I somehow managed to lose track of time for a bit, and forgot that it was Nobel season until I saw this morning's announcement that the 2007 Nobel Prize in Medicine hase just been announced, going to Mario R. Capecchi, Sir Martin J. Evans, and Oliver Smithies,
for their discoveries of principles for introducing specific gene modifications in mice by the use of embryonic stem cells
Good thing they got the Nobel, because that sounds like the sort of icky, un-Godly work we wouldn't want to actually, you know, fund.
Anyway, the announcement of this prize means that the rest of the Nobels will be announced over the next week or so. (via RSS, if you want it in almost-real-time). And, unfortunately, the Physics prize will be announced tomorrow morning, which doesn't give a great deal of time for guessing games.
However, I will repeat last year's betting pool, even in this compressed time frame. So, the title pretty much says it all:
Leave a comment here guessing the winner of one or more of this year's Nobel Prizes. If you correctly identify any of the laureates, you'll win a prize.
Rules and restrictions below the fold:
The prize last year was the right to choose a post topic, which I'm also offering as an incentive for donating to DonorsChoose. So, if you're cheap, this is a good way to get to dictate blog content. Alternately, you can request something cheap and tacky from Japan, as I do have a tacky little souvenir statue that I bought for the "guess the pictures" contest, before I saw the glow-in-the-dark Buddha.
Guesses are limited to one per person per Prize (this means you, Jonathan vos Post), and must include both the name and the Prize you think they'll win. Ideally, you should also include a short comment on the research area of the people in question, but this isn't required. Thus, an ideal entry would be of the form "Richard Dawkins will win the Peace Prize for his efforts to make us all coalesce into one big gut-laugh at religion," and this would get you nothing if he subsequently wins the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences. You can guess the same person for more than one prize, but only one person per prize.
Winning entires must be posted by midnight Eastern time of the day before the announcement. Thus, the deadlines are:
- Physics: midnight tonight
- Chemistry: midnight Tuesday
- Literature: midnight Wednesday
- Peace: midnight Friday
- Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Scienes: midnight Sunday
The contest is not open to members of the Swedish Academy or their families or employees.
So, let's hear some guesses. Who's going to win some dynamite money this year?
- Log in to post comments
Carl Sagan.
Jagdish Bhagwati will win the Economics prize for his work on trade.
What could be *ahem* sexier than giving it to Hawking? But more likely, Giant Magnetoresistance.
more likely, Giant Magnetoresistance
Do you want to associate a name with that, or are you just going with the research area?
I'm tempted to say Guth, Linde and Vilenkin for physics, but I think they'll wait a year or three and this year will either be quantum phase (Berry and some one or two others, maybe Aharonov). Grunberg and Fert will get it eventually, but not this year.
Since the Academy seems to be stirring things up, how about Gore for the Peace prize ;-)
I see I'm not the first to suggest GMR. I propose that Peter Grunberg and Albert Fert (if one gets it, the other will) will get the Physics prize for their work on Giant Magnetoresistance.
"I'm tempted to say Guth, Linde and Vilenkin for physics, but I think they'll wait a year or three..."
Nobody will win for inflation until there's strong experimental support. A ~3-sigma result on n_s =/= 1, a weak upper bound on r, and no detection of the inflationary gravity wave background are not enough.
That said...we're working on it...
Asad: what do you think is the right "strong experimental support"? Theory suggests r should remain undetectable....
Since everyone before me is skeptical of Guth & co. for inflation, I'll put them.
What is sexier than figuring out the beginning of everything, anyway?
Fert and Gruenberg evidently won the Wolf prize for giant magnetoresistance (thank you, Google), so they would be natural candidates.
Well, I doubt it's going to be anything AMOish, however I don't know enough about the other branches to other any informed speculation.
It's too early for any QI stuff probably, there's lots of interesting things but no real 'killer' experiments yet, which is what you really want for a Nobel prize. If Bell were still alive, he'd probably be a good candidate, as it's important physics in its own rights, that led on to this whole QI explosion, and he'd probably get it with Alain Aspect for his experimental (but not loophole-free...) work. So put Alain Aspect down as my left-field suggestion (and if he were to get it, they'd probably throw Zeilinger in with him).
Peace: Al Gore
I think Gabor Somorjai will win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for pioneering surface chemistry.
I hope Tim Berners-Lee to win Nobel prize in Physics for inventing WWW. It is a kind of physics in a broad sense, isn't it? ;-)
First time I guessed right. Cool!
Chem: W. E. Moerner and X. Sunney Xie
Single molecule spectroscopy
"Asad: what do you think is the right "strong experimental support"? Theory suggests r should remain undetectable...."
Depends which theory. Inflation theory isn't my forte, but from what I understand many single-field inflation models (and some others) predict r > 0.01, and a lot of experiments (including the one I'm working on) will be able to probe to near that level in the near future (next few-to-5ish years) via measurements of CMB B-mode polarization. Setting an upper limit near r = 0.01 will rule out a wide range of the simpler inflationary models.
Chemistry : W.E. Moerner