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Tuesday, September 30, 2025

Annual Nobel speculation thread


It’s that time of year again.  The physics Nobel will be announced next Tuesday, and the chemistry prize on Wednesday.  Who will it be this time?  Please speculate in the comments.  As is my annual futile tradition, I will put forward that the physics prize could be Aharonov and Berry for geometric phases in physics (even though Pancharatnam is intellectually in there and died in 1969).  This is a long shot, as always.  Last year was neural networks.  Astro is probably “due”, but who knows.  On the chem side, last year was computational protein design and AlphaFold.  

6 comments:

Gautam Menon said...

Twisted graphene?

Pizza Perusing Physicist said...

Not sure who, but my guess is someone in the general area of topological quantum matter/information.

I’m still riding the high from predicting Hopfield on this blog last year. Maybe I’ll get lucky again!

Anonymous said...

Pablo Jarillo-Herrero would be a recipient for twisted graphene, right?

Zlatan Akšamija said...

Weyl fermions, M. Zahid Hasan could also get it.

Pizza Perusing Physicist said...

On second thought, I wonder if I should go with Gautam and change my guess to twisted graphene as well. I hadn’t thought of it but maybe it is a more likely condensed matter / quantum choice, since topology has already been recognized in 2016…

Charles Day said...

I also vote for Aharanov and Berry. In the 20th century, "Berry phase" appeared in 174 PRL papers. In the 21st century, it appeared in 1310!