Working for an The 2006 Nobel Laureates will be announced on Monday, October 2. Any early guesses as to who this year's honorees will be?...
No.
To be precise, on monday the boring old medicine prize will be announced. Things don't really get exciting until tuesday... and the process doesn't finish until oct 13.
The Academy learned a long time ago what NASA knows well, you need to spread things around the news cycle. Except the Norwegians, who clearly don't understand yet that you never make a big announcement on fridays - don't they realise journalists have lives!
Serious guesses?
No idea about Medicine; one of the other sciblings dissected that.
I expect the Peace Prize will be another political nod to a good cause. If they really wanted to tweak things, give it to Clinton for the Global Initiative - or Clinton and Gore shared for CGI and Inconvenient Truth... ;-)
In physics, rule number one is to not second guess the committee, because it annoys them and they are contrarians. There are a lot of interesting AMO possibilities, I'm sure; I think particle physics is in a dry patch, but it is always possible to dig into old accomplishments; it would be interesting but premature to give it to Shor and one or two others for quantum computing...
On my side of the field, some cosmologists have a good claim - both for WMAP and for some of the theory, but it may be impossible to find an acceptable combination of three or fewer awardees.
I'm tempted to say "planet discovery", and I know which combination of three people ought to get it, but the Academy may decide planets are outside their purview, or that they can't settle on a combination of three people deserving of the prize (I'd go with Alex, Michel and Didier, for what it is worth - although a case can be made to have separate "techniques" and "discovery" prizes).
Comments
If you're thinking of WMAP, methinks you may need to go back to COBE. And that opens quite a nest of vipers ....
The only time I ever correctly predicted was in 2004. I was visiting Columbia astro at the time, and people were quite impressed with my foresight. Had to confess that I had been saying "Gross, Politzer, Wilczek" every year for the previous 4 years ... eventually I had to get it right!
Posted by: Scott H. | September 27, 2006 10:05 AM
Ah, yes. My bad. It'd have to go back to COBE. Arguably WMAP was the confirmation needed to make COBE worthy...
Yes, picking which 1-3 should get it would be an interesting challenge. Any combination would leave a number of people justifiably feeling unfairly left out. Hard with this big project science stuff.
I just hope any astrophysicist feeling left out would have the sense not to take out ads in the NYT explaining the injustice. Actually I need not fear, I don't think astrophysicists can afford ads in the NYT - leave that to medics.
Posted by: Steinn Sigurdsson | September 27, 2006 10:19 AM
The theory side may be easier - Bond & Efstathiou started it if my
non-specialists recall is correct.
Posted by: Brad H | September 27, 2006 1:10 PM
Silk? Kaiser? Peebles? Wilson?
Some obscure Russian who I am sure did it first in a journal nobody read.
Someone else I just offended by overlooking...
Posted by: Steinn Sigurdsson | September 27, 2006 1:22 PM
Semiautomatically predicted candidates:
http://motls.blogspot.com/2006/09/nobel-prizes-2006.html
Posted by: Lubos Motl | September 27, 2006 7:55 PM
Well, damn. They went into that viper's nest after all!
Posted by: Scott H. | October 3, 2006 9:52 AM