Albert WHO?

A buddy of mine mentioned the other day that Einstein had won the Nobel Prize for his work on Brownian Motion.

That didn’t ring right with me so I looked it up.

It was in fact in 1921 "for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect"

http://nobelprize.org/physics/laureates/1921/

I thought it was for something relating to light.

More on the photoelectric effect:

http://theory.uwinnipeg.ca/physics/quant/node3.html

I always like to mention this one to people who get to uppity about what a maniac Yasser Arafat was.

http://nobelprize.org/peace/laureates/1994/index.html

And of course for people who get to uppity about Kofi Annan…

http://nobelprize.org/peace/laureates/2001/index.html

Or people who think Reagan “won” the cold war for America.

http://nobelprize.org/peace/laureates/1990/index.html

And for some strange reason nobody won the PEACE prize 1939-1943. Huh. Go figure.

The chemistry prizes are kinda weird.

They seem to be either for something really non-specific and bland:

"for their theories, developed independently, concerning the course of chemical reactions"

http://nobelprize.org/chemistry/laureates/1981/index.html

or for something SO specific/esoteric you need to be a candidate for a Nobel just to understand the significance of the discovery.

Like:

"for the discovery of ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation"

http://nobelprize.org/chemistry/laureates/2004/index.html

or

"for his fundamental contributions to the establishment of oligonucleotide-based, site-directed mutagenesis and its development for protein studies"

http://nobelprize.org/chemistry/laureates/1993/index.html

Woof.