Without their hard work, nobody would be talking about which theorists should share the Nobel.
To guard against bias -- seeing pictures in the clouds -- the portion of data in which theorists hoped to find gluinos was kept hidden until the very end.
The goal has been a state of matter called a quark-gluon plasma, which theorists believe existed when the universe was only a microsecond old.
That is 250,000 times hotter than the center of the Sun and well above the temperature at which theorists calculate that protons and neutrons should melt, but the quark-gluon plasma does not act the way theorists had predicted.
The leading alternative is that it would be one of five Higgs bosons predicted by a theory called supersymmetry, which theorists have been yearning for as the next step toward a more all-embracing, unified theory of nature.
A truly astonishing discovery there — proof, say, of extra dimensions, or of something even weirder than that, which theorists have yet to conceive of — would provide a powerful impetus to keep particle physics going for another generation.
The team spotted a quadrapolar magnetic field which theorists think can only occur when whistler-mode waves are generated.
It is possible to attack the grounds on which theorists infer trends from past and present social phenomena.
The aggregated results provide an ever-growing database of facts from which theorists can ask and answer questions about the course of evolution.
