Nobel Prize

Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen: A dinner speech is harder for me than a lecture. Therefore, I will simply share with you some of the feelings and thoughts I have had about this Nobel week. At first, upon learning that we have become Nobel Laureates there is a feeling…

Val Fitch’s speech at the Nobel Banquet, December 10, 1980 Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen, Earlier today Professor Ekspong described our research which showed a basic lack of symmetry between matter and antimatter, world and antiworld. He observed that, if from some remote stellar region an alien space craft comes to visit,…

Edward V. Appleton’s speech at the Nobel Banquet in Stockholm, December 10, 1947 Your Royal Highness, Your Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen: I wish to thank you, Professor , for the kind and generous way in which you have commended us to the distinguished gathering assembled here tonight; and I want to thank all of you…

Claude Cohen-Tannoudji’s speech at the Nobel Banquet, December 10, 1997 Vos Majestés, Vos Altesses Royales, Mesdames, Messieurs, C’est sous le signe de la lumière que je voudrais m’adresser à vous. Depuis l’antiquité, la lumière a toujours fasciné l’esprit humain par ses multiples aspects et son caractère mystérieux. En se manifestant, tantôt comme une succession de…

Joseph Brodsky’s speech at the Nobel Banquet, December 10, 1987 Your Majesties, Ladies and Gentlemen, I was born and grew up on the other shore of the Baltic, practically on its opposite grey rustling page. Sometimes on clear days, especially in autumn, standing on a beach somewhere in Kellomaki, a friend would poke his finger…

Edwin M. McMillan’s speech at the Nobel Banquet in Stockholm, December 10, 1951 Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen. I would like to say how much I appreciate this honor and how deeply impressed I am by this ceremony and by what it represents. There has never been in the history of the…

German Thomas Mann’s speech at the Nobel Banquet at Grand Hôtel, Stockholm, December 10, 1929 (in German) Der Augenblick zu danken ist nun auch für mich gekommen, ein er sehnter Augenblick, ich brauche es nicht zu sagen. Und nun, wo er da ist, wo es gilt, nun steht zu fürchten, dass das Wort sich dem…

English Thomas Mann’s speech at the Nobel Banquet at Grand Hôtel, Stockholm, December 10, 1929 (Translation) Now my turn to thank you has come, and I need not tell you how much I have looked forward to it. But alas, at this moment of truth I am afraid that words will fail my feelings, as…

Yasunari Kawabata’s speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1968 Your Majesty. Your Royal Highnesses, Your Excellencies the President and the Trustees of the Nobel Foundation, Members of the Royal Swedish Academy, Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen: It is the great honor of my life to have been proposed by…

Harold E. Varmus’ speech at the Nobel Banquet, December 10, 1989 The literature of my native tongue had its beginnings in your traditional stories, set down in Anglo-Saxon, a language descended from yours, and ancestral to mine. One of the great remnants of this early work, the epic poem Beowulf, teaches the importance of the…