It's that time of year yet 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, especially since last year's prize for “for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit” was condensed matter related. Perhaps optical metamaterials, with
Yablonovitch,
Smith, and
Pendry? (Though that's another one where picking just three names is challenging.) Astro-related is likely due, so perhaps something CMBR related?
If we go by the Wolf Prize laureates (and take out the condensed matter people) maybe Martin Rees?
ReplyDeleteMy usual comment about Aharonov Bohm phase is that it was discovered 10 years earlier by Ehrenberg and Siday (Awkward for Bohm who was at the same university as Ehrenberg). My speculation is Peter Shor again. So much great science has been done in the name of quantum computing and he really broke open the field. If I wanted to add a few others to the prize, I'd go with Shor, Deutch, and Bennett.
ReplyDeleteGood to hear from you, Steve! Well, Ehrenberg and Siday both passed a long time ago. Perhaps between them and Pancharatnam, that's an argument that this topic is too old to be honored now. Still, it's hard to argue that in its present incarnation it hasn't had an enormous impact. The whole quantum geometry field, Berry connection, anomalous velocity, etc. are intellectually connected here. (It's been a 25 year running joke that I'm never right with this pick.)
Delete_Should be_ Zamolodchikov, Cardy (Breakthrough 2024), maybe others (Witten? Moore? Read?) CFT -> critical phenomena, TFT, nonabelian anyon braiding+fusion, entanglement, SYK... > Berry curvature alone. Useful quantum computers don't exist yet.
DeleteLasers are always a safe bet...
ReplyDeleteFor Astronomy, I still think the most likely option is a joint award to WMAP and Planck for validating the conformance cosmology LambdaCDM and demonstrating consistency of the primordial power spectrum with the predictions of cosmic inflation, n<~1. Making the award soon opens up the option of granting a subsequent award to Guth, Steinhardt, and Linde for inflationary theory, which they should do before those three get much older.
ReplyDeleteWhat about graphene angles/twistronics with Prof. Dr. Pablo Jarillo-Herrero as one of the recipients?
ReplyDelete