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More Nobel Speculation

By drorzel on September 28, 2006.

Blogging will be light today, as I'm giving an exam and making another magnet coil. I've also been working on getting the Blogger SAT Challenge results ready to go-- big roll-out coming soon!-- so I haven't been able to pre-schedule posts.

All I have time for this morning is a quick follow-up to yesterday's betting pool post, noting some other people trying to guess the winner's of this year's dynamite money.

First, guessing the Nobel winners is the topic for this week's Ask a ScienceBlogger (archival link here), so you can see what my colleagues have to say. Not much, yet, but maybe they'll get there.

Next, Thomson Scientific tries to predict likely winners based on citation activity (not surprisingly, they run one of the big citation-tracking services). Their suggestions for the Physics prize:

  • Guth, Linde and Steinhardt for inflationary cosmology
  • Fert and Gruenberg for Giant Magnetoresistance
  • Desurvire, Nazakawa, and Payne for erbium-doped lasers

From that list, I'd have to go with Fert and Gruenberg, as there hasn't been a pure condensed matter Nobel for a few years. Lasers and astrophysics have won more recently, so I'd give the condensed matter folks a slight edge on that basis.

They're also running a poll, which has the laser guys in the lead. The results are still pretty preliminary-- last night, cosmology was ahead.

Finally, a dark horse candidate, from my email inbox:

RE: Submission of formal presentation to the Nobel Prize Committee of the Scientific Discovery of the 4th Dimension

To Whom It May Concern

Dear Sir/Madam,

I am a Physicist (BS 1995), a student at WESTERN WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY and I have made an important scientific discovery - The 4th Dimension. I will not get into scientific details, but a lot of our science will improve with the acceptance and use of this new discovery.

This was helpfully sent to pretty much everyone in the world with a physics department affiliation, I think. Anybody want to vote for this guy? Uncle Al?

That's it for now. Off to give an exam-- whee!

Tags
Physics

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Fert's name comes up a lot at conferences--for good reason. He has a lifetime of excellent work, and his big discovery "GMR" is very important in both technological as well as academic circles. For most of the last 10 years, you couldn't buy a computer without it.

Grunberg is right up there with him.

Notably missing is Stuart Parkin...