At the greatest dinner party on earth, one thing is always on the menu: fireworks, with a side of dessert. At the end of every Nobel banquet, held yearly on December 10, servers descend a grand staircase in Stockholm’s City Hall bearing platters of sweets, surrounded by spitting sparklers. It’s an appropriately grand finale for an event celebrating groundbreaking scientists, artists, and peacemakers. Perhaps it’s also a tongue-in-cheek reference to the person who paid for the festivities. It’s suspected that, before his death in 1896, the inventor of dynamite Alfred…
