2011 Nobel Prize Predictions

Update: wrong on both counts! Physics went to Perlmutter, Schmidt, and Riess for their work studying the expansion of the universe — not a big surprise, they had it coming. Chemistry went to Shechtman for discovering quasicrystals — huge surprise! The fact that Shechtman won a Nobel Prize itself isn’t so surprising; after all, his discovery overturned much of the standard lore in crystallography. What is surprising is that he won the Chemistry, not Physics, prize; his discovery was more of a physics one, and my guess is that many (most?) chemists hadn’t even heard of him until a few days ago.

Even though the Nobel Prizes can be pretty surprising sometimes — did anyone guess Geim and Novoselov last year for the Physics prize? — it’s still fun to try to predict who will win.

Several of the recent Physics prizes have been for applied solid-state things (giant magnetoresistance in 2007, fiber-optics/CCDs in 2009, graphene in 2010). If this trend continues, John and Yablonovitch are good contenders for their work in photonics, or Ohno for his work on dilute magnetic semiconductors, or Haider, Rose, and Urban for their work on electron microscopy. If the committee decides that it’s time for something new, I think Aspect, Clauser, and Zeilinger are good contenders for their work on quantum entanglement, or, as I’ve previously predicted, Aharonov and Berry for their work on quantum topological and geometrical phases.

The Chemistry prize doesn’t seem to follow a trend, which makes it more difficult to predict. Some strong contenders are: Zare for his work using lasers for spectroscopy; Moerner for his work on single-molecule spectroscopy; and Matyjaszewski for developing ATRP.

So, completely randomly, my predictions for this year are:

• Physics: Aharonov and Berry; backup prediction: Haider, Rose, and Urban
• Chemistry: Zare; backup prediction: Matyjaszewski

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