Nobel Prize winners show playful side with crayon drawings

A new photography exhibit has found that Nobel laureates may be geniuses in their field, but most aren’t very good at colouring. The exhibit, called “Sketches of Science: Photo Sessions with Nobel Laureates,” opened at the University of California, Davis, campus this week. Photographer Volker Steger decided to put the laureates’ coloring skills to the test in order to capture something “spontaneous,” he said in a statement. Each laureate was first given a handful of crayons and a large sheet of paper and was asked to sketch out his or her Nobel Prize-winning discovery. Then, they held up these masterpieces as their photos were taken.

All the laureates I met for a photo shoot were quite surprised by my exceptional request, because I did not inform them beforehand. The sketches turned out to be as varied as the Nobel laureates who drew them. But they all equally demonstrate the beauty of intellectual concepts — and of minds at work.

Photographer Volker Steger

Leon M. Lederman won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1988 for his research on quarks and leptons, two elementary particles that serve as the building blocks of all matter. But Lederman didn’t draw any particles on his paper — just a group of scientists cheering over their new, shiny Nobel medals. Richard E. Taylor also won a Nobel for his work in particle physics in 1990. He didn’t draw anything at all. When asked why his paper was blank, his response was, “There’s a quark somewhere on that paper.”

Sketches of Science: Photo Sessions with Nobel Laureates.

Carlo Rubbia

Science Nobel prize