ONCE a year, on December 10th, Stockholm hosts the dishing out of the Nobel prizes. It is quite a party: the white-tie award ceremony itself, complete with orchestra, happens in the city’s concert hall and is broadcast live on television. Some 1,300 lucky luminaries then transfer to the city hall for a banquet, also broadcast (a fashion expert even provides a running commentary on the gowns worn by the women). Finally, students at Stockholm University host a less formal but more raucous after-party for the laureates and their guests. For that, mercifully, the TV cameras are switched off.
每年的十二月十日，各个学科的诺贝尔奖就会在斯德哥尔摩颁出。颁奖活动可谓是一场盛宴，庄重正式的颁奖典礼在该城市的交响乐厅举行，全程由交响乐团伴奏，在电视上直播。典礼结束后，大约一千三百位幸运的杰出人士前往市政大厅共赴佳宴，也在电视上直播（甚至有位时尚专家提供实时评论赴宴女士的着装）。最后，斯德哥尔摩大学的学生们还会为获奖者与其宾客举办一场较为随意、喧闹的加场派对。不过，谢天谢地，这个派对是不会直播的。
The Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, a brand-new award, is a conscious attempt to sprinkle a similar kind of stardust onto engineering, which has long worried that it is seen as a bit of a poor relation to more academic science. At a half-hour ceremony held on March 18th at the Royal Academy of Engineering in London, the prize committee honoured Marc Andreessen, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf, Robert Kahn and Louis Pouzin, all of whom were instrumental in the development of the modern internet. The Swedish-style pomp and circumstance will come on June 25th, when the queen will host the winners at Buckingham Palace. (London’s various universities, alas, have yet to announce any kind of student-run after-party.)
伊丽莎白女王工程奖是一个全新的奖项，设立该奖是为了让工程学这门似乎被主流学术科学研究边缘化的学科也沾点星光。三月十八日，在位于伦敦的皇家工程学院举行了长达半小时的授奖仪式。评委会将本届奖项颁发给了Marc Andreessen、Tim Berners-Lee爵士、Vint Cerf、Robert Kahn和Louis Pouzin，他们都对现代因特网的发展有卓越的贡献。瑞典式的大排场仪式将会在六月二十五日举行，届时，女王会在白金汉宫宴请诸位获奖者。（啊，伦敦各大高校还尚未宣称要举行学生组织的加场派对。）
While the prominence of the Nobels makes them excellent publicity for the fields they honour—chemistry, physics and physiology or medicine, not forgetting the less scientific endeavours of economics, literature and peace—they miss out large swathes of science. The result (see chart) has been a proliferation of similar prizes in other fields, many of which are quite open about their intent to mimic the Nobels.
声名显赫的诺奖为其所嘉奖的领域带来了绝佳的宣传效果——化学，物理，生理学或医学，还有非科学类的经济学，文学和和平事业。但是，科学界的许多其他领域却未被涵盖。这导致其他领域的类似奖项种类激增，其中很多奖项毫不掩饰模仿诺奖的野心。
Computer scientists, for instance, aspire to the A.M. Turing Award. The 2012 award, announced on March 13th, went to Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio Micali, both of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mathematicians have the Fields Medal, given every four years to particularly brilliant researchers under the age of 40. They also have the better-remunerated Abel prize (this year’s winner, announced on March 20th, is Pierre Deligne of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton). Other awards are more catholic.Japan hosts the Asahi and Kyoto prizes, for instance, which honour outstanding contributions in any area of science, alongside prizes for the arts.
比如，计算机科学领域设立了图灵奖。2012年的图灵奖于三月十三日颁给了麻省理工大学的Shafi Goldwasser和Silvio Micali。数学界有四年一届的菲尔兹奖，颁发给四十岁以下的青年才俊。数学界还有奖金更高的阿贝尔奖（三月二十日，本届奖项颁发给了普林斯顿高级研究所的Pierre Deligne）。还有比这个奖更大方的。比如，日本设有朝日奖和京都奖，奖励文理科所有门类的杰出贡献者。
Some of the newest prizes on the block come from Yuri Milner, a Russian billionaire, who has attempted to upstage the Nobels by offering $3m to each winner, nearly three times what the Nobel Foundation pays. The Fundamental Physics Prize, given by Mr Milner’s foundation, has so far honoured nine people. As The Economist went to press, the next batch was being announced at a ceremony in Geneva (see economist.com/physicsprize for news of the winners). A similar Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, this time a joint effort between Mr Milner, Sergey Brin (co-founder of Google), his wife Anne Wojcicki (who founded 23andMe, a genetics-testing firm) and Mark Zuckerberg (who started Facebook), honoured 11 winners, and paid them each another $3m, in February.
最新的奖金有一部分来自俄罗斯富豪Yuri Milner。这位富豪试图为每个诺奖得主追加三百万奖金，这个数额几乎是诺奖奖金的三倍。Milner基金会设立的基础物理学奖迄今为止已经有九位获奖者。在本期《经济学人》付梓时，该奖正在日内瓦举行最新的授奖仪式（请登录economist.com/physicsprize网站关注该奖最新消息）。与之类似的生命科学突破奖至今获奖者已有十一位，本次授奖由Milner先生、Google联合创始人Sergey Brin与其夫人基因测试公司23andMe 创始人Anne Wojcicki、Facebook创始人Mark Zuckerberg共同出资，奖金额度达到三百万美元，于二月授予。
Despite the deep pockets of Mr Milner and his friends, the Nobels still rule the roost when it comes to prestige. But financial muscle is not the only way an award can differentiate itself from the competition. The satirical Ig Nobel prize, established in 1991 by an American magazine called the Annals of Improbable Research, has honoured investigations into, among other topics, the spermicidal properties of Coca-Cola and the pain-relieving effects of vigorous swearing. But there is often a serious point, too: the Ig Nobels aim to celebrate research that “first makes people laugh, and then makes them think”.
尽管Milner先生和他的好友们出手不凡，若论声望，诺贝尔奖仍然独占鳌头。除了给出高额奖金，各个奖项还有别的方法各领风骚。专司讽刺的搞笑诺贝尔奖是美国《不可思议研究年报》杂志于1991年开创的，获奖项目包括对可口可乐杀精属性的研究、骂街的止痛效果等等。不过这个奖的出发点也有严肃的一面，就是要表彰那些“乍看令人忍俊不禁，然后发人深省”的研究。
Last year, for instance, an Ig Nobel was won by a group of neuroscientists who had put a dead salmon in a brain scanner and showed it some pictures. They demonstrated something that looked a lot like electrical activity in the fish’s brain—a gentle reminder to their fellow researchers to beware of false positives in the fashionable and tricky field of brain-imaging.
比如，去年，一群神经科学家获得了一项搞笑诺贝尔奖，他们将一条死三文鱼放在脑部扫描仪下，给它看了几张图片，鱼的大脑里竟然产生了一些类似脑电波之类的东西。这些科学家展示这些结果，用一种轻松的方式给同行们提了个醒——在流行又复杂的大脑成像领域，一定要小心假阳性因素。