I've also finally taken the plunge and created @NanoscaleViews on twitter. Hopefully this will help reach a broader audience, even if I don't have the time to fall down the twitter rabbit hole constantly.
Saturday, October 03, 2020
Annual Nobel speculation, + nanoscale views on twitter
It's that annual tradition: Who do people think will win the Nobel this year in physics? Or chemistry? On the physics side, I've repeatedly predicted (incorrectly) Aharonov and Berry for geometric phases. Another popular suggestion from years past is Aspect, Zeilinger, and Clauser for Bell's inequality tests. Speculate away in the comments.
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For physics: LHC + CMS + ATLAS (3 leaders/spokespeople) for discovery of the Higgs boson. WMAP + Planck teams (2 or 3 people) for precision cosmological measurements confirming existence of Dark Energy + Dark Matter (while noting, we don't usually get two astro Nobels in a row).
Oh and please, please, please at least one woman each in Chemistry & Physics
Somehow I wish the Nobel committee would surprise us this year. I know Aspect et al have been waiting in the wings for a while and it is important work. With Berry and Aharonov, my concern would be that Pancharatnam was arguably the person who discovered the essence of the 'Berry phase'in optics and that the theoretical chemists found something similar even before that(?). Plus, of course, topology in physics has already been awarded recently. A friend of mine suggested MBE - I resisted that but must admit that it ticks various boxes.
But as I said, I'd love, this time, to be surprised.
Another suggestion I've heard is a prize for unconventional superconductivity - perhaps Hosono for the pnictides and Steglich et al for heavy fermions.
I've also heard a suggestion regarding superconducting quantum information tools.
Guess we'll know tomorrow. I, too, hope for surprises.
I'm hoping for something in plasma/fusion physics but that's unlikely. I'm guessing it will be something in quantum information (Zeilinger, Aspect,...). Superconducting QC technology is certainly going to get it eventually, but I think they'll wait until QC matures a bit more.
I echo Derek's wish for at least one woman each. I also think it'd be great if we had some winners from historically underrepresented minorities for a change.
Well as usual everyone here is wrong about the topic, but they did award it to the fourth woman in history which is an important step forward!
Indeed. Astro topics two years in a row is quite unusual. The prize is a good one, though - I encourage everyone to read the scientific background document, which does a great job explaining the story.
And now we have two women sharing the prize in Chemistry! It's so refreshing to see the Nobel committee starting to properly recognize the contributions of female scientists. It's a critical step towards increasing diversity and equity in science.
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