1911

Nobel Prize in Physics

Wilhelm Wien

Wien worked out how a perfectly heated object radiates — the hotter it burns, the bluer the light. His radiation laws were among the pieces Planck and Einstein would shortly rearrange into quantum theory, though Wien himself won the prize before the rearranging was complete.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Marie Curie

She had already won the Physics prize in 1903. This time it was for discovering the elements radium and polonium and, more painstakingly, for actually isolating radium as a pure metal. Two Nobel Prizes for one scientist was unprecedented and, for those who had tried to keep her out of the French Academy of Sciences the same year, inconvenient.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Allvar Gullstrand

The eye focuses light by a mechanism more subtle than a simple lens: the cornea and the living, adjustable crystalline lens together bend incoming rays. Gullstrand worked out the precise optics of this system, a contribution so thorough that he later turned down Einstein's invitation to collaborate on relativity.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Maurice Maeterlinck

The Belgian playwright wrote of fate, death, and the silence behind words in a way that made theatre feel like something overheard rather than performed. His play "The Blue Bird" was finding audiences all over Europe while the prize arrived.

Nobel Peace Prize

Tobias Asser · Alfred Fried

Asser, a Dutch lawyer, had helped build the architecture of international private law through the Hague Conferences; Fried, an Austrian journalist, had spent decades arguing that the anarchy between nations was not inevitable. Within three years the anarchy would prove him wrong, and Asser dead.

Rutherford's nuclear model of the atom

Rutherford fired alpha particles at a sheet of gold foil and found that most sailed straight through while a few bounced almost directly back. The only way to explain the ricochets was a nucleus: a point of mass and positive charge so small that the atom around it is almost entirely empty space — which is to say, so are you.

Discovery of superconductivity

Heike Kamerlingh Onnes cooled mercury to 4.2 degrees above absolute zero and watched its electrical resistance simply vanish. No gradual decline — gone. The phenomenon had no name yet; he called it superconductivity, and it would take half a century before anyone understood why it happened.

Onnes liquefies helium

Helium resists becoming liquid at all costs, clinging to its gaseous state lower than any other element. Kamerlingh Onnes had been hunting it since 1898 and finally succeeded at his laboratory in Leiden. The liquid helium he produced became the essential refrigerant for everything that followed.

Soddy identifies isotopes

Frederick Soddy noticed that certain radioactive decay products appeared chemically identical to known elements yet had different atomic masses and different radioactive properties. He proposed these were the same element wearing a different weight: atoms identical in chemistry, different in mass. The word isotope came later, but the concept arrived here.

Discovery of parathyroid hormone function

William MacCallum and colleagues showed that the small parathyroid glands are responsible for keeping calcium levels in the blood stable. Remove them, and the muscles seize in tetanic spasm. It was an early demonstration that a single tiny gland could hold the chemistry of the whole body in check.