The top 10 engineers who should have or would have been awarded the Nobel Prize

Mildly explicit language warning!

This list is slightly different from a list of greatest engineers of all time. Engineering has mainly dealt with applied sciences and while building something useful out of an abstract theory is a prize on its own, usually, the Nobel prize is traditionally awarded for the advancement of knowledge and breakthrough in the understanding of mankind. 

What’s already controversial is engineer’s rightful claim to the prize. If you were to go through the will of Sir Alfred Nobel himself (which will be attached at the end of the article), there’s nothing preventing Steve Jobs or Charles Babbage from winning a Nobel prize in physics for the prize should be awarded to anyone who makes the biggest discovery, or invention of the preceding year, ‘invention’ being the keyword here.

Nonetheless, as past trends suggest, Nobel prize has established itself only for radical discoveries and so here is the list of top 10 engineers of all time who came up with radical discoveries worthy of a Nobel prize.

​10. Frank Whittle

Nobel prize in physics: For the discovery of heated supersonic flow expansion in a rarefied fluid flow.

The inventor of the turbojet engine, his biggest radical moment of brilliance was discovering how a supersonic flow from the combustion chamber can be made to do work in the most efficient way possible. This was important because the physics of supersonic flow was not at all developed at his time. Literally no one had much ideas about the trade-offs between shockwave losses and high-speed jet ejections, especially in case of an afterburner. 
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Why you should care? Because without this, none of your air-force fighter jets, or your intercontinental ballistic missiles would work. Be it Iran, India, Russia, China, France, USA or literally any other country in the world with a fighter jet, you have a lot to thank this guy for. Without him, we would go back to the slow days where the war was won or lost on naval and land dominance.

9. Nicholas August Otto

​Nobel prize in physics: For rapid heating and stabilization of compressed polytropic fluids.
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 If you fall anywhere between a high school student and the end of your life, you know the Otto cycle, the four-stroke engine, the engine that changed the automation industry. You can draw the diagram with your eyes closed so you must be wondering, what’s so radical about that? Well this guy actually found a way to stabilize such explosive power of the ignition.

​At a time when flame stabilization was not even a research topic, he managed to sustain it for thousands of cycles, the key insight being compressed polytropic fluid in exchanging adiabatic and isothermal boundaries. If I were to seat you down and ask you to derive an expression for sustaining the explosive power trapped within the fuel, you might start with famous relativistic energy equation or the age-old laws of thermodynamics under open volume integral but you wouldn’t be going much further than that.

This was a monumental discovery and if you own a car, or a bike, or just love speed and hate being behind an old man driving at 10 miles per hour, you have everything to thank this guy for.

8. James Watt

​Nobel prize in physics: For the discovery of extraction of low-grade energy.

When you are the S.I unit of power, there’s a hard reason to deny you a Nobel prize in the first place. However, the most intellectual part of his idea to use a condenser instead of the previously used cooling cycles was his ability to understand that low-grade energy can be retracted into useful work.

​The existing notion at the time was that since entropy of an isolated system has to always increase, once energy is lost as heat, as entropy, there’s no getting it back. People tried to minimize the production of heat instead. What Watt did was show a way to bend the laws of thermodynamics just a little, enough to blur the lines between isolated and constrained system where you could exchange entropy for work. 
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Rest is truly history.

​7. Alan Turing

Nobel prize in peace: For shortening the second world war by at least 2 years and saving lives of at least 2 million fellow citizens, with a bonus for saving the crippling world economy.

Okay hear me out, until Nobel prize for mathematics is being announced, Turing’s biggest claim to the prize is through his heroics in the second world war. The moment of brilliance we are referring to is his trailblazing papers on probabilistic cryptography and statistics of repetitions. You know a work is important when it is kept confidential for 70 years and are finally unclassified in 2012, under community pressure.

Guys like these are world heroes and should be celebrated like one. Seriously! We should stop being a hypocrite and stop patronizing someone after they are dead all-the-while treating them like sh*t while they are alive. 

6. Nikola Tesla

​Nobel Prize in physics: For efficient electric field propagation.

If your picture of sitting inside a room full of electricity zapping everywhere is a household picture seen by almost everyone alive, you know your Nobel prize is on its way to your mail post. Be it alternate current or wireless transmission, the revolution this man had brought to the entire electrical industry is unprecedented. You cannot exaggerate the importance of this man in the modern world.

​His insight about reduced heat losses over long distance high voltage transmission when using an alternating current, or his insight regarding the wireless transmission of power without domain superposition, this guy brought it all. Even his tesla coil was a game changer on its own. 

Bottom line, in every way possible, this man deserves his Nobel prize.

5. Archimedes

​Nobel prize in physics: For his contributions to the theoretical foundation of hydrostatics.
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Kings generally used to be mental, bar a few maybe. They will order you to do something and if you fail, boom, your head’s gone. Our good friend Archimedes was in a similarly tight spot. But for the betterment of us and the world, he saved his as*. We all know Archimedes principle but what we don’t comprehend was how profound that discovery was.

​Without Archimedes, we wouldn’t be able to differentiate between a wood that floats and a rock that sinks. Expanding it into molecular physics, back in 200 BC, his ability to comprehend the dynamic equilibrium between mean-oscillatory particles and differential population rise was unprecedented. 

One of my favorite phrases is, “whatever floats your boat”, and for that, I have everything to thank Archimedes for. As for you all, well if you have ever been on a boat, or a ship, or generally in your neighbor’s swimming pool, it's because of this guy that you knew in your heart, that you could do it because buoyancy got your back.

4. Leonardo Da Vinci

​Nobel prize in physics: For contribution to the foundation of structural mechanics.

We all know who he is. We all were secretly waiting to find him in the list but deep down, we all kept wondering as to what would be his radical breakthrough? The answer is his key insight into the relation between force and torque. From his flying machines to his catapults, the one thing that was most striking was his ability to understand how we can vary force and torque, and interchange between them.

Structural mechanics existed before Da Vinci but no one ever co-related the force and the torque quite as Da Vinci did. Even though rudimentary, his understanding of gear ratios, torque multiplications and moment arms, centuries before force was even defined is what makes his insight so spectacular. 

While he still remains undisputed king amongst the artists, his pioneering breakthroughs would have surely, and rightly earned him a Nobel prize as well.

3. Richard T. Whitcomb

Nobel prize in physics: For the formulation of the behavior and profile of supersonic perturbed flow.

Okay, this one is my personal favorite. He was the reason I got inspired to write this post. It is nothing short of a travesty that no one outside the field of aerospace knows the name of this genius and I would rather go as far as to tell that this guy contributed more to physics and to the world in general than most other Nobel laureates combined.

His magnum opus was the discovery of Whitcomb Area Rule and the Supercritical Aerofoils. In brief, he not only revolutionized, but founded the entire modern understanding of high-speed flows. Whenever you move through a fluid, you experience resistance. As your speed goes up and up, a plethora of new parameters come into play and things behave in complete pandemonium. Nothing happens like we think they will and this guy is the reason that we now understand most of it. From drag profile in Mach planes to precompression blade profiles or cusped trailing edges, this guy is behind all that. Okay, I might be exaggerating a tiny bit but honest to god, without him, there would not be any supersonic jets or even transonic jets whatsoever. 

Want to get from Sydney to Los Angeles? Without him, that would be 19 hours instead of 15 and thrice the price please. What your country is invaded? Do you need immediate air support? Oh I am sorry but your planes are 5 times slower now, you have a better chance by calling your nearest navy.
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And the best part? There really was no physical interpretation before him whatsoever. It’s not like he invented something based on some abstract concept or came up with a small thing, he expanded our whole understanding for the first time to the supersonic regime and with proper theoretical foundations and experimental validations. For me, he definitely deserves a Nobel Prize.

2. Leonhard Euler

Ah Euler, you crazy crazy guy. Even if the last science or mathematics class that you took was back in high school, you would still immediately recognize this stupendously brilliant and crazy dude that spared no field with his voluminous contributions. Be it calculus, algebra, topology, fluid mechanics, thermodynamics, structural mechanics, you name it, and he has done it. For the readers thinking which moment to choose, I am honestly lost for words and anything you choose will be enough.
 
I personally chose his contributions to complex analysis. I feel like that had the most profound effect on the entire scientific community. Be it communication, surveillance, astronomy, or signal conversion, anything that had to do with complex analysis like Fourier transformation, it would not work without the foundations from Euler and for that, he deserves a special edition of the Nobel prize, and not just the normal one.
 
Oh, and on a side note, he also came up with the fundamental symbol of any function f(x) and is also honored with the single most important constant alongside pie, ‘e’ being named after him. So, there’s that

​1. Michael Faraday

Nobel prize in physics: For unification of electromagnetism and contribution to field propagation.

He was the definition of engineer but more importantly, his findings transcended every other scientists of his generation by a mile. People till then thought of electricity and magnetism as two separate things. Can you believe it? He had such a profound impact that two separate words, “electricity”, and “magnetism” became one. Now that’s some serious impact right there.

Although he lacked mathematical rigor, his ability to deduct that they are but the same thing and his rightful prediction about the nature of potential field lines and the theory behind electromagnetic induction cannot be refuted whatsoever. Just like Higgs, who had wait for his prediction of bosons to be confirmed before being awarded the Nobel prize, Faraday just had to wait till Maxwell who was inspired by Faraday's work itself, to finally come forth with his set of equations for electromagnetism, three of which already existed in a slightly different form. 

Faraday's claim to Nobel fame cannot be argued whatsoever. End of sentence.

Please leave your thoughts below as to who you think among our engineering brothers deserves a Nobel prize, and as promised, here's the exact quote from Alfred Nobel's will ~

"The interest is to be divided into five equal parts and distributed as follows: one part to the person who made the most important discovery or invention in the field of physics; one part to the person who made the most important chemical discovery or improvement; one part to the person who made the most important discovery within the domain of physiology or medicine; one part to the person who, in the field of literature, produced the most outstanding work in an idealistic direction; and one part to the person who has done the most or best to advance fellowship among nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies, and the establishment and promotion of peace congresses."