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?
18 comments:
If we go by the Wolf Prize laureates (and take out the condensed matter people) maybe Martin Rees?
My 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.
Good 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.)
_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.
For 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.
What about graphene angles/twistronics with Prof. Dr. Pablo Jarillo-Herrero as one of the recipients?
Maybe one more prize in 2d materials. My predictions are Pablo and Allan McDonald for MATBG, and Xiaodong for FQAHE.
I predict that this year there will be 3 Nobel Laureates in Physics: Jeffrey Hangst & 2 others (very uncertain who the 2 others might be). Also, I predict that the Weizmann Institute's Prof. Milgrom & BGU's Prof. Guendelman will share a Nobel Prize in Physics next year. Please google "milgrom guendelman".
Why have I predicted that the Weizmann's Institute's Prof. Milgrom & BGU's Prof. Guendelman will, next year, share a Nobel Prize in Physics? There is overwhelming empirical evidence that Milgrom's MOND is approximately valid. The main problem is FUNDAMOND. My guess is that Guendelman's new version of string theory provides a highly plausible mathematical model for Milgrom's conjectured FUNDAMOND. The basic idea is that Guendelman's string theory predicts 2 new forms of spontaneous symmetry breaking in string vibrations. One form occurs in the geometric tensor & explains the dark matter phenomenon in terms of FUNDAMOND. The other form occurs in the energy-momentum tensor and explains the dark energy phenomenon in terms of Guendelman-Guth spontaneous symmetry breaking.
https://heritagediner.com/paradigm-shifts-in-modern-astrophysics-applying-thomas-kuhns-the-structure-of-scientific-revolutions-to-dark-matter/
Guendelman, E. I. "Dynamical string tension theories with target space scale invariance SSB and restoration." The European Physical Journal C 85, no. 3 (2025): 276.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.08875
David, three posts about Milgrom and Guendelman is plenty.
I don't think so. Prof. Milgrom is more than 20 years overdue for a Nobel Prize. My guess is that Prof. Guendelman is the greatest theoretical physicist since Einstein. Let the history of science be my judge.
I'll give my prediction Tuesday morning 😜
Charles Bennett
Well - this is a new sensation, never been member of a Nobel-winning collaboration before…
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/06/science/nobel-prize-physics.html?unlocked_article_code=1.GlE.zXoz.59YG5-GEjZlp&smid=nytcore-ios-share
(That’s me)
Hey Derek - As someone outside the area, I have to ask: Are there others who could credibly have shared the prize? It’s pretty unusual to name a single person when there is a large collaboration in play.
I understood he is the one who came up with the idea. On his own.
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