1936

Nobel Prize in Physics

A Mirror Twin, Raining From Space

Victor F. Hess · Carl D. Anderson

Victor Hess made seven balloon ascents in 1911 and 1912, the last reaching five thousand metres, carrying electroscopes to measure ionising radiation as altitude increased — because the conventional wisdom held that any such radiation must originate in the earth and would therefore fade with height. It didn't fade; it intensified. He concluded, calmly, that something was raining down from space. Two decades later, Carl Anderson was photographing cosmic-ray tracks in a cloud chamber at Caltech when he noticed a particle curving the wrong way in a magnetic field — not wrong as in faulty equipment, but wrong as in never-seen-before. It was the positron, the electron's antimatter twin, whose existence Paul Dirac had theorised in 1928 and which most physicists had quietly hoped Dirac was mistaken about, because antimatter is deeply inconvenient. One prize, two discoveries, separated by twenty years and the width of the atmosphere; together they handed physics both the raw material of the cosmos and proof that nature duplicates everything in mirror image.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Measuring the Lopsidedness of Molecules

Peter Debye

Most chemists of the early twentieth century were content to know what a molecule was made of; Peter Debye insisted on knowing exactly what shape it made, and at what angles. He realised that the slight lopsidedness of polar molecules — the way charge concentrates toward one end, creating a dipole moment — could be measured with great precision by studying how they deflected in electric fields, and that X-ray and electron diffraction patterns contained, if you were patient enough, detailed portraits of molecular architecture. The unit of dipole measurement is still the debye, which is the particular immortality that attaches to scientists who make measurement itself more precise. His methods transformed physical chemistry from a discipline of recipes into one of geometry, and virtually every technique used to determine molecular structure today — from drug design to materials science — traces a direct lineage to Debye's conviction that scattering radiation off a molecule was a perfectly reasonable way to learn its secrets.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

A Chemical Message, Dreamed Twice

Henry Dale · Otto Loewi

Otto Loewi claimed the idea came to him in a dream on Easter Saturday 1921, twice — he woke the first time, scribbled the experiment down, and then could not read his own handwriting in the morning; the second night he ran straight to his laboratory rather than risk it. The experiment itself was quietly devastating to the electrical theory of nerve conduction: he stimulated the vagus nerve of a donor frog heart, collected the fluid surrounding it, and dripped that fluid onto a second, resting frog heart, which promptly slowed its beat. Something chemical, not just a spark, was crossing the gap. Henry Dale, working in London, identified the substances involved — among them acetylcholine — and mapped the broader system of neurotransmitters with methodical thoroughness. The discovery that nerves communicate by releasing molecules has proven consequential beyond easy summary: every anaesthetic, every antidepressant, every drug treating Parkinson's or myasthenia gravis or Alzheimer's works, one way or another, by meddling with that chemical conversation.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Making Grief Unfashionable to Ignore

Eugene O'Neill

American theatre in the early twentieth century was largely content to entertain, and O'Neill took it personally. Working through the 1910s and 20s, he pulled the stage toward the kind of material that serious European drama had been willing to face for decades — addiction, incest, racial identity, the particular savagery of families who know each other too well — and did so with an almost obstinate refusal to soften the landing. He was the first American playwright to win the prize, and the committee cited his concept of tragedy as original, which was accurate as far as it went. What they meant, but perhaps felt was impolitic to say directly, is that O'Neill had made grief unfashionable to look away from. The plays endure not because they comfort but because they are honest about the degree to which people damage one another by simply staying in the same room.

Nobel Peace Prize

A Ceasefire Over Land With No Oil

Carlos Saavedra Lamas

Argentina's foreign minister came to international diplomacy with the rare combination of legal rigour and genuine tenacity. In 1933 he drafted the Anti-War Treaty of Rio de Janeiro, a non-aggression and conciliation pact eventually signed by a dozen Latin American states, and then used it not just as an ornament but as a working instrument: when the Chaco War between Paraguay and Bolivia — a peculiarly lethal conflict over a stretch of territory that turned out to contain very little oil — showed signs of dragging past 1935, Saavedra Lamas pressed both sides into negotiation. The ceasefire held. He became the first Latin American to receive the Peace Prize. The committee had given the previous year's award to Carl von Ossietzky, who received the news in a Nazi concentration camp, so the prize in 1936 was for practical diplomacy producing a practical result — not glamorous, but genuinely useful.

Fields Medal

A Soap Film Proves Its Own Theorem

Fields Medal

Lars Ahlfors · Jesse Douglas

The Fields Medal had been conceived by John Charles Fields as mathematics' answer to the Nobel — which famously lacks a prize for the discipline — with the additional condition that laureates must be under forty, on the theory that mathematics rewards the young and that recognition ought to arrive while it can still do some good. The first two recipients, awarded at the 1936 International Congress in Oslo, were chosen well. Lars Ahlfors, a twenty-nine-year-old Finn, had done fundamental work in complex analysis, sharpening the theory of conformal mappings and the geometric behaviour of analytic functions. Jesse Douglas, an American, had cracked the Plateau problem: given any closed curve in three-dimensional space, can you always find a surface of minimal area spanning it? Soap films do this automatically, which is why anyone who has ever blown a bubble and watched it settle has, without knowing it, been watching a theorem prove itself.

Muon confirmed in cosmic ray interactions

Who Ordered That?

Carl Anderson and Seth Neddermeyer had been puzzling over a cosmic-ray particle since 1936 that curved too much in a magnetic field to be a proton and too little to be an electron — some intermediate object that seemed to fit nothing in the known taxonomy of matter. By this year their measurements were precise enough to confirm it: a distinct particle, about two hundred times heavier than an electron, that passed through matter with a nonchalance ordinary particles did not share. When the theorist Isidor Rabi heard the news, he reportedly asked, 'Who ordered that?' — a remark that has aged perfectly, because the muon turned out to serve no obvious structural purpose in the universe. It is not a building block of atoms; it simply exists, rains down from the upper atmosphere, and decays in about two microseconds. The muon is the clearest sign physicists have that the particle table contains more lines than the recipe requires.

Radar development begins in the United Kingdom

An Invisible Fence Along the Coast

Robert Watson-Watt had persuaded the Air Ministry in early 1935 that a 'death ray' capable of stopping enemy aircraft with radio waves was implausible, but that those same waves, bounced off approaching aircraft and timed on their return, might give Fighter Command enough warning to scramble its planes. By 1936 his team was erecting the first permanent stations of Chain Home along Britain's eastern coast — a string of tall steel masts transmitting on wavelengths far longer than the German engineers, who had built their own radar systems, considered worth bothering with. The frequencies were crude and the altitude readings unreliable, and the operators had to develop a set of hand-calculated corrections to compensate for the system's limitations. None of that mattered in September 1940, when those several minutes of warning — the difference between climbing Hurricanes and sitting Hurricanes — made the Battle of Britain something other than a rout.