Steven Chu, a professor of physics at Stanford University, was in bed last Wednesday morning when he learned that he had become a Nobel laureate.

"I thought it might be a hoax because I got the call from a local news station," said Chu in an interview with The Crimson last night.

Chu--who was recruited by the Harvard physics department in 1987, but turned the offer down to work at Stanford--said that the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences had been unable to contact him that morning because of some confusion over the local area code.

Chu and two of his colleagues, along with recipients of the five other Nobel prizes awarded over the past two weeks, have become inexorably associated with what is perhaps the best-known prize for contributions in science, the arts and humanitarian work.

The receipt of the prize in economics by Harvard's Baker Professor of Administration Robert C. Merton last week focused campuswide attention on the prize.

The flurry of publicity surrounding this year's batch of Nobel prizes reminded the public of the infamous romantic story of Alfred Nobel's attempt to purify his legacy as the inventor of dynamite by establishing awards for contributions in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, economics, literature and peace.

"To my mind, the significance [of the Nobel prize] is that because of this rather strange person [Alfred Nobel], you have a small country of eight and a half million people reminding the world every fall that the kind of thing recognized by these prizes is important," said Baird Professor of Science Dudley R. Herschbach in a phone interview from Oregon last night. Herschbach received the Nobel prize in chemistry in 1986.

"In this country, [the prize] tends to be treated as creating a few more very minor celebrities," rather than sending a message about the importance of science, literature and peace, he said.

A great deal of planning goes into ensuring the integrity of the prize and making it an "occasion of note," said Higgins Professor of Physics Sheldon L. Glashow, a 1979 Nobel laureate.

"In almost every case the winners of the Nobel prize in science have been deserving," he said. "It's also true that some scientists have been neglected."

Nominees in each category are selected by various organizations as stipulated in Nobel's will. The prizes for physics and chemistry are administered by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Respected scientists from various academies and academic institutions around the world are solicited for nominations in February every year. The prize-awarding institutions then research each candidates' work and vote on the recipient.

"There have been some amusing examples" of mistakes on the part of the prize-awarding committees, Glashow said. He cited the 1906 and 1937 Nobel prizes in physics which recognized J.J. Thomson for discovering the electron as a particle, and subsequently his son for discovering it as a wave.

"Of course, neither interpretation was correct," Glashow said.

Glashow also noted that there was some controversy surrounding the work of Dr. Stanley Prusiner of the University of California School of Medicine at San Francisco on prions--a new type of infectious agent consisting of a single protein with no genetic material.