(Courtesy: Nobel Foundation).
By Hamish Johnston
The 2008 Nobel Prize for Physics is set to be announced at 10.45am BST on Tuesday 7 October and we are starting to get excited here at Physics World about who will scoop this year’s gong.
Here are a few of our picks…
News Editor Michael Banks is putting his money on Daniel Kleppner at MIT for inventing the hydrogen maser.
Reporter Jon Cartwright is tipping Berkeley’s Saul Perlmutter and Brian Schmidt at the Australian National University for their discovery that the universe’s rate of expansion is increasing…leading to the concept of dark energy.
Reviews and Careers Editor Margaret Harris is supporting MIT’s Alan Guth and Andrei Linde at Stanford University for their work on inflation.
Editor Matin Durrani has as his dark horse Chapman University’s Yakir Aharanov for the Aharanov-Bohm effect and Michael Berry at the University of Bristol for the Berry phase — the AB effect being related to the Berry phase.
And what about me? Well, after spending Tuesday at the “Pendry Fest”, I’m going for John Pendry of Imperial College and Duke University’s David Smith for their prediction and discovery of negative refraction.
I also asked a few “friends of physicsworld.com” for their predictions.
New Journal of Physics publisher Tim Smith has two favourites: One being John Pendry and the other Roger Penrose at Oxford University and Cambridge’s Stephen Hawking for their contributions to general relativity theory and cosmology.
Finally, former Physics World editor Peter Rodgers — who successfully predicted last year’s prize — is tipping Atsuto Suzuki from Japan’s SuperKamiokande experiment and Art MacDonald from SNO in Canada for their work on neutrino oscillations.
So, who do you think will win this year?
