1927

Nobel Prize in Physics

Arthur H. Compton · C.T.R. Wilson

Compton won for showing that X-ray photons behave like billiard balls during collisions with electrons. Wilson won for the cloud chamber — a vessel of supersaturated vapour in which a passing charged particle leaves a visible trail of condensed droplets, like a tiny contrail, making the invisible suddenly, beautifully legible.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Heinrich Wieland

Wieland worked out the chemical constitution of the bile acids — the molecules your liver produces to help digest fats — and in doing so revealed a common structural backbone shared with steroids and cholesterol. The architecture of a whole family of biological molecules came into focus.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Julius Wagner-Jauregg

Wagner-Jauregg had observed that the high fevers caused by malaria sometimes appeared to cure the neurological devastation of late-stage syphilis — dementia paralytica — and had the nerve to test the idea deliberately, infecting patients with malarial parasites. It worked. That this treatment is now considered extraordinarily dangerous does not diminish what he observed.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Henri Bergson

Bergson's ideas about time, consciousness, and creative evolution had, over thirty years, reshaped how educated Europe thought about mind and duration. The committee praised his rich and vitalising ideas — a diplomatic formulation for a philosopher whose influence on literature was real even if he himself wrote no fiction.

Nobel Peace Prize

Ferdinand Buisson · Ludwig Quidde

Buisson had spent decades in French education and pacifist politics; Quidde had spent his in German antimilitarism, including a satirical pamphlet so pointed it had briefly landed him in prison. The committee gave them the prize jointly for building, in France and Germany respectively, the kind of public opinion that prefers not to go to war.

Heisenberg articulates the uncertainty principle

Early in 1927, Heisenberg published what is now probably the most famous single equation in physics: that the uncertainty in a particle's position multiplied by the uncertainty in its momentum can never be smaller than h-bar over two. This is not a statement about imperfect instruments; it is a statement about what nature will permit you to know.

Lemaître derives the expanding universe solution

Georges Lemaître, a Catholic priest and trained physicist, published a paper in the Annals of the Scientific Society of Brussels showing that Einstein's field equations naturally predict an expanding universe — and deriving the relationship between a galaxy's distance and its recession speed that Hubble would confirm observationally two years later. Einstein read it and told him the maths was fine but the physics was abominable.

Goddard's rocket experiments continue

Robert Goddard continued his methodical experiments in rocket propulsion in Massachusetts, testing new fuel configurations and stabilisation methods. His launches attracted little notice and occasional mockery from the press. He continued anyway.