Nobel predictions: Higgs boson not yet prize-worthy
— -- The physicists who predicted the existence of the elusive Higgs boson, or so-called God particle, can stop packing for Stockholm, at least this year, says a Nobel science prize prediction report.
Every year, David Pendlebury and his team at Thomson Reuters, the worldwide information-tracking firm, release their predictions for possible Nobel Prize winners in chemistry, physics and medicine. They rarely call the winners exactly but have a good track record in noting scientists who do go on to win the awards a few years later.
In this year's predictions, "it's too early for the Higgs boson team," Pendlebury says, despite the attention paid to the "God particle," first predicted in the 1960's. Two large teams at CERN's Large Hadron Collider facility reported a "Higgs-like" particle in their data this year, making the Higgs boson's theorists look like Nobelists-in-waiting. The Higgs boson is a subatomic particle that provides mass to other physics particles in our current understanding of how matter behaves on the most fundamental level.
Instead "quantum teleportation" inventors Charles Bennett, Gilles Brassard and William Wooters, or light-speed-slowing pioneers Stephen Harris and Lene Hau, look more like winners for the physics prize, he says. Those phenomena have been experimentally validated in recent years, while the CERN results are still new, with that lab calling their discovery "Higgs-like" in their announcement, hedging their bets for further tests to verify the find.
For a full list of possible winners, check out the 2012 "Citation Laureates" website (sciencewatch.com/nobel), which bases its predictions on the publishing record of leading scientists. The group looks for papers cited thousands of times more often than others as indicators of study authors likely to win the Nobel Prizes announced later this year. Some areas such as quantum physics or "epigenetics" in medicine, which looks at how environment alters gene activity, are "due" for a win, Pendlebury says.
Although science has become a more multidisciplinary team-oriented effort in recent decades, Pendlebury expressed confidence that the Nobel prizes would continue to go to three living scientists, as stipulated in the 1895 will of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, who founded the award. "The judges are very conservative and don't like to change things," he says.
And that means we can look forward to the prize announcements in October to continue. We'll see how the predictions turn out then.
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