The Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2014 was awarded jointly to Eric Betzig, Stefan W. Hell and William E. Moerner "for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy", the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced on Wednesday.

Four Chinese Americans, Ching W. Tang, Robert Tjian, Yang Pedong, and Zhang Shoucheng, on a list of possible winners drawn up by Thomson Reuter, sadly missed out. Some might think they not qualified to win the prize - but nothing could be further from the truth.The forecast drawn up by Thomson Reuter is entirely unofficial. The list serves only to analyze and estimate according to the citation score of scientists’ papers.

But since 2002, 36 scientists on the list have succeeded in winning the prestigious award. 9 of them have won the award in the same year as they appeared on the list, and another 16 potential winners received the honor within the following two years. Thus, social media take the list as an accurate guide to likely winners.

Zhang Shoucheng, for instance, who featured on the Thomson Reuter list, has won several international awards in recent years, including the Guggenheim fellowship, the Alexander von Humboldt research prize, the Europhysics prize, and the Dirac Medal and Prize. His success in taking the Europhysics prize in 2010 has led many people to conclude that he will take a Nobel Prize sooner or later.

In contrast with the Oscars and other international awards that attract public attention, the Nobel Prize refuses to reveal its candidate list and sets a 50-year-long moratorium on revealing this information. So we must wait for half a century to find out which candidates were on the short-list.

The article is edited and translated from《看清纳米世界 三科学家齐摘诺奖》  , source: The Beijing News, author: Han Xuyang