CMS Collaboration / CERN

The Large Hadron Collider's CMS Collaboration gets its collective picture taken in front of a full-scale picture of the CMS detector at Europe's CERN particle physics lab. More than 3,000 scientists, engineers and students are involved in the CMS Collaboration, and just about that many more are involved in the collaboration for the LHC's other primary detector, ATLAS.

The Higgs boson received nary a mention at this year's Nobel Prize proceedings — and although the Higgs hunt has been the biggest news in physics over the past year, there are good reasons for the silence. Next year, however, the Nobel committee could have a huge Higgs hassle on its hands. And maybe that's a good thing.

Some observers think the conundrum surrounding a potential physics prize for the Higgs boson could lead the Nobel committee to make some long-overdue changes. And that, in turn, could change the public perception of how science is done.

First, here's the main reason why this year's discovery of a "Higgs-like particle" wasn't Nobel-worthy this year, even though it validated a 40-year quest: The key breakthrough came to light in July, when the teams behind the Large Hadron Collider's two main experiments — ATLAS and CMS — declared that they had enough data to merit an official discovery of a new subatomic particle. That's well past the traditional deadline for nominations, and although deadlines can be bent, the findings still need to be firmed up.

MIT physicist Frank Wilczek, who won a share of the 2004 Nobel Prize for his theoretical work on the strong nuclear force, said as much in an interview with LiveScience's Clara Moskowitz: "There are ways to stretch the rules, but evidently the relevant decision-makers felt that there was not sufficient reason to do so in this case."

Wilczek added that a Nobel Prize recognizing the theoretical underpinnings behind the Higgs boson was "the odds-on favorite for next year."

Too soon?
Usually, the committee in charge of awarding the physics prize waits until a breakthrough becomes so much a part of the scientific mainstream that there's no doubt about its truth and its value. That's the way it was this year, when French physicist Serge Haroche and American physicist David Wineland were honored for work in quantum optics that they pioneered 20 years ago.

When it comes to the Higgs, however, the clock is ticking: British physicist Peter Higgs —who lent his name to the theory, the field and the particle that would explain the origins of particle mass — is 83 years old. Other contributors to the theory are of a similar age. The theory itself was developed in the 1960s, and the real marvel is that Higgs and his colleagues were proven so right, so long after they came up with the idea.

But tradition dictates that the prize can be shared by no more than three individuals, who all have to be alive (although that rule was bent last year). Besides Peter Higgs, who should be in on the glory? Caltech theoretical physicist Sean Carroll, who has just finished a book about the Higgs quest titled "The Particle at the End of the Universe," says Belgian physicist Francois Englert is the best candidate for the second spot. Several others have valid claims on the third spot, however. And then, how about recognizing the thousands of physicists who worked on the LHC collaborations?

This is the sort of quandary that has tied physicists in knots for years. Wilczek himself has said he's using the "no more than three" rule as a key plot device in a murder mystery he's writing, tentatively titled "The Attraction of Darkness." It's about a team of four physicists who discover the true nature of dark matter, and find themselves up for a Nobel Prize. "One of the four dies, supposedly a suicide, but then, maybe not," he told The New York Times.

Do the right thing
The way Carroll sees it, the Higgs hassle provides a perfect opportunity for the Nobel committee members to change their tradition — and ruin the premise of Wilczek's novel in the process.

"They can do the right thing, and stop insisting that only three people can win it," Carroll told me. "Maybe that's something they can talk about over the next 365 days."

Carroll isn't alone on this: This week, Scientific American's editors urged the Nobel Foundation to change its ways, either by merely throwing out the "no more than three" rule, or by allowing the prize to be awarded to groups as well as individuals. Etienne Klein, a physicist at France's Atomic Energy Commission, was quoted as saying the Nobel committee should "take a gamble" and award a Nobel to Higgs, Englert and Europe's CERN particle physics center, which manages the LHC. Columbia University's Peter Woit, the blogging mathematician behind "Not Even Wrong," favored going with CERN plus the ATLAS and CMS collaborations.

Some might think recognizing groups rather than individuals would represent a dilution of Nobel prestige — but it can easily be argued that the change would bring the scientific prizes in line with the practice for the Nobel Peace Prize, which is routinely awarded to organizations ranging from the International Committee of the Red Cross (1917, 1944, 1963) to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007).

The change could also shift the popular perception of the scientific process — away from the image of a scientist slaving away alone in a basement lab, and toward a more complex picture of scores, hundreds or thousands of researchers working together, connected via global networks. In short, the picture that actually reflects how science is usually done nowadays.

Do you agree? If not, why not? If so, what's the best way to convince the Nobel committee to make a noble change? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

Correction for 4:40 p.m. ET Oct. 11: I originally wrote that Belgian physicist Francois Englert was French. That error has been corrected. Pardonnez-moi s'il vous plaît!

More about the Nobel and the Higgs:

• Nobel physics prize highlights quantum optics
• Chemists win Nobel for study of protein receptors
• Medicine prize recognizes stem cell breakthroughs
• The art and science of guessing a Nobel Prize
• Sean Carroll on what lies beyond the Higgs boson

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

What's dark energy? In this illustration, the mysterious repulsive force is represented as a smooth purple grid that overwhelms the effects of gravity (represented by a lumpy green grid).

Most of the research recognized by a Nobel Prize has to do with solutions, but this year's physics prize highlights a problem that's been bugging scientists for more than a decade. And there may be more such problems to chew on in the years ahead.

"The way science makes progress is through an interplay between theory and observation," Sean M. Carroll, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology, told me today. But when it comes down to theory vs. observation, "observations always win," he said.

As an example, take the research that won today's Nobel Prize for physics: When the three physicists who won the award started charting the brightness of distant supernovae, they expected to find out how much the expansion of the universe was slowing down, in accord with the accepted theories for cosmic evolution. Instead, they were surprised to find that the expansion rate was speeding up.

"We thought this would be an interesting experiment to do, but we didn't know it would be this interesting," one of today's Nobel laureates, Johns Hopkins University astrophysicist Adam Riess, told journalists during a teleconference.

Physicists didn't have a good explanation in 1998 for why the cosmos should go against gravity's pull and fly apart at a faster and faster rate. And they still don't. Their best guess is that our universe has a built-in, outward-pushing feature known as dark energy, which appears in Albert Einstein's equations for relativity as a cosmological constant.

"Dark energy still looks like the right answer — the best guess, I should say," Riess said. Einstein's cosmological constant appears to account for the effect to within 10 percent accuracy, he said. But physicists are in the dark about the mechanism. It's as if you're watching a car speeding down the road, faster and faster. Riess said you might hypothesize that there's such a thing as a gas pedal, and that pressing on it was causing the speedup. But there's not yet any way to say for sure. And there's no guarantee that the speedup will continue. There might still be a let-up on the cosmic accelerator, "in which case all bets are off," Riess said.

So is this Nobel premature? Riess said it was important to note that the prize was "awarded for seeing or discovering that the universe is accelerating," rather than for explaining why.

How to crack the mystery
There are lots of experiments in the works to expand upon the discovery made by Riess and his fellow Nobel laureates, Saul Perlmutter of the University of California at Berkeley and Brian Schmidt of the Australian National University in Canberra. Just today, the European Space Agency gave its go-ahead for the 2019 launch of the $650 million Euclid space telescope, which is designed to study dark energy's effects on the large-scale structure of the universe. NASA's $1.6 billion Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope, or WFIRST, would also target the mystery surrounding dark energy.

But Riess suspects that the mystery can't be solved by observations alone. "We won't really resolve it until some brilliant person, the next Einstein-like person, is able to get the idea of what's going on," he said.

So he issued a plea to the theorists: "Keep working," he said. "We need your help. ... It's a very juicy problem, it's hard, and you'll win a Nobel Prize if you figure it out. In fact, I'll give you mine."

Carroll, the theorist, was sympathetic to Riess' plea. But he wasn't overly encouraging.

"You don't need to tell us that this is a big one," Carroll said. "Many of us have tried. I've tried. I've written many papers about it. But it's hard."

There are plenty of possibilities, to be sure. The acceleration could be caused by vacuum energy that doesn't vary over time, but is just a feature of empty space. It could be a slowly varying quality of the cosmos known among physicists as "quintessence." It could be some unanticipated twist in the nature of gravity, or a byproduct of multidimensional spheres of existence.

"I've spent my time on this, and I'm increasingly willing to predict that the answer is a boring one," Carroll said. Maybe the best that scientists can ever say is that this is just the way our universe works.

More deep, dark questions
For now, dark energy is just one item on a growing list of puzzling questions for big-thinking physicists — questions that also include:

• What's dark matter made out of? Observations from the past decade suggest that dark energy accounts for 74 percent of the universe's mass-energy content, and that another 22 percent consists of similarly mysterious stuff known as dark matter. So far, dark matter has been detected only through its gravitational effect, but physicists have come to assume that it takes the form of exotic subatomic particles that interact only weakly with the 4 percent of the universe we can see. Researchers had been hoping they'd see the signature of those exotic particles at the Large Hadron Collider, but so far there's been no sign.
• Where's the Higgs boson? Researchers are also looking for the Higgs boson, the last fundamental particle whose existence is predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics. Fermilab's Tevatron collider had been in the hunt until its shutdown last week, and if there's no confirmed detection hiding within the Tevatron data yet to be analyzed, it'll be up to the LHC to spot the Higgs, which is thought to be responsible for creating the mass of some subatomic particles and has been nicknamed the "God Particle." Again, there's been no sign so far, but physicists say they should know within the next year or so whether the Higgs exists. If there's no such thing, theorists might have to rewrite one of the scientific world's most successful theories.
• Why does the universe seem fine-tuned? A good number of physicists have noted that if the fundamental constants of physics had been tweaked slightly differently, life as we know it — perhaps even the universe as we know it — could not have endured for long, if at all. If you ascribe the workings of the cosmos to God, this doesn't present a problem. But this apparent "fine-tuning" poses a challenge if you're trying to explain why the universe is just so. One possibility would be to say there's a plenitude of universes out there, and we just happen to be in a universe that works pretty well. Or maybe the universe is governed by a "feedback loop" that operates forward and backward in time. Or maybe it's some sort of weird quantum phenomenon, as Stephen Hawking has proposed. As Keanu Reeves might say: "Whoa..."
• Why does time run only one way? Speaking of time's direction, Carroll's favorite conundrum has to do with why we experience time in only one direction, moving from the past into the future. In his book "From Eternity to Here," Carroll makes the case that the arrow of time moves in the same direction as entropy, from low entropy at the time of the big bang to higher entropy today, and even higher entropy tomorrow. "The question is, why was entropy low near the big bang?" Carroll said. "I'm still very much up in the air as to the answer to that question." As he studies that question, Carroll is delving into other puzzles ranging from the origin of life to the debate about free will vs. determinism. "You don't have to get into those age-old questions," Carroll admitted. "My own impulse is to enjoy those questions and get into this."
• Was Einstein wrong about the speed of light? This is one of the most recent unsettled questions for modern physics. For more than a century, the overwhelming evidence has been that Einstein's special relativity theory was correct in claiming that nothing could move faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. That's now been called into question by observations suggesting that some neutrinos achieved faster-than-light speeds during a 450-mile trip between two underground labs in Europe. Carroll said the observations are "very, very unlikely to be right," but if they are verified, that would force a radical reinterpretation of Einstein's theories.

Faster-than-light neutrinos would be far more troublesome for scientists than the speeding-up universe. As strange as the Nobel-winning supernova observations appear to be, Carroll said they actually "explain a whole bunch of things that people had been worrying about for a long while," including apparent discrepancies in measurements of the universe's age.

"Unlike the 'accelerating universe,' ... the faster-than-light neutrinos would create a whole bunch of problems to worry about," Carroll said. For example, would the phenomenon allow for backward time travel and reverse causality? Could a neutrino go back in time and "kill its grandfather"?

In a posting to the Cosmic Variance blog, Carroll floats some ideas that could get theorists out of a time-traveling jam, but it wouldn't be pretty. "If neutrinos are moving faster than light, the question is, how can we adapt special relativity to a framework which allows for this?" he said.

Riess, the experimenter, offered some advice for Carroll and his fellow theorists, based on his experience with the surprising supernova observations.

"As a lot of my colleagues say when they hear about a strange result, they go, 'Oh, that's wrong,' and usually 'How do you know?' then, 'Well, most things that are weird turn out to be wrong.' And that's true," Riess said. "But you don't want to completely close your ears and eyes to seeing weird things, because a lot of the most interesting things we see at some point were the weird things."

Tune in to 'Virtually Speaking Science'
Carroll and I will be talking about the accelerating universe, faster-than-light neutrinos and other weird and interesting things on Wednesday at 9 p.m. ET (6 p.m. PT) on "Virtually Speaking Science," an online talk show that I host on the first Wednesday of the month. You can listen to the hourlong show via BlogTalkRadio, or be a part of the audience at the Stella Nova auditorium in the virtual world known as Second Life. (Here's the SLURL for your teleporting pleasure.) You can ask questions during the show via Second Life chat or BlogTalkRadio's call-in number.

If you can't make it in real time, don't worry: The show will be archived at BlogTalkRadio as an audio podcast for on-demand listening. Many thanks to the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics for providing the Second Life venue.

More podcasts from 'Virtually Speaking Science':

• Rand Simberg on the private-enterprise vision for spaceflight
• Martin Hoffert on the future of energy policy
• George Djorgovski on science in virtual worlds
• Alan Stern on suborbital research and NASA's mission to Pluto
• Col. 'Coyote' Smith on the outlook for space solar power
• Tim Pickens on rocket ventures and the Google Lunar X Prize

More about the Nobel-winning research:

• Cosmic Variance: Dark energy FAQ
• Inside Science: The story behind the accelerating universe
• Life's Little Mysteries: What's dark energy? | How find was made
• Search for dark energy on msnbc.com

Carroll will also be a featured speaker for the New Horizons in Science symposium, presented Oct. 16-18 at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff by the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing as part of ScienceWriters2011. I'm a member of the CASW board.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also add me to your Google+ circle, and check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds. 

Ming Liu / UC Berkeley

Schematic illustration of the graphene-based optical modulator. A layer of graphene (black fishnet) is placed on top of a silicon waveguide (blue), which is used as an optical fiber to guide light. Electric signals sent in from the side of the graphene through gold (Au) and platinum (Pt) electrodes alter the amount of photons the graphene absorbs

Researchers have used graphene, a one-atom thick layer of crystallized carbon, to create a device that could potentially stream high-definition 3-D movies onto a smartphone in a matter of seconds.

The device, a tiny optical modulator, currently switches light on and off. This switching is the fundamental characteristic of a network modulator, which controls how fast data packets are transmitted. The faster the data pulses are sent out, the greater the volume of information that can be sent.

"This is the world's smallest optical modulator, and the modulator in data communications is the heart of speed control," Xiang Zhang, an engineering professor at the University of California at Berkeley who led the research, said in a press release.

"Graphene enables us to make modulators that are incredibly compact and that potentially perform at speeds up to ten times faster than current technology allows. The new technology will significantly enhance our capabilities in ultrafast optical communication and computing." 

Prize-worthy material
The device is based on graphene, which was first extracted from graphite — the same material as pencil lead — in 2004 with Scotch tape. This achievement earned Konstantin Novoselov and Andre Geim at the University of Manchester a Nobel Prize in Physics last year.

Graphene is already being eyed for a range of technologies such as lighter and cheaper body armor, touchscreen displays and chemical sensors. It is the thinnest, strongest crystalline material yet known, can be stretched like rubber and is an excellent conductor of heat and electricity.

Zhang and his colleagues took advantage of the conducting ability, tuning graphene electrically to absorb light in wavelengths used in data communications.

They found that the energy of the electrons, referred to as Fermi level, can be easily altered depending upon the voltage applied to the material. The graphene's Fermi level in turn determines if the light is absorbed or not.

When a sufficient negative voltage is applied, electrons are drawn out of the graphene and are no longer available to absorb photons. The light is switched on because the graphene becomes totally transparent as the photons pass through, UC Berkeley explains.

Graphene is also transparent at certain positive voltages because, in that situation, the electrons become packed so tightly that they cannot absorb the photons. Zhang's team found a sweet spot in the middle where there is just enough voltage applied so the electrons can prevent the photons from passing, effectively switching the light off.

The breakthrough is described online May 8 in Nature.  Xiaobo Yin, co-lead author of the paper and a research scientist in Zhang's lab, described it this way in the press release:

"If graphene were a hallway, and electrons were people, you could say that, when the hall is empty there's no one around to stop the photons. In the other extreme, when the hall is too crowded, people can't move and are ineffective in blocking the photons. It's in between these two scenarios that the electrons are allowed to interact with and absorb the photons and the graphene becomes opaque."

Optical modulator
To create the optical modulator, the team layered graphene on top of a silicon wafer. They were able to achieve a modulation speed of 1 gigahertz, but noted the speed could theoretically reach as high as 500 gigahertz for a single modulator.

Using graphene in this way allows the researchers to scale down technologies that rely on photonics, such as fiber optic lines. The team has already shrunk a graphene-based modulator down to 25 square microns, which is roughly 400 times smaller than a human hair.

Even at this size, graphene can absorb a broad spectrum of light, ranging over thousands of nanometers from ultraviolet to infrared wavelengths. This allows graphene to carry more data than current state-of-the-art modulators, which operate at bandwidths of up to 10 nanometers.

"Instead of broadband, we will have extremeband," Zhang said.

So, yes, that really does mean a high-definition 3-D movie streamed to your smartphone in a matter of seconds.

—Via University of California at Berkeley

More articles on graphene:

• Graphene: Thin stuff is a big fat deal
• For wonder material graphene, Nobel Prize is just the start
• Physicists win Nobel for carbon breakthrough
• Scientists make nanosheets with high-tech potential

This year's Nobel Prize for chemistry was awarded for decades-old breakthroughs in the use of palladium to help synthesize useful compounds — a process that took the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences 13 pages to explain. The easy way to explain it is to say palladium is a rare metal that acts as a catalyst or "matchmaker," marrying ingredients to produce all sorts of useful things for flat-screen displays, cancer drugs, asthma medicines and more.

"Any undergraduate who's taken chemistry is starting to see this in textbooks as really important chemistry," Joseph Francisco, president of the American Chemical Society, told me today. Francisco is a chemistry professor at Purdue University and hence a colleague of one of the laureates named today, Purdue's Ei-Ichi Negishi.

Negishi, along with the University of Delaware's Richard Heck and Hokkaido University's Akira Suzuki, were honored for their work in the 1960s and '70s to develop a technique called palladium-catalyzed cross coupling in organic synthesis. That's quite a mouthful, but it simply means they found a way to use palladium atoms to build smaller molecules into larger ones, The atoms act as "marriage brokers," in the words of Inside Science News Service's Steve Miller. Here's what Francisco told Miller:

"Think of palladium as the mutual friend who brings two people together for a handshake," Francisco said. "Palladium brings the right carbon atoms from two molecules together, performs the introduction, and then moves on."

The palladium atoms themselves emerge unchanged by the process, ready to introduce more carbon atoms to each other.

"The beautiful thing about this chemistry is it's very fundamental ... it can create new carbon bonds and certain functional groups that normally would be very difficult to create, in a very easy, very facile, very efficient way," Francisco told me.

Francisco said most chemists knew it was just a matter of time before Heck, Suzuki and Negishi won a Nobel for their work. "At the time, I don't think the Nobel laureates really anticipated just how broadly that chemistry would be applied, but it was," he said.

So what kinds of products have been created through palladium-catalyzed cross coupling?

Pharmaceuticals: Painkillers ranging from synthetic morphine to naproxen (which is marketed under brand names such as Aleve or Midol Extended Relief). Asthma medicines such as montelukast (marketed as Singulair). Anti-cancer drugs such as synthetic Taxol as well as the candidate drug discodermolide (a synthetic version of a poison found in a Caribbean marine sponge) and diazonamide A (which appears to be effective in fighting colon cancer). Potential anti-viral drugs such as dragmacidin F (which affects the herpes virus and HIV). Antibiotics such as modified vancomycin (to fight MRSA infections).

Plastics: Heck developed the chemical reaction that now bears his name in order to create styrene, a major component in polystyrene plastic.

Electronics: Reactions involving palladium are used to optimize the blue light in organic light-emitting diodes, or OLEDs, which have found their way into ultra-thin flat-screen displays. The Heck reaction also comes into play for producing resins used in electronic fabrication (such as Dow Chemical's Cyclotene).

... And more: The Heck reaction is a key step in the production of the herbicide Prosulforon. The Suzuki reaction is used to manufacture a fungicide known as Boscalid. And strangely enough, researchers reported just this year that they put palladium together with graphene, the one-atom-thick form of carbon that earned two other researchers the Nobel Prize in physics this week. Palladium-graphene hybrids could be used as catalysts for the Suzuki reaction, to produce new strains of polymer circuitry and liquid crystals.

"What's exciting about this is it's a case where fundamental chemistry has led to innovations in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries that bring benefit to the general public," Francisco said. "What can be more exciting than using fundamental chemistry to improve the lives of people worldwide? That's cool stuff."

Visit the brand-spanking-new Cosmic Log page on Facebook and hit the "Like" button. You can also follow @boyle on Twitter. And if you really want to be friendly, ask me about "The Case for Pluto."