Nobel buzz 2007

It’s this time of the year again. The Nobel Prize in Physics will be awarded by the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences and Nobel Foundation on October 9 2007. Who will get it? That’s the question. Once again, Thomson Scientific is trying to predict the outcome of this year’s selection. They try to combine “worthy discoveries” with number of citations and “predictor prizes” to form their predictions. Or maybe they just want to show that the actual selection process is nothing of the above (after all, they totally got it wrong last year)? So far, their top three candidates are:

1. Sumio Iijima (carbon nanotubes)

2. Arthur McDonald and Yoji Totsuka (neutrino physics)

3. Martin J Rees (cosmology)

Personally, I think that the chances of Sumio Iijima look better then the rest — they just gave out an astrophysics prize last year with AMO and particle physics in the preceeding years…