The 1983 Nobel Prizes. Part 1. Physics and Chemistry Awards go to Chandrasekhar, Fowler and Taube

We have examined each group of annual Nobel Prize winners since 1979. Beginning with the 1982 awards, I we included data from the research fronts we identify each year for Science Citation Index” (SCP’ ). Briefly, a research front is a group of current papers that cite a cluster of “core” papers identified by co-citation clustering. These procedures have been described previously.2 By systematically reviewing our research front data from year to year, one maybe able to forecast fields that may eventually be acknowledged with a Nobel Prize. However, it is careless and fallacious to claim that citation analysis or any other method can predict the choice of the prize-awarding committees. Citation anaIysis, however, wi// identify individuals who are of Nobe[ c/ass.J From these groups, one might forecast winners for their fields once the prize-awarding committees choose to recognize those areas. This part of the essay will discuss the 1983 Nobel Prize in physics—awarded to Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, [University of Chicago, Illinois, and William A. Fowler, California Institute of Technology (CalTech), Pasadena—and the chemistry prize, awarded to Henry Taube, Stanford University, California. Part two will discuss the prizes in physiology or medicine, economics, and literature. Since we began work on this essay, the 1984 Nobel Prizes have been announced. Carlo Rubbia, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Center for European Nuclear Research (CERN), Geneva, and Simon van der Meer, also of CERN, won the physics prize, Their work led to the discovery of the W and Z particles, the communicators of weak nuclear interactions. ~ The 1984 prize in chemistry went to R. Bruce Merrifield, Rockefeller University, New York, for his revolutionary method of protein synthesis. It created completely new possibilities in the fields of peptide and protein chemistry.~ A future essay will discuss the work of each of these scholars.