Jesse Adams said:He’s a much smaller figure than de Broglie. But let's be real—he was the one who first spotted that the eikonal equation in optics is basically an analogue to the Hamilton-Jacobi equation. That realization essentially kicked off quantum mechanics and paved the way for Schrödinger to actually write his equation. Without that link? Nothing.
Jordan didn't just assist Heisenberg—he basically handed him the blueprint for matrix mechanics on a silver platter.It’s tough—given how much physics spans different disciplines—to put a "statistical weight" on any single discovery. But let's be real: when you look at the list of people who *didn't* get a Nobel—Hubble, Gamow, von Karman, Tesla, Racah, Bohm—and then see guys like Bardeen or Curie walking away with two? It tells me that, IMO, at least 50% of the Physics Nobels are questionable. Not to mention the stuff where the criteria are totally subjective—like the Michelson experiment, which was brilliant design—or the hunt for the tau lepton and W bosons, where researchers were basically just checking boxes to confirm the Standard Model. Is it actually groundbreaking science, or just confirming what we already suspected?
Look, you're already changing the subject. The real question here—the only one that matters—is whether the Nobel Prize has become nothing more than a political tool.
Let's get something straight. De Broglie didn't contribute much to actual quantum mechanics, just wave mechanics. His approach via Hamilton-Jacobi classical mechanics was simply easier for most people to swallow than the radical nature of matrix mechanics. Even if Schrödinger proved both approaches were technically identical, it doesn't change the fact that Jordan, alongside Heisenberg and Born, was the true pioneer in redefining physical reality.
And let's not forget his significant discovery of Fermi-Dirac statistics, which happened well before either of those two.