{"id":9621,"date":"2014-10-06T09:23:38","date_gmt":"2014-10-06T13:23:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/?p=9621"},"modified":"2014-10-06T09:23:38","modified_gmt":"2014-10-06T13:23:38","slug":"nobel-season-2014","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2014\/10\/06\/nobel-season-2014\/","title":{"rendered":"Nobel Season 2014"},"content":{"rendered":"

With this morning’s announcement of the 2014 Nobel Prizes in Physiology or Medicine<\/a>, the annual Nobel season is upon us. I didn’t do a betting pool post this year, because when I announced last year’s winner, I was reminded that I had never paid off the prize to the previous year’s winner. So I think I just don’t have the time to manage that contest right now…<\/p>\n

Anyway, the Physics prize will be announced tomorrow, and while I’m not going to host a contest, I did want to offer some space for speculation about what might win. Unlike last year, when the suspense was mostly about which subset of the many discoverers of the Higgs boson would get screwed, this one’s pretty wide open, as you can see from the range of speculation in blogs<\/a>, magazines<\/a> and news services<\/a>. <\/p>\n

As always, I’m sorta-kinda rooting for a quantum optics prize for Bell Inequality experiments– Aspect, Clauser, and Zeilinger would be a nice set. Those guys have all done amazing work over the years. There’s also a possibility of a quantum information theory prize of some sort– a couple of years back, Thomson was floating a slate that included Charles Bennett and one of my undergrad professors, Bill Wootters for (among other things) coming up with quantum teleportation (explanation with stuffed animals here<\/a>, in case it happens to win and you need a link…). That would also be pretty awesome– Williams would hold bragging rights over Amherst for a long, long time…<\/p>\n

As I said on Twitter, I would also be pretty psyched to see a dark matter Nobel for Vera Rubin, whose story gets a good chunk of a chapter in Eureka<\/a>. She’s done some great science over the last sixty years, and her story is a great inspiration for anybody juggling job and family<\/a>. In addition to the story in that post, there’s also the tale of her first conference presentation: She had recently had a baby, so one of the senior faculty at Cornell said “Well, you won’t be able to go to the meeting, so I’ll give the talk instead,” to which she replied “No, I’ll do it.” And went to the meeting, family in tow, to give a talk that made a big splash. <\/p>\n

If you could find a picture of her looking grumpy, a “Vera Rubin doesn’t have time for your bullshit” meme would be cool, but she’s pretty cheerful in all the photos I’ve seen…<\/p>\n

As I also said on Twitter, though, if you put a gun to my head and made me pick a winner for this year’s Physics prize, I’d probably go with something related to topological insulators. They’re a huge area of interest in condensed matter right now, and it’s been a few years since the prize went to condensed matter work, while astrophysics and quantum optics have gotten prizes more recently. I couldn’t begin to name names, but if you want a bit of background, this post on topological insulators<\/a> is one of the most reliable traffic generators in my back catalogue. Which, come to think of it, is more or less how Thomson generates their predictions<\/a> every year, so I feel I’m on solid ground with that prediction…<\/p>\n

Anyway, if you have a better idea of what will or ought to win this year’s Nobel in physics, leave a comment. We’ll find out early tomorrow morning…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With this morning’s announcement of the 2014 Nobel Prizes in Physiology or Medicine, the annual Nobel season is upon us. I didn’t do a betting pool post this year, because when I announced last year’s winner, I was reminded that I had never paid off the prize to the previous year’s winner. So I think… Continue reading Nobel Season 2014<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,7,37,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9621","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astronomy","category-physics","category-pop_culture","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9621","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9621"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9621\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}