More exciting to me and certainly more impactful to humanity than the NCAA, Nobel season is a great time to reflect on major advances in science. I’m going to walk through my top contenders for the Chemistry and Physics Prizes. While I’m interested in all the Nobel prize winners and their work – whether it is in one of the sciences or in literature – the Physics and Chemistry Prizes hold a special appeal to me as a scientist working somewhere between those two fields.

The chemists in the blogosphere generally have a better game on about the odds on the potential future laureates than the physicists. I am particularly intrigued by Chembark and The Curious Wavefunction‘s  predictions. Given a recent shift away from the bio-related topics, this might be a year to bet that way. I thus find myself in agreement with Chembark’s 6-1 odds on Pierre Chambon for nuclear hormone signalling. Moerner’s work on single molecule spectroscopy is also another favorite of mine, for which he won the Wolf Prize in 2008 and the Langmuir Prize in 2009. In Physics, a Wolf Prize is a very strong indicator of soon-to-come Nobel. I’m not sure if this is true for Chemistry or not.

The dark horse in this race, in my opinion, is Allen Bard, the noted electrochemist, for the discovery of electron transfer in biological systems. This would tickle the bio-partisans and recognize the crowning contribution by someone for whom a lifetime achievement award would not be unreasonable. Chembark is quoting 19-1 odds on Bard. I think the chances are higher.

Usually, no one from the physics community handicaps the Physics Nobel race like the chemists do theirs. Poor showing, my fellow physicists!  This year, however, there is a heavyweight contender for the prize. With the exciting results from the Large Hadron Collider, I think that the Nobel Committee will have a hard time ignoring nominations for Peter Higgs (of the eponymous boson) and Francois Englert. The Atlantic has made a case for one of the trio of Hagen, Guralnik, and Kibble, who also published extensively (and a case can be made for independently) on what we now refer to as the Higgs boson. All 5 of these men (and one other, deceased) shared the Sakurai prize for work on the Higgs, so their contribution has been recognized. I will predict that if the Academy presents a medal based on this work, it will be to Higgs and Englert alone. The only thing I see that can be argued against a Higgs win here is the relative recency of the results. The committee, which includes two particle physicists, (Brink and Bergström) might reasonably choose to wait a year to ensure a more thorough analysis of the LHC data.

If they choose to delay on an award for Peter Higgs, the field is fairly wide open. There are several strong contenders in this case. The leading contenders, in my opinion, are Anton Zeilinger, John Clauser, and Alain Aspect for discoveries around quantum entanglement. With Zeilinger’s recent paper in arXiv.org building on his 2007 work on quantum teleportation, its clear that a path exists towards development of a practical quantum communications system. Zeilinger won the Wolf Prize in 2010 for this work.

Last year’s Wolf Prize winners in Physics are also strong contenders. Maximilian Haider, Harald Rose, and Knut Urban received the Wolf Prize in 2011 for their work on aberration-corrected transmission electron microscopy. Bekenstein’s Wolf Prize winning work on the thermodynamics of black holes is certainly worthy of a prize, but I have a hard time seeing that this year.

In any case, October of 2012 is fast approaching. I can’t wait to find out who will get the call from Stockholm.