For the past few years, a photo of several people together with the caption “28 out of 29 won the Nobel” has been circulating on Facebook.
What was written in the claim?
The information attached to the photo in the circulating posts claimed, “The most intelligent group photo ever. Participants of 5th solvay conference on Quantum Mechanics, 1927. Albert Einstein, Marie S Curie, Niels Bohr and others. 28 out of the 29 in this picture are Nobel Prize Winners.”

See some of the posts circulating on Facebook in 2023 on that claim here, here and here. See archived versions of the posts here, here and here.
Check out some Facebook posts from past years with the same claim –
- 2022 – here and here. Archived versions are here and here.
- 2021- here and here. Archived versions are here and here.
- 2020 – here and here. Archived versions are here and here.
- 2019 – here and here. Archived versions are here and here.
- 2018 – here and here. Archived versions are here and here.

Fact Check
According to the Rumor Scanner’s investigation, The claim that 28 of the 29 people in the picture got the Nobel is not correct; rather, 17 of the people in the picture got the Nobel.
At the beginning of the investigation, through a reverse image search, the image mentioned in the claim was found on the ‘Nobel Prize’ website under the title “Arthur H. Compton Photo gallery“.
According to the information in the photo caption, the 5th Solvay International Conference on Electrons and Protons was held in October 1927. Physicists from different parts of the world attended the conference. This picture was taken there. 17 out of 29 people present in it got Nobel.

The official Facebook page of the Nobel Prize also has the same picture.
Later, by doing a separate keyword search on the physicists in the picture from the Nobel Prize website, it was found that the 17 scientists who won the Nobel Prize are, Louis de Brogli, Erwin Schrödinger, Wolfgang Pauli, Charles Thomson Rees Wilson, Werner Heisenberg, Peter Debye, Marie Skłodowska Curie, William Lawrence Bragg, Max Planck, Paul Dirac, Arthur Compton, Max Born, Irving Langmuir, Hendrik Lorentz, Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, Owen Willans Richardson.
Those whose names are mentioned in this photo but did not win the Nobel are: Auguste Piccard, Émile Henriot, Paul Ehrenfest, Édouard Herzen, Théophile de Donder, Jules-Émile Verschaffelt, Werner Heisenberg, Ralph Howard Fowler, Léon Brillouin, Martin Knudsen, Hendrik Anthony Kramers, Paul Langevin, Charles-Eugène Guye.
That is, not 29 of the people in the picture, but 17 received the Nobel.
Bottom Line
For the past few years, a photo of physicists from around the world together with the caption “28 out of 29 won the Nobel” has been circulating on Facebook. However, according to the Nobel Prize website, 17 of the people in the picture have received the Nobel Prize.
So, the fact that 17 of the 29 people in the picture of the physicists have received the Nobel Prize has been circulating on Facebook claiming that 28 people have received the Nobel Prize; Which is Misleading.
Sources
- Nobel Prize: Arthur H. Compton Photo gallery
- Nobel Prize: All Nobel Prizes in Physics