The Nobel Prize · route
The 662 awards of the Nobel Prizes in Physics, Chemistry and Physiology or Medicine are marked on a map of the world. Each dot is not where someone was born but where the work was done. Run the years forward and the dots light up one by one, and you see where the centre of science moved from and to. The large dots are stations, where a story has been set up.
There are six Nobel Prizes, and three of them are in science: physics, chemistry, and physiology or medicine. (The economics prize is presented on the same day on the same stage, but it was not in Nobel's will; it was created later by Sweden's central bank.) The literature prize usually goes to one person a year, whereas a science prize is often shared by two or three, so the three together come to more than five times the literature prize.
So it is divided into two layers. The lower layer is the full list: year, name, and one line on what the prize was for. The upper layer is the chosen stations: prizes that changed the world, prizes later overturned, prizes that caused controversy. Tap a station for the story of the discovery, and for the cards and articles of the Atlas it leads on to.
There are 72 stations across the three prizes: 28 in physics, 21 in chemistry and 23 in physiology or medicine. The full list is the data published by the Nobel Foundation, and the prize motivations there are the Foundation's own wording. At the stations, “What it was for” is a plain one-line summary of ours, not the Foundation's citation. When new laureates are announced in October the list is fetched again. The last station is Korea. No Korean has yet received a Nobel Prize in the sciences. Why not yet leads on to the last piece of “Science in Korea”, about research that does not ask what it is for.