Nobel forecasts

The Nobel prize for physics will be announced on Tuesday October 7, 2025. As a warm up exercise in preparing for this event, I will dedicate this post to some scientists who missed out on a Nobel.

1. Nikola Tesla: His greatest and most enduring discovery was the alternating current (AC) motor and its use for electrification of modern societies. He made many other discoveries, including some of the first wirelessly controlled machines and electrical charging at a distance. Although he won a large number of prizes and medals, he was never awarded the Nobel. Theories ascribe this to his idiosyncratic and critical personality and his opposition to quantum physics and relativity.

   
   

2. Arnold Sommerfeld: Sommerfield's contributions lay in significantly extending the Bohr model of the atom using ideas from classical mechanics, before Schrodinger and Heisenberg ushered in the new quantum mechanics. The lack of a Nobel is ascribed to the absence of a single pathbreaking achievement on his part. Consolation can perhaps be found from i) the Google claim that Sommerfeld holds the record for being nominated the most times (84) for the physics Nobel and ii) four of his students - Heisenberg, Pauli, Debye and Bethe - won Nobels.

   
   

3. S. N. Bose: He was responsible for developing Bose-Einstein statistics (particles obeying these statistics are called bosons in his honor) and gave his name to the Bose-Einstein condensate. Apparently his nomination was examined and found wanting by the physicist Oscar Klein, the expert appointed by the Nobel committee. Some blame for the non-award is also given to Bose's complete indifference to honors and the consequent lack of advocacy and political support for his candidature.

   
   

4. Lise Meitner: Meitner (along with her nephew Otto Frisch) identified (and named) nuclear fission from the experimental data of Hahn and Strassmann. Apart from being a fundamental phenomenon in physics, this of course forms now the basis of military, commercial and scientific technologies: it was a monumental discovery. She was nominated for the Physics (30 times) as well as Chemistry (19 times) Nobels. That she was not awarded could well be ascribed to sexism as well as antisemitism.

5. Georges Lemaitre: He was the first person to relate astronomical observations to the expansion of the universe, and hence was the progenitor of what is now called the Big Bang theory. Guesses as to why he was not awarded the physics Nobel range from astronomy being not so well recognized at the time to lack of experimental evidence for the Big Bang in those early days.

   
   

6. C. S. Wu: She performed the first experiments showing parity violation in nature - the fact that the laws of physics were not always mirror-symmetric. This fundamental discovery won the theorists C. N. Yang and T. D. Lee, who had predicted it, a Nobel. Wu was excluded, a fact some put down to pure sexism, but the real issue was likely more complicated.

   
   

7. Edwin Hubble: Indisputably a giant in astronomy, he experimentally established that there were galaxies beyond our own (the Milky Way) and that they were receding, since the universe is expanding. His exclusion is also ascribed to the fact that astronomy was not recognized as a field by the Nobel committee (apparently the first Nobel prize to target astronomy directly was awarded in 1974, see below).

   
   

8. E.C.G. Sudarshan: Sudarshan's Nobel-worthy contribution involved an explanation of the weak nuclear force. This historically preceded, but was overshadowed by, a paper on the same subject by Feynman and Gell-Mann. No one was awarded a Nobel for this exact work, but several Nobels were given out for advances in understanding of the weak force.

   
   

9. Jocelyn Bell Burnell: She was the graduate student who identified the first pulsar. Burnell did not make the list of Nobel awardees (Martin Ryle and Antony Hewish, her PhD advisor) in 1974 for the discovery, both for reasons of sexism as well as academic low rank (professors, not graduate students, were supposed to get Nobel prizes). Happy to report that both ceilings were later broken by Donna Strickland.

   
   

10. Vera Rubin: She found evidence for dark matter. She was the first to show that galaxies must contain large quantities of invisible matter - or else the gravitational pull keeping their stars in orbit cannot be accounted for. Reasons proposed for why she was not awarded the Nobel range from sexism to lack of definitive experimental evidence for dark matter.

Afterword

Soon: predictions for the 2025 Physics Nobel!