You're a winner: Listening in on 'the call' for Nobel Prize

This is what it’s like to get “the call” — the Swedish Academy of Sciences ringing you up to say you won the Nobel Prize. 

It’s usually a dream-of-a-lifetime call that only the special few get in private. But for American physicist John Clauser, who was awarded the Nobel for his work on quantum mechanics, it rang a little different. 

Thanks to a three-hour delay from a phone busy with congratulations and reporters’ queries, the call finally got through to him while he was on a live Zoom interview with The Associated Press. And he shared his side of the notification and celebration. 

“Oh hang on. They’re on the phone right now," he said. "OK. Hang on just a second. Can I talk to the guys from the Swedish Nobel Committee?”