My picks for this year’s Nobel Prizes

The timing of the Nobel Prize announcements is awkward for a monthly like Physics Today. In that first week of October, the magazine’s editors are finishing their stories for the November issue. If you want to read Physics Today‘s coverage of the prizes, you’ll have to wait for the December issue.

But Physics Today‘s website faces no such awkwardness. By 5:30am on Monday, 4 October, I’ll have breakfasted and I’ll be ready to respond to the medicine prize. If the prize goes to, say, functional MRI, positron emission tomography, or radiation therapy, I’ll start reporting and writing.

As it happens, I don’t think the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, to use its full, official name, will go to medical physics. My hunch is that 2010 will be the year of the drug. My pick to win is Akira Endo of Daiichi-Sankyo Co, a Japanese pharmaceutical company. In the 1970s Endo discovered the class of cholesterol-lowering drugs called statins. According to one estimate, statins have cut the death rate from heart disease by 42%.

Physics is the next prize to be announced, on Tuesday, 5 October. This year, I hope Alain Aspect wins for his 1982 experiment that demonstrated that what Einstein called spooky action at a distance is a natural feature of the universe. At that time, I was an undergraduate at Imperial College. I can’t remember if the lecturers incorporated Aspect’s experiment into their presentations. They did, however, stress that quantum mechanics had passed all its tests, despite the counterintuitive manifestations of its mathematical underpinnings.

Wednesday is chemistry’s turn. Predicting the winners is hard because the Swedish Academy of Sciences’ selectors evaluate contributions to the vast field of molecular biology, as well as to chemistry’s traditional divisions of inorganic, organic, and physical. I like the chances this year of Sumio Iijima , Andre Geim , and Kostya Novoselov . In 1991 Iijima discovered how to make one-dimensional carbon (carbon nanotubes); in 2004 Geim and Novoselov discovered how to make two-dimensional carbon (graphene). In my view, both carbon nanotubes and graphene have proven to be more interesting and more useful than carbon’s zero-dimensional variant, the buckyball.

The date for the announcement of the literature prize hasn’t been scheduled, but if it took place on Thursday, it would not have to share the media spotlight with another prize. Given that Joseph Conrad, Franz Kafka, Henrik Ibsen, Marcel Proust, Leo Tolstoy, Henry James, and James Joyce could have won, but didn’t, while Selma Lagerlˆf, Rudolf Christoph Eucken, and Elfriede Jelinek did win, the Swedish Academy’s selection criteria are mystifying. Still, I’d like to see Mario Vargas Llosa win. His 1969 magnum opus Conversation in the Cathedral covers Peruvian society and politics in the 1950s. The novel’s narrative moves back and forth across time in an initially challenging but ultimately natural structure. The novel is skillful, thought-provoking, and moving.

The peace prize is announced on Friday. My nomination: President Ma Ying-jeou of Taiwan for improving relations between Taiwan and China. The body of water that separates the two countries is only 140 km wide, yet until Ma took office, direct flights between Taipei and the mainland were not allowed. Other significant and symbolic rapprochements have taken place under Ma’s government, although China’s Taiwan-facing missile banks remain deployed. Whether you want the two Chinas to reunify or remain separate, the warming of their relations constitutes a major boost to world peace.

We have to wait until Monday, 11 October, to learn who has won the economic sciences Nobel. This year could be the turn of economic geography—that is, the study of how location influences prosperity and other manifestations of economic activity. I set myself a deadline of today—a week before the physics prize is announced—to write this entry. In that time, I haven’t identified a must-win economic geographer, but Brian Berry seems deserving.