from house Stuff Works dot com where
smart happens. Hi Am Marshall Brain with today's question, how
does the Nobel Prize work? I mean, we hear about
these prizes on the news constantly and they've been around forever.

(00:21):
Where did they actually come from? Six Nobel Prizes are
awarded each year in the areas of peace, chemistry, physics, medicine, literature,
and economics. The prizes are named after Alfred Noble, the
inventor of dynamite, who created the prizes. In his will.
He donated a good portion of his estate to fund

(00:43):
the prizes, decided who would judge the winners of each award,
and also named the five prize categories. Economics was added
during the nineties sixties. The Nobel Prizes are administered by
the Nobel Foundation and are awarded in the fall after
a rigorous selection. Says the list of winners in the
different categories, especially physics and chemistry, is like a hall

(01:06):
of fame. For example, in physics, the winners include Albert Einstein,
Neil's Bore, Robert Milliken, Louis Victor de Broglie Werner, Heisenberg,
and so on. It's a pretty prestigious list. Today, each
prize is valued at over a million dollars. The reason
it's such a big deal is because of the size

(01:27):
of the award and the fact that the award has
been given since nineteen o one, long enough that everyone
has heard about it. Do you have any ideas or
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(01:49):
out the brain stuff blog on the house stuff works
dot com home page.