1936

Nobel Prize in Physics

Victor F. Hess · Carl D. Anderson

Hess had ascended in balloons in 1912, measuring ionising radiation that grew stronger with altitude rather than fading, and concluded that it must be arriving from outside the Earth. Anderson, examining that same radiation in 1932, found it contained something entirely new: the positron. One prize, two discoveries, separated by twenty years and the width of the atmosphere.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Peter Debye

Debye's subject was the slight lopsidedness of molecules — the way a positive charge concentrates at one end and negative at the other, creating a dipole moment. He measured these asymmetries with great precision using X-ray and electron diffraction, extracting structural information from the way molecules scattered radiation, turning scattering into a kind of slow portrait.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Henry Dale · Otto Loewi

Loewi's famous 1921 experiment involved transferring fluid from a stimulated frog heart to a resting one and watching the second heart respond — proof that nerve signals were chemical, not merely electrical. Dale identified the chemicals involved, including acetylcholine. The discovery that nerves talk by releasing molecules rather than simply conducting current has proven enormously consequential for medicine.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Eugene O'Neill

O'Neill had dragged American drama somewhere it had not previously been willing to go: into the long, uncomfortable silences of families that cannot speak to each other, the weight of grief and addiction and failed hope. The committee called his concept of tragedy original, which was accurate, and diplomatically left out the word "harrowing".

Nobel Peace Prize

Carlos Saavedra Lamas

Argentina's foreign minister had drafted the Anti-War Treaty of 1933 — a non-aggression and conciliation pact — and then used it as leverage to mediate the end of the Chaco War between Paraguay and Bolivia in 1935. Practical diplomacy producing a practical result; the prize committee, having given the previous year's award to a man in a concentration camp, was perhaps relieved.

Fields Medal

Fields Medal

Lars Ahlfors · Jesse Douglas

The first Fields Medals went to Ahlfors for work in complex analysis — understanding the geometry of conformal mappings — and to Douglas, who had solved the Plateau problem: given a closed curve in space, can you always find a minimal surface spanning it? The answer is yes, which anyone who has blown soap bubbles might have suspected.

Muon confirmed in cosmic ray interactions

Anderson and Neddermeyer's earlier findings were confirmed with greater precision: the cosmic ray particle that curved the wrong amount in magnetic fields was indeed a distinct particle, heavier than an electron and lighter than a proton. Its existence served no obvious purpose in the structure of matter, a mystery that remains technically unsolved.

Radar development begins in the United Kingdom

Robert Watson-Watt and his team began constructing Chain Home, a network of tall transmitting masts along Britain's eastern coast that bounced radio waves off approaching aircraft. The system was crude by later standards — it could not determine altitude reliably — but it would, within four years, give Fighter Command the minutes of warning that made the Battle of Britain survivable.