Nobel prize physics to be announced

Discoveries of planets orbiting stars outside the solar system, efforts to better understand the weather and work on carbon tubes are among the discoveries that could win the Nobel Prize in physics today.

But the prize, one of the original five outlined in the will of Alfred Nobel, is one of the most difficult to predict, given the complexity of science involved for an award with a wide latitude of subjects to touch on.

It will be announced in Stockholm, Sweden.

“Physics is a tough one,” said David Pendlebury, of research services at Thomson Scientific, which analyses the work, citations and experience of scores of possible Nobel laureates and conducts an online poll to see who the likely winners could be.

“We have a real challenge, which is to make a prediction and assume or hope or something that these few people will win it that year,” he said.

The company predicted that the winners of this year’s medicine prize would win, but last year.

“What happens is we have picked people who go on in subsequent years to win the Nobel Prize.”

This year, Thomson Scientific singled out British cosmologist and astrophysicist Martin Rees for his work studying cosmic microwave background radiation and how galaxies form; Sumio Iijima, of Meijo University in Nagoya, Japan, for his work in nanoscience; and Canadian Arthur McDonald and Tokyo’s Yoji Totsuka for their work on solar and atmospheric neutrinos.

Others tipped as contenders include Polish-born Alexander Wolszczan, Canadian Dale Frail and Switzerland’s Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz for their discovery and documentation of planets that orbit stars outside of a solar system.

Whomever wins, it is likely to be someone whose primary work was completed years ago and seen it serve as a foundation for future study.

“Often the prizes are awarded for work that was done many decades ago,” Pendlebury said. “My impression is that there is a large backlog of worthy recipients.”

Edward Lorenz, a meteorology professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is a possible contender for his discovery of a butterfly effect related to the study of weather and its patterns during the 1960s and 1970s.

He found, according to the American Physical Society, that “systems that are so sensitive to measurement that their output appears random, even though there is an underlying order”.

The butterfly effect, according to the American Physical Society’s APS News on its website, was a “serendipitous discovery that subsequently spawned the modern field of chaos theory and changed forever the way we look at nonlinear systems like the weather”.

Lorenz’s studies of the dynamics of atmospheric circulation has given better understanding to what is called the chaotic behaviour of modelling weather systems using mathematics. He was honoured with the 1991 Kyoto Prize for basic sciences for his work

“The principle contribution has been to recognise that the weather is chaotic, meaning that small undetectable differences in the present weather can” throw off single forecasts, he told The Associated Press.

His work has been implemented by forecasters worldwide to create ensemble forecasting, a process whereby “instead of making a single weather forecast you make a whole bunch of them, or an ensemble ... each with a slightly different assumption as to what the present weather is and see how they diversify from each other”.

Last year, Americans John Mather and George Smoot won for their work examining the infancy of the universe, studies that have aided the understanding of galaxies and stars and increasing support for the Big Bang theory of the beginning of the universe.

Yesterday, two American scientists, Mario Capecchi and Oliver Smithies, and Briton Sir Martin Evans, won the 2007 Nobel Prize in medicine for groundbreaking discoveries that led to a powerful technique for manipulating mouse genes.

The widely used process has helped scientists use mice to study heart disease, diabetes, cancer, cystic fibrosis and other diseases.

It was the first of six awards that will be announced this week, followed by prizes for physics, chemistry, literature, peace and economics.

The peace award is announced in Oslo, while the other prizes – medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and economics – are announced in Stockholm.

The prizes, each of which carries a cash prize of 10 million Swedish kronor, or about £750,000, were established in the will of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel.

They were first handed out in 1901.

The Nobel prizes are always presented to the winners on the December 10 anniversary of the death of its creator.