Courtesy: Alison Tovey/IOPP

Here at Physics World we have had some luck with predicting who is going to win a Nobel Prize in Physics. One successful strategy is to identify top physicists and just keep predicting that they will win – and eventually they do!

For example, we picked Anton Zeilinger for the 2009, 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2019 prizes – and he won in 2022. Clearly, it was a mistake to give up on him in 2020.

In making our predictions we sometimes rely on an infographic that we have been updating for a decade or so. It shows the chronological progression of Nobel prizes in terms of fields of endeavour – such as condensed matter, particle and nuclear, quantum and more (see figure).

By staring at the infographic for far too long, we have convinced ourselves that there is a regular pattern of gaps between prizes in specific fields.…