Predicting who will be awarded a Nobel Prize is difficult—at least it has been for me. In the 16 years since I joined the editorial staff of Physics Today, I’ve guessed right just twice: The 1998 physics prize to Robert Laughlin, Horst Stormer, and Daniel Tsui for the fractional quantum Hall effect and the 2010 literature Prize to Mario Vargas Llosa for his rich, complex novels set in his native Peru.
Despite my poor record, I continue to speculate on who the winners will be. For one thing, it’s fun. But it’s also a worthwhile exercise for science editors like me who have to decide—sometimes daily—what research makes it into our publications and what doesn’t. Evaluating importance is part of the job.
The structure of chromatin
The prize for medicine or physiology will be the first to be announced, on Monday, 7 October. My guess is whoever has done the most to figure out how DNA is packed in cells that have nuclei. Stretched out, a strand of human DNA is 1.5 cm long. When it’s wound around proteins to form a chromosome—human chromosome 22, for example—its length is reduced to 2 μm. In the famous textbook Essential Cell Biology, the DNA–protein combo, called chromatin, is depicted in schematic diagrams like a zigzag string of beads. Someone—I’m not sure who—determined the molecular structure behind the schematics. They deserve a Nobel.
The physics prize will be announced the following day. Last year’s discovery of the Higgs boson looms largest. On the grounds of importance and impact, the discovery merits a Nobel, but who would receive it? Six theorists, of whom five are still alive, predicted the particle in 1964, yet the prize can be awarded to three people at most. And what about the teams who designed, built, and ran the accelerator and the two detectors? I don’t think the Higgs will win.
My friend and colleague, Bert Schwarzschild, disagrees. He predicts the prize will go to François Englert and Peter Higgs for their respective 1964 papers (Englert’s coauthor, Robert Brout, died in 2011) and to Tom Kibble for his single-author 1967 paper, “Symmetry breaking in non-Abelian gauge theories.” But the list omits the coauthors of Kibble’s 1964 paper, Gerald Guralnik and Carl Hagen. “It isn’t fair,” Bert admits.
There are precedents for not awarding a Nobel prize for important breakthroughs. Amazingly, the 1909 discovery of the atomic nucleus by Hans Geiger, Ernest Marsden, and Ernest Rutherford was overlooked. In 1977 Carl Woese and George Fox discovered a new domain of life—single-celled Archaea—that occupies the top level of the tree of life alongside Bacteria and Eukarya (organisms whose cells contain a nucleus). Woese died last year. The expansion of the universe, Earth’s liquid core, medical ultrasound, plastics have all missed out.
Iron-based superconductors
But I digress. In 2009 Douglas Natelson wrote wryly in his blog: “I used to think that I was the only condensed matter physicist not working on graphene. Now I realize I’m the only condensed matter physicist not working on graphene, iron pnictide superconductors, or topological insulators.”
One of the three hot topics that Natelson listed, graphene, has already been honored with a Nobel Prize. The other two are just as deserving. Choosing between them is tough. Based only on the seniority of the discovery, I favor iron-based superconductors and their discoverer, Hideo Hosono of Tokyo Institute of Technology, for this year’s physics prize.
Isotopic analysis
One of the first feature articles I edited for Physics Today was “Ancient stardust in the laboratory,” by Thomas Bernatowicz and Robert Walker, which appeared in the December 1997 issue. When I first received the article, editor-in-chief Stephen Benka asked me to add a new first paragraph to capture the excitement of it. Here’s what I wrote:
Amazingly, individual grains of dust from stars that existed before the Sun was born have made their way to Earth in meteorites. When subjected to a battery of cutting-edge laboratory techniques, these tiny grains provide thrilling new insights into such topics as the dynamics of supernova explosions, the age and chemical evolution of the Galaxy, fundamental nuclear physics and processes in the outer envelopes of stars. The path from dust grain to astrophysical insight is the subject of this article.
Sixteen years later I remain amazed by the power of isotopic analysis. Just last week, Sean Crowe of the University of Southern Denmark and his colleagues reported the results of their study of 3-million-year-old soil trapped in a rock formation in South Africa. By determining the abundance ratio of chromium-52 and chromium-53 in the soil, Crowe and his colleagues deduced that the Great Oxidation Event occurred 700 million years earlier than previously thought.
So my pick for the chemistry prize, which will be announced on Wednesday, is for the leaders of ion-probe isotopic analysis. In their Physics Today article, Bernatowicz and Walker cited their colleague, Ernst K. Zinner of Washington University in St Louis, as one pioneer. I expect the chemistry committee of Swedish Academy of Sciences could identify two others—if it shares my enthusiasm for the technology, that is.
Books, peace, and money
For the sake of completeness, I’ll guess who’ll win the other three prizes—literature, peace, and economics—although I admit I’m out of my depth. The literature prize is especially tricky because the committee that makes the choice considers novels, plays, and poetry from all over the world. Still, the committee reliably favors works that tackle big themes and display a social or political conscience.
Margaret Atwood, my pick for the literature prize, has written 14 novels, among them The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), The Blind Assassin (2000), and her latest, MaddAdam (2013). She also writes short fiction, poetry, and children’s books. CREDIT: BBC
To its credit, the committee does not turn up its collective nose at science fiction. Doris Lessing (2007) and Jean-Marie Le Clézio (2008) have both written books in the genre—as has Margaret Atwood, who’s my pick to join them as a literature laureate. Her novels tick all the committee’s boxes—and she’s deserving!
Unfortunately, my nominee for the peace prize died of a rare heart condition in 2010. US diplomat Richard Holbrooke was the lead negotiator for the Dayton peace accords, which ended the Bosnian War of 1992–95. The agreement he brokered remains in place. Bestowing the Peace prize on the two chairmen of the negotiations, Carl Bildt of Sweden and Igor Ivanov of Russia would be a fitting tribute to Holbrooke’s efforts.
As for the economics prize, all I can offer is the observation that dealing with the globalization of goods, services, and capital is one of the biggest challenges faced by societies. Whoever has shed the most economic light on that challenge gets my vote.
If you want to comment on my picks, please join the conversation taking place on Physics Today’s Facebook page.
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