Russia Eyes Nobel Prize in Physics

(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – October 7, 2014) Soviet scientists may be among the laureates for the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics for promulgating a theory on “the first tremors of the Big Bang” that was empirically proven this Marсh, Rosbalt news agency reported.

Soviet physicist Alexei Starobinsky was the first to introduce the theory of an inflationary era of the universe in 1979. In 1981, American scientist Allan Guth proposed “cosmic inflation” as a scientific term, and one year later another Soviet physicist, Andrei Linde, proposed his own version of the theory.

The three received the Kavli Prize – often considered a precursor to the Nobel Prize – in astrophysics this year for their part in “pioneering the theory of cosmic inflation.”

The theory gained credence on March 17, when the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announced that researchers from the BICEP2 telescope collaboration had found the first evidence of cosmic inflation.

Ahead of Tuesday’s announcement of the winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics, Russian media reports expressed hope that Starobinsky and Linde would receive recognition for their roles in developing the theory.

However, the theory and the scientists were not listed among the likely recipients by the Thomson Reuters ScienceWatch website, widely considered an authority in Novel Prize predictions.