In the Dark

Just to mention the announcement of this year’s Nobel Prize for Physics will take place tomorrow (Tuesday, October 6th,2026). I must remember to make sure my mobile phone is fully charged so I can be easily reached, although I am likely to be lecturing when the announcement is made.

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 20 years the chocolate is now inedible, but it serves as a souvenir of a very nice weekend in Stockholm! Sadly one of the Laureates whose award we were celebrating passed away recently.

Regular readers of this blog may recall that I called it correctly in 2022 when Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger won the Nobel Prize for Physics that year. I had, however, predicted them every year for many years until they won, and they won’t win it again, so I’ve probably shot my bolt.

I drew a blank in 2023 when “attosecond light pulses” were the topic and was completely wrongfooted when the 2024 Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks”. I didn’t see that one coming at all. Last year’s went to John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis “for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit”.

I really have no idea who will win it this year, but I’ll suggest that there’s still an outside chance for Michael Berry and Yakir Aharonov for their work on the geometric phase, although if they were going to win they would probably have done so by now.

Feel free to make your own predictions through the comments box below! To find out who the lucky winners you’ll have to wait for the announcement, around about 10.45 (UK/Irish time) on Tuesday morning. I’ll update this post when the wavefunction has collapsed.

Update: I’m not often right but I was wrong again.

I’m a little surprised to see this going to just one person, but there you are.

This entry was posted on October 5, 2026 at 7:35 pm and is filed under Biographical, Science Politics, The Universe and Stuff with tags Nobel Prize for Physics, Nobel Prize for Physics 2026. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.