1929

Nobel Prize in Physics

Louis de Broglie

Five years after proposing in his doctoral thesis that moving particles have a wavelength — λ = h/p — de Broglie received the Physics prize. Electron diffraction experiments, which had confirmed his prediction by showing electrons behaving exactly as waves should, had appeared between the thesis and the medal.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Arthur Harden · Hans von Euler-Chelpin

Harden and Euler-Chelpin had worked, separately and over many years, to untangle exactly what happens when sugar ferments. They traced the role of phosphate groups and coenzymes, establishing that fermentation is not a single reaction but a cascade of steps — the beginnings of what we now call metabolic biochemistry.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Christiaan Eijkman · Sir Frederick Hopkins

Eijkman had discovered, by feeding polished rice to chickens in Java in the 1890s, that beriberi could be caused by something missing from the diet rather than the presence of something harmful. Hopkins had reached the same conclusion independently, coining the term "accessory food factors" for what we now call vitamins. Together they had shifted how medicine thinks about deficiency disease.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Thomas Mann

The committee gave the prize principally for Buddenbrooks, Mann's 1901 novel tracing the decline of a German merchant family over four generations — a book that had, by 1929, spent nearly three decades acquiring the particular quality of permanence. Mann was fifty-four when he accepted it; he would continue writing for another twenty-six years.

Nobel Peace Prize

Frank B. Kellogg

Kellogg, as US Secretary of State, had co-authored the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, in which sixty-two nations solemnly renounced war as an instrument of national policy. The pact contained no enforcement mechanism. History was not unkind to it so much as simply indifferent.

Hubble publishes observational evidence of expanding universe

On 15 March, Hubble published measurements of 46 galaxies showing that their recession speed increases in direct proportion to their distance — now called Hubble's Law. Lemaître had derived the same relationship theoretically two years earlier; Hubble had the telescopes. Together, the papers established that the universe is not static, and that its expansion, run backwards, implies a beginning.

Henry Norris Russell confirms hydrogen as principal stellar constituent

In July, Russell published a careful analysis of solar abundances confirming that hydrogen is overwhelmingly the dominant constituent of the sun — a conclusion Cecilia Payne had reached in her 1925 doctoral thesis, which Russell had persuaded her to walk back. His published acknowledgement of her priority was gracious; the delay was less so.

Robert Goddard tests first instrumented rocket

On 17 July, Goddard launched a rocket carrying a barometer and a small camera — the first time scientific instruments had been sent aloft by liquid-fuelled rocket. The flight lasted approximately one minute. The data were modest; the principle was not.