The Nobel Prize Medal for Physics and Chemistry
The Nobel Prizes will be announced next week and a rash of predictions are appearing around the Web. A few weeks back, Travis Brooks looked at whether you could predict Nobel Prize winners based on citation counts and concluded that you couldn't now, although you used to be able to. However, that won't stop people trying.
Thomson Reuters, known for its work in science citation databases, and with a strong interest in proving the usefulness of those databases, has its annual prediction of winners out now. You can decide whether choosing three different options for each prize is cheating as a prediction!
Their three possibilities for the Physics Prize are graphene, an intriguing and potentially extremely useful form of carbon; dark matter discovery, a topic of much discussion here in symmetry; and elucidation of the structures of materials that are not quite traditional crystals and which have unusual properties, specifically Penrose tilings and quasicrystals.
At symmetry, we are most interested in the Physics prize but also pay close attention to the others as the overlap between physics and the other science fields has been substantial in previous years.
So who do you think might win the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics, or the other prizes for physics-related research? Get your predictions here in the comments fast to stake your claim for bragging rights!
