1922

Nobel Prize in Physics

An Orbit Only Quantum Rules Allow

Niels Bohr

By 1913, Niels Bohr had imposed on the atom a set of rules that would have baffled Newtonian physics entirely: electrons could only orbit the nucleus at fixed, permitted distances, and when one jumped between orbits it emitted or absorbed light at a precise, predictable frequency. His model was borrowed from a classical picture of planets around a sun — a metaphor he knew was imperfect — yet it predicted the spectral lines of hydrogen with an accuracy that left almost no room for coincidence. That the model worked as well as it did while being, at its foundation, logically inconsistent was a fact Bohr found more interesting than embarrassing; he spent the next decade coaxing younger physicists like Heisenberg and Pauli to replace it with something stranger and more honest. The Nobel committee, catching up at its own dignified pace, awarded him the 1922 prize for a model already in the process of being superseded — which is, in physics, very nearly a compliment. Without Bohr's willingness to weld quantum rules onto classical orbits and see what held, the language in which quantum mechanics was eventually written might have taken another decade to arrive.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Neon's Awkward Decimal, Explained

Francis W. Aston

Before Francis Aston refined his mass spectrograph at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, the element neon had a slightly embarrassing problem: its atomic weight came out at 20.2, which was not a tidy number and therefore not the sort of thing a tidy universe should tolerate. Aston resolved the embarrassment in 1919 by demonstrating that neon was not one element but two — isotopes of masses 20 and 22 — mixed in a ratio that averaged out to the awkward decimal. Over the following years he catalogued isotopes of dozens of elements, and noticed that their masses, when measured against the hydrogen-1 standard, were very nearly whole numbers — a regularity he called the whole-number rule. The small deviations from that rule turned out, eventually, to be mass converted into binding energy, which is to say that Aston's precise weighing of atoms contained, latent inside it, the first intimation of nuclear energy. He himself noted the implication with characteristic British understatement: that a pint of water harboured enough potential energy to drive an ocean liner across the Atlantic. His Nobel in 1922 honoured the spectrograph and the isotopes; the full significance of the discrepancies it exposed took another decade and a half to become terrifyingly clear.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Two Chapters Inside Every Muscle

Archibald V. Hill · Otto Meyerhof

In the early twentieth century, the question of what actually happens inside a contracting muscle — what fuel it burns, in what sequence, and whether oxygen is strictly required — was almost entirely open. Archibald Vivian Hill, working in Manchester, took the rigorous approach of measuring the heat a muscle generates during and after a contraction with extraordinary precision, and found that the process had two distinct phases: a rapid, oxygen-independent burst, followed by a slower aerobic recovery that consumed oxygen and cleared up the biochemical debt. Otto Meyerhof, working independently in Germany, traced the same two-phase story through the chemistry of lactic acid, showing how glucose was broken down anaerobically and then partially reconverted during recovery. That neither man had set out to describe the same phenomenon, and that they converged on the same two-chapter account anyway, is the kind of coincidence that is usually called confirmation. Hill and Meyerhof effectively founded the study of exercise physiology, and every cyclist monitoring lactate threshold, every coach timing recovery intervals, every emergency physician managing a patient in metabolic crisis is working with machinery first mapped in their experiments.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Measured Disrespect for a Beloved Stage

Jacinto Benavente

Jacinto Benavente arrived at the Nobel Prize in Literature by way of a long career dismantling, gently and with considerable sardonic skill, the pretensions of the Spanish bourgeoisie. His plays — among them Los intereses creados, a commedia dell'arte fable about the uses of self-interest — replaced the grandiloquent Romantic drama that had dominated Spanish stages through most of the nineteenth century with something cooler, more ironic, and considerably less likely to make the audience feel heroic. The Stockholm committee praised his continuation of the illustrious traditions of Spanish drama, which is the sort of formulation that conceals as much as it reveals; what Benavente had actually done was to treat those traditions with the measured disrespect of someone who loved them too much for reverence. His real legacy is the particular tone — dry, worldly, alive to the comedy of people behaving exactly as their circumstances require — that ran through Spanish theatre long after his own reputation faded into the comfortable obscurity of the once-canonical.

Discovery of the Compton effect

A Photon Recoils Like a Billiard Ball

The question of whether light was truly a wave or truly a particle had been, by 1922, somewhat unsatisfactorily answered as 'both, depending on what you measure', and most physicists were not entirely comfortable with that. Arthur Compton, working at Washington University in St. Louis, aimed X-rays at a graphite target and measured the wavelength of the scattered radiation with care. The result was inconvenient for wave theory and obvious from a particle perspective: the scattered X-rays came out at a longer wavelength than the incoming ones, as though each photon had handed some of its momentum to a recoiling electron in a collision, the way one billiard ball slows when it strikes another. The shift in wavelength matched, precisely, the formula you would derive by treating the photon as an object with momentum equal to its energy divided by the speed of light. Compton's effect made it very difficult to go on treating the photon as merely a convenient fiction, and it earned him the 1927 Nobel Prize. More broadly, it established that the wave-particle duality physicists had been muttering about was not a philosophical embarrassment to be explained away but a fundamental feature of the world to be reckoned with.

Stern–Gerlach experiment demonstrates space quantization

Silver Atoms Land in Only Two Places

The notion of 'space quantization' — that atoms can only orient their angular momentum in certain discrete directions relative to a magnetic field, not freely as a compass needle turns — was a prediction of the old quantum theory that most physicists regarded as a probably-correct but rather abstract piece of formalism. In early 1922, Otto Stern and Walther Gerlach tested it in Frankfurt by sending a narrow beam of silver atoms through a strongly inhomogeneous magnetic field and catching the deflected atoms on a glass plate. Classical physics predicted a continuous smear; quantum theory predicted two distinct bands. They got two bands. The result was clean enough to be decisive, and strange enough that even some of the people who had predicted it found it slightly shocking to see: angular momentum, the thing that keeps a gyroscope upright and a planet in its plane, arrived at the detector in one of only two permitted orientations, no intermediate values allowed. The two bands also, as it later emerged, encoded something the experimenters had not been looking for — electron spin, a property that had not yet been theorised but that the data was quietly demonstrating anyway.

First successful clinical use of insulin for diabetes

A Dying Boy Improves Within Hours

Before January 1922, a diagnosis of type 1 diabetes was a sentence of gradual starvation — the only treatment that prolonged life at all was a diet so severely restricted in carbohydrates that patients wasted away more slowly, but still wasted. Leonard Thompson was fourteen years old and dying in Toronto General Hospital when, on 11 January, he received an injection of insulin that James Collip had spent weeks purifying from pancreatic extract; the first crude attempt, twelve days earlier, had caused an allergic reaction, but Collip refined the preparation until it was safe. Thompson improved within hours. Frederick Banting and Charles Best had isolated the active hormone the previous summer, working in a borrowed laboratory with underfunded equipment and a supervisor, John Macleod, who was abroad when the critical experiments ran — a biographical detail that generated years of acrimony about who deserved credit for what. The Nobel Prize in 1923 went to Banting and Macleod, Banting promptly shared his half with Best, and Macleod shared his with Collip, which is one way to resolve a priority dispute. What the dispute does not diminish is the fact that a hormone identified, purified, and clinically used within eighteen months of its isolation turned a death sentence into a chronic condition managed daily by hundreds of millions of people.

Discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb

Yes, Wonderful Things

Howard Carter had been digging in the Valley of the Kings, on and off, for years — long enough that his patron Lord Carnarvon had told him 1922 would be the last funded season. On 4 November, a worker uncovering a new trench struck a stone step, then another, and Carter found himself at the top of a staircase leading to a sealed doorway bearing the cartouches of Tutankhamun, a minor king who had died at roughly eighteen around 1323 BCE and whose tomb had, improbably, escaped the systematic plundering that emptied nearly every other royal burial in the valley. When Carter made a small hole in the inner sealed door on 26 November and held a candle to it, Carnarvon asked if he could see anything; Carter's reply — 'Yes, wonderful things' — became one of the more understatedly epic lines in the history of archaeology. Beyond the door lay furniture, gilded shrines, chariots, a gold throne, hundreds of objects preserved in near-perfect condition, and eventually the mummy of the king himself wearing a gold mask of extraordinary refinement. The discovery recalibrated what archaeology could find and reshaped public fascination with ancient Egypt in ways that have not much abated in the century since.

Birth of Marlyn Wescoff

Six Women Taught a Machine to Think

Marilyn Wescoff

Marlyn Wescoff was born in Philadelphia in 1922, and whatever calculations attended her birth, they were of the ordinary domestic variety. The extraordinary ones came later. In 1945, she was among six women — all trained mathematicians — recruited by the US Army to program ENIAC, the enormous room-filling electronic computer built at the University of Pennsylvania to calculate artillery firing tables. The job was classified as 'subprofessional' at the time, though the programming itself was anything but: working without manuals, with only the circuit diagrams and their own ingenuity, the women had to work out how to configure a machine that its builders had assembled without having fully settled what it could do. Wescoff and her colleagues — Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Fran Bilas, and Ruth Lichterman — were largely omitted from photographs, absent from press coverage, and uninvited to the celebratory dinner after ENIAC's public debut. Their contribution was rediscovered by historian Kathy Kleiman in the 1980s and 1990s. The programming of the first general-purpose electronic computer was assigned, as it happened, to women; that it was then quietly forgotten is less a surprise than it should be.