[VLM]

"aren't backed up by experiment"

Sadly, I was expecting arguments by string theorists along the lines of the longbets.org bet for $2000 that no one is going to get a Nobel for anything related to string theory, but I guarantee we'll get ten times as much "Obama" instead.

Can't we please argue about that instead of making fun of our "concentration camp warmonger in chief", maybe just in one thread please?

[bdg]

This is likely among the last prizes we'll see in physics for a long time that has evidence to back it up.

The theory is so far ahead of the practice that things we think we understand just can't be tested in reasonable times. Look at what it took just to get the Boson data.

[jessriedel]

There's lots of things under the physics umbrella out there, and the Nobel committee has refrained for giving a prize for string theory or other speculative BSM physics for decades; there's no reason to think they'll change, especially given the recent downturn in the popularity of those fields. The Nobel isn't restricted to fundamental physics. You can look at the awards from the recent years to get a sense of what gets honored when there are no fundamental advances: laser spectroscopy, magnetoresistance, optical fibers, semiconductors, graphene, etc.

[L_Rahman]

The graphene one still rubs everyone in the materials science community the wrong way. I haven't had a single professor bring it up in class without snorting derisively at the fact that the guys who discovered won a Nobel.

This means they're either really smart people who saw something the rest of the community didn't or lucked into something that they might not actually deserve. I'm not sure yet which is true.

[rubidium]

I must emphatically disagree with your statement. There are plenty of very hard theoretical problems that experiments are regularly shedding new light on. The entire field of condensed matter and most of atomic, molecular and optical physics progress by both theory and experiment figuring out problems together.

Perhaps by "physics" you meant "particle physics"... but even in that field your statement would be hard to justify.

[theorique]

This is likely among the last prizes we'll see in physics for a long time that has evidence to back it up.

Not exactly. In condensed matter physics, theory and experiment are much more tightly coupled, and many experiments can be done on a table top with a few tens to a few hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment. Not all physics is multi-billion dollar colliders.

[debacle]

...what?

Edit: Ah, after reading the rest of the comments, I guess I have to agree with you.