1933

Nobel Prize in Physics

Erwin Schrödinger · Paul Dirac

Schrödinger gave the quantum world a wave equation — a way of calculating, for any particle, the probability of finding it somewhere. Dirac, working separately and with a certain cold elegance, extended quantum mechanics to account for relativity and predicted the existence of antimatter as a by-product. Two very different minds had arrived, by different routes, at new and productive forms of atomic theory.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Thomas H. Morgan

Morgan spent years breeding fruit flies in a cramped Columbia laboratory, watching traits appear, disappear, and reappear in patterns that Mendel had predicted but never explained mechanically. He showed that genes sit on chromosomes, travel together when chromosomes travel together, and can be mapped relative to one another by how often they separate — establishing heredity as a physical, locatable thing.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Ivan Bunin

Bunin had been living in Paris exile since 1920, the first Russian émigré to win the prize and the last major Russian-language laureate for a very long time. His prose carried the exact textures of a pre-revolutionary Russia that no longer existed — the smell of old estates, the specific melancholy of provincial afternoons — rendered with a restraint that made them hurt more, not less.

Nobel Peace Prize

Sir Norman Angell

Angell had argued, in his 1910 book "The Great Illusion", that modern economies were so interlocked that war between major powers had become economically self-defeating — which turned out to be entirely true and did absolutely nothing to prevent two world wars. He received the peace prize while Europe was already moving, efficiently and with great conviction, toward the second.

Adrian and Hodgkin pioneer electrophysiology

Edgar Adrian · Alan Hodgkin

With microelectrodes fine enough to tap a single nerve fibre, Adrian and the young Hodgkin began recording the electrical storms that constitute thought and sensation. The action potential — that brief, decisive spike of voltage travelling along a neuron — was becoming something that could be measured rather than merely inferred.

DNA structural chemistry clarified

Phoebus Levene

Levene's structural work had established that DNA was built from deoxyribose sugar and phosphate groups chained together — dull sounding, but it meant the molecule had a backbone, and backbones can carry sequence. The idea that this particular backbone carried the sequence of life would not be accepted for another two decades, but the chemical facts were accumulating.

Nazi boycott of Jewish scientists begins

April brought the first civil service laws barring Jews from public employment, and with them the departure of an extraordinary concentration of talent — physicists, chemists, mathematicians — who left Germany and Austria for Britain, the United States, and elsewhere. The Reich had just distributed, involuntarily and apparently without noticing, the scientific capital that would eventually produce the atomic bomb.