Two for Two

Back in 2004 I made my first venture into Nobel Prize predictions, then decided to retire from that business. This year I came out of retirement with another prediction. After the posting, I consulted with experts who assured me that the right names were Perlmutter, Riess and Schmidt, something I thought I mentioned in a comment, but it appears that I didn’t, instead leaving this to Shantanu.

Congratulations to Perlmutter, Riess and Schmidt. The theoretical significance of their tour de force observational work remains still controversial, but it richly deserves the Nobel prize.

This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.

6 Responses to Two for Two

  1. Some Guy says:

    Yes, Shantanu nailed it. Riess’ presence at http://agenda.albanova.se/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=1125 this spring was a strong hint. What I find surprising is the unequivocal motivation, “for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae”. No room left at all for all the ongoing work on dark flows, anisotropies etc. The “scientific background” document, http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2011/sciback_fy_en_11.pdf , is also quite unequivocal, starting from the title. I may have to write something about the politics of it all… somewhere else, under my own name.

  2. SpearMarktheSecond says:

    Bravo, although perhaps the winners might have preferred a satellite devoted to dark energy measurements. Doubtful that the US political class will reverse the current course and give it to them based upon Scandinavian laurels.

    Now perhaps dark matter can get a price. Vera Rubin?

  3. Christopher Nubbles says:

    I really thought Guth was going to win it this year.

  4. Math Student says:

    No share for Weinberg for the prediction? 🙂

  5. Shantanu says:

    Christopher,
    We still don’t have any smoking gun evidence that inflation happened or if it did, what caused inflation. Inflation also has a whole set of conceptual problems (cd Steinhardt article from Sci. Am in 2011).

  6. John says:

    In the scientific justification of Nobel Prize there is the sentence “None of the alternative models … extra dimensions or modifications of general relativity, seem to convincingly account for all observations.” At the announcement video I can see Lars Brink one of the godfathers of string theory, he also seems to be a member of the Nobel Prize Committee. Does this mean he is getting doubts?

Comments are closed.