By Hamish Johnston

There’s just 18 hours and 21 minutes until the physics Nobel is announced – or so says the tacky countdown on the Nobel Foundation website.

So there’s time for just one more Nobel-related blog entry.

Yesterday’s Observer had an interesting article about the British astrophysicist Fred Hoyle, who famously didn’t share the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics with Willy Fowler and Subramanyan Chandrasekhar.

Fowler bagged his half for his work on nucleosynthesis – the process by which stars create heavy elements out of hydrogen. He was apparently shocked to learn that his long-time collaborator Hoyle was snubbed by the Nobel committee.

Why? According to the science writer Robin McKie, it’s because Hoyle believed, among other things, that outbreaks of flu are sometimes caused by microbes from outer space.

Should you win a Nobel if your views aren’t always conventional? The answer is apparently no.

You can read more here.