No, I don’t have any idea who will win this year, but the announcement will be a week from today, on Tuesday October 3. After my initial success in Nobel Prize prognostication, I’ve now retired from that game, but encourage others to play.
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I would vote for Giorgio Bellettini (with a few possible others) for the top quark discovery. Wishful thinking of course, but who knows ?
And I know I am biased, but I think the man would deserve it for his lifelong effort, which indeed culminated in the CDF 94 evidence and then CDF-D0 95 observation.
Cheers,
T.
I would say someone from the COBE team for discovsering anisotropies in the
CMB. This year they got the Gruber prize.
The evidence for the acceleration of the expansion of the universe is now quite good. Why not someone involved in the supernova red shifts?
I think the COBE team did a beautiful job, but in my view they simply confirmed existing expectations.
I consider the evidence for an accelerated expansion as still iffy, though that result remains an electrifying possibility. However I wouldn’t bet against some recognition of dark matter this year. Though Zwicky is gone, Vera Rubin is still quite active…
Has everyone forgot ? Alan Guth ( & probably Andre Linde) were smiling the entire week the WMAP 3rd yr. observational reports were announced. Alan is a shoe-in, & perhaps Andre as well.
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Alan Guth ( & probably Andre Linde) were smiling the entire week the WMAP 3rd yr. observational reports were announced. Alan is a shoe-in, & perhaps Andre as well.
Pffft, no way. WMAP’s results have kept inflation healthily afloat, but it’s hardly as if the matter is closed and inflation is proven. The evidence for dark energy is more convincing, and even that is not up to Nobel snuff; the prize committee goes for sure things, often many years or decades after the actual research was done and after everyone agrees on the results.
I don’t know enough about the entire range of subfields of physics to make a guess, but the last few years looked like this:
2005: Quantum optics
2004: QCD
2003: Superconductivity/superfluidity
2002: High-energy astrophysics
2001: Bose-Einstein condensation
2000: Semiconductors
1999: Electroweak interactions
Draw what conclusions you will, but remember, when you cast your prediction, that there is more to physics than particle physics and speculative cosmology.
Well firstly it won’t be a string theorist (at least not for their work on string theory).
The two outstanding ones not yet given:
– Higgs, Yang and Mills for the Higgs particle and Yang Mills theory (Yang has it for parity but not for Yang-Mills – I assume it is the same Yang?) But maybe also Goldstone? Higgs and Goldstone one year, Yang and Mills another?
– Aharonov and Bohm for the Aharonv Bohmn effect. Well Bohm is dead but Aharonov is still alive I think.
If the Higgs is discovered, there will probably be two rapid prizes: a theoretical one to Higgs, Brout and Englert (Polyakov and Migdal probably not), and an experimental one for the actual discovery. But we are not there yet.
My personal favorites are Belavin-Polyakov-Zamolodchikov for the application of CFT to statistical physics, but I’m sure that they won’t win this year neither.
With Aharonov they’d have to include Michael Berry of Berry’s phase, which is a more general concept and surely deserves a prize in its own right.
The guys who created the Bose-Einstien condensate deserve some kudos. That was a top class piece of experimental physics.
To Tommaso: not discovering the top would have deserved a Nobel prize. Discovering that top (or its right-handed component) is composite would deserve a Nobel prize. But, so far, discovering the top with the expected charge, expected strong interactions, expected weak interactions, expected spin, expected mass (from precision data) and expected name is not interesting enough.
ObsessiveMathsFreak,
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2001/index.html
Eli Yablonovitch and Sajeev John for the theory of photonic crystals. Although 3D crystals are found in nature and 2D crystals are already technologically important, perhaps the prize will wait for an experimental synthesis of 3D crystals.
Victor Veselago and John Pendry for theory of negative refractive index. David Smith for experimental realisation.
i have to second michael berry (and perhaps aharonov). this has been wildly influential work in condensed matter.
JK says:
They have been making 3D crystals since the very begining. Jesus man; experimentalists are infinitely more capable than that. 3D photonic Crystal fabrication is an undergraduate project at a low level non-research institution.
Anyway I dont think Photonic Crystals are Nobel worthy. It’s basically only classical field theory in periodic space.
Try supersolid
Analyzer says
Yes people, remember that the blogosphere does not represent the average physics department…In fact, I’m reasonable confident that the majority of physicists specialize in condensed matter.
David Deutsch, founder of quantum information theory. Primitive quantum computations have been performed in labs. So you have an important theory confirmed by experiment.
Hi!
The only outstanding candidates spoken about here are
M Berry and V Rubin!
My vote is for V Rubin, but the Crafoord prize 2005 was awarded James Gunn, James Peebles, and Martin Rees for Dark Matter (in my opinion scandalous!). So I do not have much hope.
Onto M Berry. The problem is that who would he share the prize with?
Does anyone care about Statistical Mechanics? And anyway, there is the small problem of R Baxter, McCoy, Wu et al……
Expect the unexpected!
Zelah
The evidence for the acceleration of the expansion of the universe is now quite good.
There are some evidences, but they are not unquestionable. For instance, we first must learn much more about Type Ia supernovae.
Christine
Yoichiro Nambu.
I’d also put my bet on WMAP/CMB, exact measurement of parameters in LambdaCDM, esp confirmation of cc nonzero. I don’t know though who’d be the person to name.
Nambu may deserve a Nobel, but I’d be surprised if he gets it this time around. He’ll probably have to wait till after the LHC turns on.
I echo Kea and Christine in that evidence for inflation and cosmic acceleration is still shaky. The low-l data rules out inflation’s prediction. Evidence for acceleration is based entirely upon redshifts.
Fadeev and Popov, who showed how to quantize gauge theory and discovered the “ghosts”.
Peter Woit and Lee Smolin for their efforts on behalf of the welfare of theoretical physics.
How about Paul Ginsparg for his contribution to the development of physics?
Belizean Says:
“David Deutsch, founder of quantum information theory. Primitive quantum computations have been performed in labs. So you have an important theory confirmed by experiment.”
Do you have a link to this experimental evidence? I don’t believe quantum computations have been verified.
David Pines for plasmons and the random phase approximation, and Conyers Herring for spin waves and the orthogonalized-plane-waves method in solids.
A said:
“not discovering the top would have deserved a Nobel prize. Discovering that top (or its right-handed component) is composite would deserve a Nobel prize. But, so far, discovering the top with the expected charge, expected strong interactions, expected weak interactions, expected spin, expected mass (from precision data) and expected name is not interesting enough”
Dear A,
I do not think some thing has to be intrinsically unexpected to deserve a nobel prize. The top quark discovery was largely expected, but it involved two decades of searches, at least one published wrong observation (UA2 1987), and theoretical predictions for the mass which scaled with the experimental lower limits for quite a while. The CDF experiment was conceived in 1980 or so, built by 1985, started taking data in 1987, saw the first top event in 1988, and had to be upgraded with a silicon detector to find the elusive top, whose mass kept it unreachable otherwise. I think the overall achievement of observing a picobarn-sized signal in collisions occurring with cross sections of 60 millibarns is quite a feat, and the people responsible for the discovery deserve recognition.
Cheers,
T.
Renormalized,
Here’s one that took 10 seconds to with Google:
http://domino.watson.ibm.com/comm/pr.nsf/pages/news.20011219_quantum.html
Do you have a link to this experimental evidence? I don’t believe quantum computations have been verified.
Small quantum computations have been performed — see here for experimental confirmation that 15=3*5 (with small probability of error). The challenge is scaling up to a nontrivial number of qubits.
Of course, the interesting experimental discovery would be a fundamental reason why quantum computing isn’t scalable!
Here´s my tip:
Give it to Mathematical Physics,
not String Theory,
but Knot Theory,
(Knit String Theory would be O.K. for me….)
E.g. Witten or Drinfeld,
or you suggest a 3rd one.
Since Maths works slow,
it would be good to surpass the rule that only living ones be Nobel pontificated,
& sharing the Prize money could be Dadificated (randomized in a certain sense)
e.g. by awarding it to an element of a time-space-brainlard chain of a tree (or Feynman Diagram) of brainlard evolution:
E.g. give it to Witten for the Witten-Jones Generalization (skipping Kaufmann)
or e.g. give it to Drinfeld for his Quasitriangular Quantum Groups (generalizing the Yang-Baxter relations).
…
…(cont)
Since both had the Fields medal,
suggested Nobel Prize could probably form a noice antiparticle to Perelman
I’d really enjoy M. Berry and Y. Aharonov. Great stuff. There’s also a long-overdue prize to recognize the great materials growers (MBE?). Regarding Conyers Herring, they’d better hurry…. He was not exactly a spring chicken when I was a grad student at Stanford ten years ago. Supersolid is too new and too controversial. For those interested in chemistry, at some point I’d be willing to bet a fair bit of money on Whitesides for self-assembly.
I’d like to see it go to Kobayashi and Maskawa for their theory of CP Violation. As of this summer the unitary triangle is looking very consistent, and their names have come up before, so I don’t think it would be too unexpected.
If the prize were given to theory, I think there would be two possilbilities.
1 to C.N.Yang Dyson and Fadeev etc
2 to Hawking and Bekenstein etc
:)^_^
I don’t think the prize has ever gone to a theory that was not already experimentally verified to a very high degree, such that it was essentially completely uncontroversial within the physics community. (Is asymptotic freedom an exception?)
Nor I think has it gone to a technical prediction (such as photonic bands) that hasn’t already had significant practical consequences. That makes several of the above suggestions seem very unlikely.
My bet:
Sir Samuel Edwards.
Among other things:
Together with Phil Anderson (Nobel laureate), he pioneered the replica theory of disordered systems which has found far reaching applications even beyond physics.
Together with P. G. de Gennes (Nobel laureate), he pioneered the field theoretic approach to polymer physics and placed soft matter physics in a solid theoretical foundation.
Physiker,
If they gave it to Edwards would they have to include G. Parisi as well?
A.J. wrote:
Nambu may deserve a Nobel, but I’d be surprised if he gets it this time around. He’ll probably have to wait till after the LHC turns on.
What idea of Nambu do you have in mind? I thought some of the people involved in the early development of QCD (Nambu, Bjorken…) deserved a prize, but I don’t expect that one to ever be given now that the later development of asymptotic freedom got the prize.
Then there’s Nambu – Goldstone, but it’s hard to imagine why that would get a prize now since it hasn’t in the past. (It is a fundamental idea that’s experimentally verified and applicable to all sorts of physics, so it seems as Nobel-worthy as any theoretical development I can think of.)
Since I can’t find an email address on your page (probably for good reasons) please indulge me in asking an unrelated question here. I have a Ph.D. in astronomy, and I have some familiarity with the mathematics of the Standard Model, but I’m by no means a particle physicist. Can you recommend a book or books on post-Standard Model theories that would be at my level?
Everything I’ve found so far seems to be aimed either at nonmathematicians (and is therefore useless for trying to understand the mathematics behind the models) or at people who are almost as knowledgeable as the author (and is therefore an inpenetrable display of how smart the author thinks he is.)
I’m looking for something on the level of Cottingham and Greenwood’s “An Inroduction to the Standard Model of Particle Physics,”, which I enjoyed immensely.
If you think your own book is in this category, then I’ll accept that datum; but my sense is that you have largely avoided formulas. I want formulas, but I want them patiently explained.
anon.,
Yes, I was thinking of spontaneous symmetry breaking. Nambu was the first to introduce the idea into particle physics, so he’s certainly a candidate for the prize if they find a Higgs boson at LHC. I don’t think he’s a sure thing though. There were a lot of people involved in the idea. I think Higgs is the only one I’d put money on.
It seems strange that a Nobel prize for general properties of spontaneous symmetry breaking should be contingent on the discovery of a Higgs boson. The understanding of SSB due to Nambu, Goldstone, and others is amply supported by superconductivity, by chiral symmetry breaking in QCD, and other applications. I would think a Nobel prize for the Higgs should go specifically to people who studied SSB applied to gauge theories; as far as I know, Nambu didn’t specifically propose that, while plenty of others did.
I think Nambu and Goldstone probably do deserve a Nobel, but it would seem odd if it were only given now, decades after it could have been. On the other hand, Ginzburg just got the prize recently, so maybe it wouldn’t be so unreasonable.
What about the theory of granular media? This is a relatively new but very important field in condensed matter…
Kent G. Budge,
My book does contain short descriptions of many ideas about beyond the standard model physics, together with suggestions for further reading about these subjects. I don’t know of a single good book of the kind you are asking about. One thing a little bit like what you are asking for is a book by Pierre Ramond called “Journeys Beyond the Standard Model”.
Dear Kent,
THE book you’re seeking is entitled:”The Ideas of Particle Physics, an introduction for scientists”, by Coughlan & Dodd, 2nd ed., Cambridge press, ~ 200 pgs. A good companion book for it(at the same math level, but in more depth) is `Elementary Particles’, by Hughes, 3rd ed.,also on Cambridge, ~ 400 pgs. Both are in paperback.
Kent: If you want something more discursive than a textbook, try Penrose’s The Road to Reality. It doesn’t cover the post-Standard-Model theories with any pretense of rigor, but it does have formulas and it doesn’t aim low.
Thanks to all for the suggestions. It happens I live and work in Los Alamos, so if the local library doesn’t have these works, it shouldn’t take much of a nudge from me to get the library to acquire them And there’s always the LANL technical library.
I am particularly curious about doubly special relativity. Is it covered by any of these books?
Thanks again. Sorry about the thread hijack.
Kent,
DSR is largely covered by the work of Smolin & Magueijo; just do an arxiv search & I’m sure you can pull up a review article. I don’t think its covered in any recent texts.