1926

Nobel Prize in Physics

Jean Baptiste Perrin

Perrin spent years measuring the way tiny particles suspended in liquid drift about under constant bombardment from invisible molecules — Brownian motion — and used those measurements to calculate Avogadro's number with uncommon precision. His prize effectively closed the last serious argument about whether atoms actually exist.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

The Svedberg

Svedberg built the ultracentrifuge — a machine capable of spinning samples at forces tens of thousands of times greater than gravity — and used it to separate proteins and colloids by size with a precision no one had achieved before. For the first time, it was possible to measure how heavy a protein molecule actually is.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Johannes Fibiger

Fibiger was awarded the prize for identifying what he believed was a parasitic worm, Spiroptera carcinoma, as a cause of stomach cancer in rats. Later research could not replicate the finding; it is now regarded as one of the more awkward Nobel decisions in medicine, awarded for a result that turned out not to be what it appeared.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Grazia Deledda

The second woman to win the Literature prize, Deledda wrote novels of Sardinian life — village feuds, family honour, the Catholicism of the rural poor — with a clarity and sympathy that the committee called at once plastic and deep. She heard of the award while ill in bed and could not travel to Stockholm to collect it.

Nobel Peace Prize

Aristide Briand · Gustav Stresemann

Briand and Stresemann were, respectively, the French and German foreign ministers who had negotiated the Locarno Treaties of 1925 — a set of agreements in which Germany and its western neighbours accepted their borders and promised to resolve disputes without war. It was a genuine achievement; it also lasted until 1936.

Schrödinger publishes wave mechanics

In a series of papers published in early 1926, Schrödinger described electrons as waves governed by an equation he had worked out over Christmas in the Swiss Alps. In May he proved that his wave mechanics and Heisenberg's matrix mechanics were mathematically identical — two languages for the same thing. The wave picture was more intuitive; physicists quietly preferred it.

Max Born's probabilistic interpretation of quantum mechanics

Born read Schrödinger's wave function and realised that it did not literally describe a wave of matter spreading through space. The square of its amplitude, he argued in July, gives the probability of finding the particle at any given location. This was a strange and uncomfortable idea — Einstein never accepted it — but it predicted experimental results with complete success.

Birth of Marilyn Wescoff

Marilyn Wescoff

Born on 9 May, Wescoff would become one of the six women hired to program ENIAC — the US Army's room-sized electronic computer — in 1945, doing work that was largely unacknowledged for decades. The programming of the world's first general-purpose electronic computer was, it turned out, assigned to mathematicians who happened to be women.