Another weird Nobel note: When we were talking about this yesterday at work, a colleague noted that this is one of several prizes awarded for observations based on radio astronomy (Penzias and Wilson, and a couple of things to do with pulsars), but we couldn't think of any given for optical astronomy. There's even the 2004 prize for neutrino and X-ray observations, but we couldn't think of any astronomers who won for work done using visible light.
This probably isn't significant, but it was sort of interesting. Or were we missing something really obvious?
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In which we do a little imaginary Q&A to explain the significance of Tuesday's Nobel Prize to Dave Wineland and Serge Haroche.
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Some people have predicted that eventually there will be a Nobel Prize for the discovery of the accelerating Universe, which was all done in the optical. Since I was involved in that, I have my own musings on it.
I might also give a Nobel Prize to Vera Rubin for observational evidence for dark matter-- although I suppose I should re-review the history of the field to make sure that she really is "the one". (Of course there's also Zwicky, but he's dead.)
-Rob
Nuts -- Chad, I failed to close a link properly in the previous comment. Could you fix it?
-Rob
According to the entry on Hubble in wikipedia, astronomy wasn't considered a part of physics for Nobel Prize purposes until 1953, the year of Hubble's death. That probably has more than a little to do with this.
You can find lots of people who still don't think that astronomy is part of physics... many place it under the "stamp collecting" category. A few years ago, I had an elder memeber of my department express to me the misconception that astronomers are mostly cataloging stuff.
Old memes die hard.
-Rob
Hubble not winning was of course a travesty. Rob is certainly right that the acceleration of the universe will win at some point. I would love to see a joint prize to Vera Rubin (for discovering dark matter in galaxies) and Wendy Freedman (for measuring the Hubble constant). If you know anyone on the Nobel committee, feel free to mention that.
I imagine that the recently released Bullet Cluster results have at least a small chance of winning some day, and that work is at least partly in the optical. Probably not before the cosmic acceleration work does, though, and ideally not before or at worst jointly with Vera Rubin's work.
Yeah, when the accelerating-expansion news broke, I remembering thinking that it was a lock for the Physics prize if it held up. It has everything going for it - significance, fundamental nature, and the extra unexpected what-the-hell-does-that-mean quality. The RNA interference work that won this year was in the same category.