This Year's Nobel Prize In Physics

The 2023 Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to a team of scientists who created a ground-breaking technique using lasers to understand the extremely rapid movements of electrons, which were previously thought impossible to follow.

Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier “demonstrated a way to create extremely short pulses of light that can be used to measure the rapid processes in which electrons move or change energy,” the Nobel committee said when the prize was announced in Stockholm on Tuesday.

From CNN.

Usually, the Nobel Prize in Physics goes to someone who made a major theoretical advance. This year, however, the prize went to winners who developed a new experimental measurement technique.

This is fair. Experimentalists deserve their day in the sun and are absolutely critical to scientific advances in physics which are often under appreciated.

I wonder, however, if this choice doesn't also reflect ambivalence about which paths in the theoretical development of physics by physicists who are still alive and haven't yet received the prize, will turn out to be the right ones.