Nobel Prize for Physics Speculation
Just to mention that tomorrow morning (Tuesday, October 3rd 2023) will see the announcement of this year’s Nobel Prize for Physics. I must remember to make sure my mobile phone is fully charged so I can be easily reached.
Of course this is just one of the announcements. This morning, for example, there is the announcement of the Prize for Physiology or Medicine, and on Wednesday is the Prize for Chemistry: both of these sometimes go to physicists too. You can find links to all the announcements here.
I do, of course, already have a Nobel Prize Medal of my own already, dating from 2006, when I was lucky enough to attend the prize-giving ceremony and banquet.
I was, however, a guest of the Nobel Foundation rather than a prizewinner, so my medal is made of chocolate rather than gold. I think after 17 years the chocolate is now inedible, but it serves as a souvenir of a very nice weekend in Stockholm!
Regular readers of this blog, Sid and Doris Bonkers, may recall that I called it correctly last year when Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger won. I had however predicted them every year for many years until they won, and they won’t win it again, so I can’t follow my usual strategy. I’ll suggest that there’s an outside chance for Michael Berry and Yakir Aharonov for their work on the geometric phase, although if they were going to win they probably would have done so by now. Feel free to make your predictions through the comments box below.
To find out you’ll have to wait for the announcement, around about 10.45 (UK/Irish time) tomorrow morning. I’ll update this post when the wavefunction has collapsed.
UPDATE: The 2023 Nobel Prize for Physics goes to:
Pierre Agostini
The Ohio State University, Columbus, USA
Ferenc Krausz
Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics, Garching and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany
Anne L’Huillier
Lund University, Sweden
“for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter”
Congratulations to them! The full press release containing the citation can be found here.
Anyway, for the record, I’ll reiterate my opinion that while the Nobel Prize is flawed in many ways, particularly because it no longer really reflects how physics research is done, it does at least have the effect of getting people talking about physics. Surely that at least is a good thing?
P.S. My own claim for the 2023 Physics Nobel Prize is based on the discovery of the Coles Law.
In the Dark 
October 2, 2023 at 9:33 am
I might have said this before, but most large chocolate medallions are the same size as CDs and DVDs so you can unwrap it carefully, eat the chocolate and replace it by an out-of-date CD-ROM.
With consummate taste (geddit?), Canterbury Cathedral used to sell them with the inscription “Indulgence of Thomas a Becket”. I have the gold cover in the jewel case of my CD of “Murder in the Cathedral”.
October 2, 2023 at 10:11 am
I fully share the sentiments in your last paragraph, and if nothing else, the speculations I saw on Reddit for this, are amusing. A couple of sensible answers, a lot of pretty unconvincing ones:
I’d be pretty certain to state that no Nobel prize will be given to string theory, yet Susskind seems to be the most popular name.
For my money, I would perhaps put a tiny wager on atto-second physics. That won the Wolf prize last year, and seems like Nobel-prize-y science.
October 2, 2023 at 10:14 am
From a quick trawl through social media I’d say David Deutsch is getting a lot of support. And among cosmologists there’s a bit of a push for inflationary cosmology: Guth, Linde, Starobinsky, etc
October 2, 2023 at 11:16 am
Deutsch’s field is too near to last year’s winners. Quantum computing will get it some year, in which case Deutsch might share it with some relevant experimentalists. I hope any citation doesn’t mention his ideas about interpretations of QM and metaphysics.
October 2, 2023 at 10:31 pm
David Deutsch is certainly not a bad shout but like Anton I’d be surprised as it is somewhat close to last year’s prize but you never know.
Inflationary cosmology seems a bit like wishful thinking at the moment – it is a likely and well-argued theory but my feeling is that the observational support is much too weak to justify a Nobel.
October 2, 2023 at 5:53 pm
But surely many string theorists are strong contenders for receiving the Nobel Prize for Physics Speculation.
October 2, 2023 at 6:00 pm
You might very well say that. I couldn’t possibly comment.
October 2, 2023 at 10:37 pm
😀 Many of the leading lights of string theory have been awarded prestigious prizes, not least Witten’s Fields medal, and someone like Susskind has contributed to many fields of physics – so while string theory as such is speculative people contributing to it are excellent physicists and my phrase above was a tad too snarky and should probably be “no Nobel prize will be given to string theory at the moment at least” – it might be never but I’m not really qualified to judge on that.
October 3, 2023 at 10:58 am
Did you make that “tiny wager”? If you did you won!
October 3, 2023 at 11:14 am
Unfortunately not!
October 3, 2023 at 2:03 am
Irwin Shapiro for shapiro delay
October 3, 2023 at 12:06 pm
Chemistry tomorrow. Nowadays it is usually in the overlap area of that subject either with physics or with biochemistry.
October 4, 2023 at 10:59 am
The award goes for work on quantum dots, which I would indeed classify as at the interface between chemistry and physics. Much work in this area is done in physics departments.
October 5, 2023 at 8:03 am
Speaking of the interface between chemistry and physics, I note that one mole of attoseconds is almost exactly one week…