It's that time of year again - go ahead and speculate away in the comments about possible Nobel laureates in physics or chemistry. Natural suggestions in physics include Aharonov and Berry for geometric phases, Vera Rubin for dark matter/galaxy rotation curves, Charlie Kane and Shoucheng Zhang (and possibly Molenkamp) for topological insulators, Pendry, Smith, and Yablonovitch and John (oh dear that's four) for metamaterials and/or photonic bandgaps.
Update: check out Slate's article on deserving women candidates. Dresselhaus would be a good choice. (I'm not as big a fan of, e,g., Lisa Randall, who is extremely smart but is in the space of high energy theorists who have not yet had predictions of exotic physics actually verified by experiment.)
13 comments:
except for the spelling error, I concur with the possibilities you note.
(yeah, yeah, autocorrect and Chinese names...)
Fixed. Totally my fault, and I even took a class from him. Whoops.
Massimo, you could be right (e.g., Guth and Linde), but I wonder if the BICEP2 business makes a prize for inflation less likely this year.
Since he's not calling it, I'm going with Doug's perennial pick...
Thouless, Aharonov, Berry
Ijima for nanotubes, either in physics or chemistry.
I should have added that there are a couple of possible quantum optics slates (e.g., Aspect, Zeilinger, and Clauser for Bell's Inequality experiments; the quantum teleportation folks). I was also remiss in leaving out the extrasolar planets folks (Marcy, Mayor, Queloz). Thanks to Chad Orzel and Jennifer Ouellette for their writeups of the annual speculation.
Lastly, I realized that I should also have mentioned a possible slate of Holonyak, Hall, and Nakamura for LEDs/diode lasers.
You were right on with your blue LED prediction in our last night call.
The odd thing about this LED prize is that it basically skips over people who are still alive that did key work on visible LEDs (e.g., Holonyak). We're probably looking at an astro-themed prize next year, if the committee continues its history of cycling through subfields.
Hurrah to Engineering and Materials Science ! I think is the first prize where one of the prize winners (Nakamura) got his UG, Masters and PhD degrees all in Engineering. I don't know about the degrees of the other two Japanese Laureates.
As fields get larger and more and more subfields develop, is it reasonable to expect the nobel prizes to be expanded into more than one category for each existing category, given the many superb contributions? Or are we expected to cherish other, less well known, prizes in its stead? Will that also cause the nobel prizes to become a little less significant? Will we be instead making speculation on other coveted prizes?
The super-resolution microscopy prize today was super cool and well-deserved. I never expected this from the Chemistry prize, though.
It's too bad they didn't go one further and maybe try and nominate for structured illumination since that and other computational microscopy methods tend (in my opinion) to be more universal in application, but given that Mats Gustafson passed away and that it is sort of "included" in half of the prize, I can understand the omission.
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