The dilemma of attribution

I suspected that there were some members of the live audience who were somewhat apprehensive about sitting through the morning's physics lectures. After all, there were three guys there to talk about one minus sign. If it were just two people and a plus sign, +, one could talk about the | and the other about the –. However, to my mind, this year's awards represent or symbolize not just a minus sign, but a large body of significant advances in our understanding of fundamental physics, and are the work of not just three people but a great many scientists, stretching out over many years and many countries. This is really a prize for that whole community.

Sidney Coleman, my beloved teacher from graduate school, referred to this community as i fratelli fisici, by which he meant the brotherhood of physicists. Most of us spoke at least a bit of broken Italian, a legacy of the grand and highly influential summer schools organized by Nino Zichichi in Erice, Sicily. Indeed, one of my fondest reflections on my particle physics career is having been able to arrive at a train station, virtually anywhere in the world, and be greeted by a total stranger who immediately treated me like an old friend.

I'd love to tell you all their stories, but I certainly don't know them all, nor do I have time (or space) even for those that I do. So I've chosen a few of the people and a few of the stories with which to make a particular point. You can judge for yourself at the end how well I've succeeded. And I'll deal mostly with theorists because I know them best—although I must say that I do regard theoretical physics as a fundamentally parasitic profession, living off the …