Who are they? And why should we be angry about their status?
Went uncracked! These are Narinder Singh Kapany and ECG Sudarshan both Indian born scientists who rightfully deserved the Nobel Prize for their respective research fields but remained unsung heroes till the end. Narinder Singh Kapany is the man who invented the optic fibre which we use for telecommunications today, but eventually the 2009 Nobel Prize for physics went to Charles K Kao for his work on optic fibres. Quoting wiki:
ECG Sudarshan has been overlooked for the Physics Nobel Prize on more than one occasion.
Several physicists wrote a letter to the Swedish Academy, protesting that Sudarshan should have been awarded a share of the Prize for the Sudarshan diagonal representation (also known as
Sudarshan-Glauber representation ) in quantum optics, for which
Roy J. Glauber won his share of the prize. The Nobel Committee has often been criticized for allegedly ignoring scientists who did seminal work on a topic while awarding a prize to other scientists for the same topic.
He expressed frustration at the way he was ignored for top science honours, saying
"The 2005 Nobel prize for Physics was awarded for my work, but I wasn’t the one to get it. Each one of the discoveries that the Nobel was given for were based on my research.
"... The irony of the situation is that in spite of all these facts being available in print, the diagonal representation instead of being referred to as the Sudarshan representation is dubbed as either the P-Representation (as if Glauber discovered and named it first) or at best as `Glauber-Sudarshan' Representation."
About having been denied the Nobel in 1979 as well, Sudarshan said, "Steven Weinberg, Sheldon Glashow and Abdus Salam built on work I had done as a 26-year-old student. If you give a prize for a building, shouldn’t the fellow who built the first floor be given the prize before those who built the second floor?"
