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.
12 comments:
Twisted graphene?
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!
Pablo Jarillo-Herrero would be a recipient for twisted graphene, right?
Weyl fermions, M. Zahid Hasan could also get it.
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…
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!
If we’re going astro, we’re well overdue for a prize honoring the WMAP and Planck satellite teams for measuring the geometry of the universe and confirming Inflation predictions of flatness and nearly scale-invariant (n<~1) Gaussian primordial fluctuations. Or if they want to avoid honoring large collaborations, a prize to Guth, Linde, and Steinhardt for the theory that they confirmed.
Donald Trump for discoveries related to cranial hot air containment beyond all known records. People say this is yuge.
Hahahahaha!!
If there is another topology prize presumably at least one of the recipients will be Charlie Kane.
I’d like to see a prize for quantum dynamics but I think we’ll have to wait a while for that one.
Another possibility (not yet raised in this thread) is a prize for quantum algorithms. This could be a `pure theory' prize (say, Peter Shor and Umesh Vazirani). Or it could be something like eg 1/2 to Peter Shor and 1/2 to Google Quantum AI.
My money is on Shor, Deutch, and Bennett (maybe drop Bennett and add Vazirani?) for launching the quantum industry --- particularly being that this is the year of the quantum. I love the twisted vanderwaals field, but despite how cool it is, it hasn't had anything near the impact that the drive for quantum computing has. I've bet on Berry and Aharnov in the past but as I learned more about the history I leaned more against. In both cases there was earlier work that makes it difficult to choose them: Pancharatnam before Berry, and Ehrenberg&Siday before Aharanov and Bohm. Bohm quickly conceded that the AB effect was not original. Maybe Berry is sufficiently different from Pancharatnam, but it still looks unlikely to me. I'd love a Charlie Kane prize too, or even an Anyon prize, but I'm not holding my breath.
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