2009 Nobel Prize Predictions

It is that time of the year again when Thomson Reuters plays this game of predicting this year's Nobel Prize winners. Last year, they got the one for physics completely wrong! :)

Still, it's a fun game to play, and along the way, we recognize and mention those who are utterly deserving of the award. This year, for physics, the prediction falls onto:

* Yakir Aharonov of Chapman University in Orange, California, Tel Aviv University, and the University of South Carolina, and Michael Berry of the University of Bristol in Britain for their discovery of the Aharonov-Bohm Effect and the related Berry Phase. "It describes certain aspects of electromagnetics that violate classical descriptions of physics," Pendlebury said. "They are all in every physics text book now. It seems odd to me that they have not been recognized by the Nobel committee."

* John Pendry of Imperial College of Science and Technology in London, Sheldon Schultz of the University of California San Diego and David Smith of Duke University, whose prediction and discovery of negative refraction makes possible meta-materials, used to make "invisibility cloaks" to deflect various wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation.

* Juan Ignacio Cirac of the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany and Peter Zoller of the University of Innsbruck in Austria, whose work on quantum switches has made possible quantum computers.

All of them are good and worthy choices.

Zz.