The 2015 Nobel Prize for Physics: could it be Vera Rubin?
Just a quick note to point out that the 2015 Nobel Prize for Physics will be announced next Tuesday, 6th October. According to the Nobel Foundation’s website the announcement will be made “no earlier than 11.45am” Swedish time, which is one hour ahead of British Summer Time.
As is the case every year there’s quite a lot of speculation going on about who might garner this year’s prize. There’s a piece in Nature and another in Physics World, to give just two examples. There’s also the annual prediction from Thomson Reuters, which has never to my knowledge been correct (although some of the names they have suggested for a given year have won it in a subsequent year); perhaps they will strike lucky this time round.
For myself, I’ll just say that I think Vera Rubin is conspicuous by her absence from the list of Nobel Physics laureates – her classic work on galactic rotation and the evidence for dark matter in galaxies surely deserves an award, possibly alongside Kent Ford. Most Nobel Prizes are awarded for work done decades before the year of the award; the research in this case was mostly done in the 1970s. I think recognition is long overdue. I’m biased in favour of astronomy, of course, but my fingers will be crossed that Vera Rubin’s time will come on Tuesday!
I’m not going to open a book – even Ladbrokes stopped taking bets on the Nobel Prize for Physics some years ago! – but I’d be interested to hear opinions through the comments box…
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In the Dark 
October 5, 2015 at 8:43 am
That didn’t stop them with the “accelerating Universe”!
October 5, 2015 at 12:08 pm
Anton Zeilinger would suit me.
October 5, 2015 at 12:53 pm
Yes. Aspect, Zeilinger & Clauser are the other three likely names.
October 5, 2015 at 4:01 pm
Aspect was first to test Bell inequalities, but to my knowledge he and Clauser did only that whereas Zeilinger is also a pioneer in quantum computing.
October 5, 2015 at 1:54 pm
Yes, that may be one reason she’s out of favour with the establishment.
October 5, 2015 at 4:38 pm
For GR, how about Irwin Shapiro for proposing and carrying out a 4th test of GR (since named after him). Although now Shapiro delay might seem totally obvious, it took 50 years since inception of GR
to propose this and nowadays it has been used not just as a tool to test GR but also as an astrophysical tool to measure masses of neutron stars in binary systems.
Shantanu
October 5, 2015 at 5:54 pm
I’ve never quite been sure if a DM Nobel is justified for Rubin (surely paired with Ford, her regular collaborator). The problem is that all their work is based on optical rotation curves and so the data inevitably stop just as things are getting interesting. There is a strong case that it’s only 21cm rotation curves to >2 times the optical radius that make the point robustly. Even in 1980, Rubin & Ford say “accurate 21cm velocity mapping beyond the optical image will be crucial in determining the outlying mass distributions for these galaxies”. In contrast, the 21cm work of Bosma in 1978 already allows him to say “The mass models indicate that in the outer parts of a spiral the mass-to-light ratio is higher than in the inner parts. Perhaps a substantial fraction of the mass is not distributed in a disk at all. The ratio of total mass to neutral hydrogen mass tends to remain more or less constant in the outer parts”. That’s rather closer to “there’s DM out there” than any statement I’ve seen in a Rubin-Ford paper (although I’d be happy if some blog reader knows a quote where they do make such a claim prior to 1978).
October 5, 2015 at 6:43 pm
It’s certainly the case that 21cm rotation curves demonstrate most clearly that there’s considerable mass where there’s negligible light, but the Nobel Committee tends to give awards to people who pioneered a field, which I think is a far assessment of Rubin-Ford.
October 6, 2015 at 10:56 am
Well, the announcement has just been made, The Nobel Prize for Physics 2015 was awarded jointly to Takaaki Kajita and Arthur B. McDonald for discovery of neutrino oscillations.