List of Nobel laureates in Physics facts for kids

Kids Encyclopedia Facts

The Nobel Prize in Physics (Swedish: Nobelpriset i fysik) is a super important award given out every year. It's for scientists who make amazing discoveries in the world of physics. This prize is one of five special awards created by Alfred Nobel in his will back in 1895. He wanted to celebrate people who made big contributions to science.

The Nobel Foundation manages the prize, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences chooses the winners. The award ceremony happens every year in Stockholm on December 10th, which is the day Alfred Nobel passed away. Each winner gets a cool medal, a special diploma, and some money!

Cool Facts About the Physics Prize
- When the Prize Wasn't Awarded
- Popular Physics Fields
Nobel Laureates by Country
Images for kids
See also

Cool Facts About the Physics Prize

As of 2024, 226 different people have won the Nobel Prize in Physics. The very first winner was Wilhelm Röntgen from Germany in 1901. He received a lot of money for his time!

Did you know that John Bardeen is the only person to win the physics prize twice? He won in 1956 and again in 1972. That's pretty impressive!

The youngest person ever to win the Nobel Prize in Physics was William Lawrence Bragg. He was only 25 years old when he won in 1915. He was the youngest Nobel winner overall until 2014. The oldest winner was Arthur Ashkin, who was 96 years old when he got the prize in 2018!

Only five women have won this prize so far:

Marie Curie (in 1903)
Maria Goeppert-Mayer (in 1963)
Donna Strickland (in 2018)
Andrea Ghez (in 2020)
Anne L'Huillier (in 2023)

Marie Curie also won an unshared Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911. Anne L'Huillier received a one-third share of the prize in 2023.

When the Prize Wasn't Awarded

There have been six years when the Nobel Prize in Physics wasn't given out. These were 1916, 1931, 1934, and from 1940 to 1942. This usually happened because of big world events like World War I and World War II.

Sometimes, the prize was delayed by a year. For example, the 1914 prize for Max von Laue was announced in November 1915. The 1917 prize for Charles Glover Barkla was given in 1918. This also happened for prizes in 1918, 1921, 1924, 1925, 1928, 1932, and 1943.

Popular Physics Fields

A study in 2020 looked at Nobel Prizes given between 1995 and 2017. It found that many prizes went to a few specific areas of physics. These included Particle physics (14% of prizes) and atomic physics (10.9%). Other important areas were semiconductor physics and magnetics.

Nobel Laureates by Country

This table shows how many Nobel laureates in Physics each country has had.

Country	Number of Nobel laureates
United States	91
Germany	26
United Kingdom	25
France	16
Russia/ Soviet Union	10
Netherlands	9
Japan	9
Canada	6
Switzerland	6
Austria	5
Italy	6
Sweden	4
Denmark	3
(1912–1949)	2
Hungary	2
(Taiwan)	2
Australia	1
Norway	1
Poland	1
Ireland	1
Pakistan	1
Belgium	1
India	1

Images for kids

Front side (obverse) of the Nobel Prize Medal for Physics presented to Edward Victor Appleton in 1947
Wilhelm Röntgen
Hendrik Lorentz
Pieter Zeeman
Henri Becquerel
Pierre Curie
Marie Curie
Lord Rayleigh
Philipp Lenard
J. J. Thomson
Albert A. Michelson
Gabriel Lippmann
Guglielmo Marconi
Karl Ferdinand Braun
Johannes Diderik van der Waals
Wilhelm Wien
Gustaf Dalén
Heike Kamerlingh Onnes
Max von Laue
William Henry Bragg
Lawrence Bragg
Charles Glover Barkla
Max Planck
Johannes Stark
Charles Édouard Guillaume
Albert Einstein
Niels Bohr
Robert Andrews Millikan
Manne Siegbahn
James Franck
Gustav Hertz
Jean Baptiste Perrin
Arthur Compton
Charles Thomson Rees Wilson
Owen Willans Richardson
Louis de Broglie
C. V. Raman
Werner Heisenberg
Erwin Schrödinger
Paul Dirac
James Chadwick
Victor Francis Hess
Carl David Anderson
Clinton Davisson
George Paget Thomson
Enrico Fermi
Ernest Lawrence
Otto Stern
Isidor Isaac Rabi
Wolfgang Pauli
Percy Williams Bridgman
Edward Victor Appleton
Patrick Blackett
Hideki Yukawa
C. F. Powell
John Cockcroft
Ernest Walton
Felix Bloch
Edward Mills Purcell
Frits Zernike
Max Born
Walther Bothe
Willis Lamb
Polykarp Kusch
John Bardeen
Walter Houser Brattain
William Shockley
Lee Tsung-Dao
Yang Chen-Ning
Pavel Cherenkov
Ilya Frank
Igor Tamm
Emilio Segrè
Owen Chamberlain
Donald A. Glaser
Robert Hofstadter
Rudolf Mössbauer
Lev Landau
Eugene Wigner
Maria Goeppert-Mayer
J. Hans D. Jensen
Nikolay Basov
Alexander Prokhorov
Charles H. Townes
Richard Feynman
Julian Schwinger
Shin'ichirō Tomonaga
Alfred Kastler
Hans Bethe
Luis Alvarez
Murray Gell-Mann
Hannes Alfvén
Louis Néel
Dennis Gabor
Leon Cooper
John Robert Schrieffer
Leo Esaki
Ivar Giaever
Brian Josephson
Martin Ryle
Antony Hewish
Aage Bohr
Ben Roy Mottelson
James Rainwater
Samuel C. C. Ting
Burton Richter
Philip Warren Anderson
Nevill Francis Mott
John Hasbrouck Van Vleck
Pyotr Kapitsa
Arno Allan Penzias
Robert Woodrow Wilson
Sheldon Glashow
Abdus Salam
Steven Weinberg
James Cronin
Val Logsdon Fitch
Nicolaas Bloembergen
Arthur Leonard Schawlow
Kai Siegbahn
Kenneth G. Wilson
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
William Alfred Fowler
Carlo Rubbia
Simon van der Meer
Klaus von Klitzing
Ernst Ruska
Gerd Binnig
Heinrich Rohrer
Georg Bednorz
K. Alex Müller
Leon M. Lederman
Melvin Schwartz
Jack Steinberger
Norman Foster Ramsey Jr.
Hans Georg Dehmelt
Wolfgang Paul
Jerome I. Friedman
Henry Way Kendall
Richard E. Taylor
Pierre-Gilles de Gennes
Georges Charpak
Russell Alan Hulse
Joseph Hooton Taylor Jr.
Bertram Brockhouse
Clifford Shull
Martin Lewis Perl
Frederick Reines
David Lee
Douglas D. Osheroff
Robert Coleman Richardson
Steven Chu
Claude Cohen-Tannoudji
William Daniel Phillips
Robert B. Laughlin
Horst Ludwig Störmer
Daniel C. Tsui
Gerard 't Hooft
Martinus J. G. Veltman
Zhores Alferov
Herbert Kroemer
Jack Kilby
Eric Allin Cornell
Carl Wieman
Wolfgang Ketterle
Raymond Davis Jr.
Masatoshi Koshiba
Riccardo Giacconi
Alexei Alexeyevich Abrikosov
Vitaly Ginzburg
Anthony James Leggett
David Gross
Hugh David Politzer
Frank Wilczek
Roy J. Glauber
John L. Hall
Theodor W. Hänsch
John C. Mather
George Smoot
Albert Fert
Peter Grünberg
Makoto Kobayashi
Toshihide Maskawa
Yoichiro Nambu
Charles K. Kao
Willard S. Boyle
George E. Smith
Andre Geim
Konstantin Novoselov
Saul Perlmutter
Brian P. Schmidt
Adam G. Riess
Serge Haroche
David J. Wineland
François Englert
Peter Higgs
Isamu Akasaki
Hiroshi Amano
Shuji Nakamura
Takaaki Kajita
Arthur B. McDonald
David J. Thouless
Duncan Haldane
John M. Kosterlitz
Rainer Weiss
Kip Thorne
Barry Barish
Arthur Ashkin
Gérard Mourou
Donna Strickland
James Peebles
Michel Mayor
Didier Queloz
Roger Penrose
Reinhard Genzel
Andrea M. Ghez
Syukuro Manabe
Klaus Hasselmann
Giorgio Parisi
Alain Aspect
John Clauser
Anton Zeilinger
Anne L'Huillier
Ferenc Krausz
Pierre Agostini
John Hopfield
Geoffrey Hinton