The peace prize seems more political than the sciencey ones. As Side Show Bob pointed out while disputing the crime of
attempted murder, "they don't hand out a Nobel Prize for Attempted Chemistry!.. "
Anyway the credibility of the award does not deter the accomplishments of those recipients.. This is great work, and the discovery would be it's own reward. This is some serious sh!t.. (maybe these guys know the answer to Marks reverse spinning galaxies??)
Three astronomers won the Nobel prize on Tuesday for discovering that the universe is apparently being blown apart by a mysterious force that cosmologists now call dark energy. They are Saul Perlmutter of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., Brian P. Schmidt of the Australian National University in Weston Creek, Australia, and Adam G. Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
They were the leaders of two competing teams of astronomers who were trying to use the exploding stars known as Type 1a supernovae as cosmic lighthouses to measure the expansion of the universe. They were hoping to measure how fast the universe, which has been expanding since its fiery birth in the Big Bang 14 billion years ago, was slowing down, and thus to find out if its ultimate fate was to fall back together in what is called a Big Crunch or not. Instead, they reported in 1998, it was inexplicably speeding up, a conclusion that nobody would have accepted if not for the fact that both groups wound up with the same answer.
Feynman also won the award, and his attitude towards it is brilliant..
