Monday marks the beginning of Nobel Prize week. It may not generate the same speculative hype as Oscar season in the United States, but that hasn't stopped a handful of publications - including the Nobel Prize predicting site Thomas Reuters - from making their most educated guesses on this year's winners.
Nobel Prize week is actually an eight-day event in which a different winner is announced each week day in the categories of physiology/medicine, physics, chemistry, literature, peace, and economic sciences, according to nobelprize.org.
Two Americans and a German won the Nobel Prize in physiology/medicine for their work in demonstrating the process of chemical transport within a cell, as per nobelprize.org.
The confirmation of the Higgs boson particle will almost certainly be the discovery that wins the Nobel Prize in physics, according to NBC News and Scientific American; however, the question of who will get credit remains open.
The two biggest names associated with the Higgs boson, nicknamed "The God Particle" by some, are Peter Higgs and Francois Englert, who conducted their research separately, according to NBC News. Thousands of other scientists contributed to proving its existence.
"It's a nightmare of a choice, which is the way things go," said Thomson Reuters' David Pendlebury, whose site uses scientific data to predict Nobel Prize wines each year, told NBC News on Friday. "In many people's minds, it's not fair that the others are left out, but such are the rules of the Nobel Prize."
In chemistry, Thomas Reuters believes M.G. Finn, Valery V. Fokin and K. Barry Sharpless will win for discovering a new method of chemical synthesis. For economics, the site predicts two British and one Yale professor will win for advancing the accuracy of economic models.
For the hallmark of the event - the Nobel Peace Prize - Øivind Stenersen, an expert on the history of the peace prize specifically, told The Guardian he believes Denis Mukwege of the Democratic Republic of Congo will win. Mukwege has cared for "thousands of women gang-raped and tortured during the civil war," wrote The Guardian.
"They pick candidates they know will draw a lot of debate," Stenersen said. "They want discussions to happen, because those discussions will get us closer to knowing what we need to achieve peace. I'd be surprised if the award didn't go to this doctor."
Five names provide speculation for the literature prize, according The Guardian, including Norweigan, Spanish novelist Javíer Marías ,and Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. The movement to award Bob Dylan persists, though not legitimately said Michael Orthofer, managing editor, at the Complete Review and its Literary Saloon.
"Unless there's a diehard Dylan fan among the former laureates who keeps putting up his name, I would be surprised if he continues to figure among the eligible names," he told The Guardian. "Personally I can't imagine him ever getting the prize, or anywhere near the prize."
