1937
A year in which electrons were confirmed as waves, three prizes converged on vitamin C from different angles, and the physicist who had first glimpsed the nuclear interior died in Cambridge, leaving the machinery he built to others who would run it in ways he might not have endorsed.
Nobel Prizes
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Both Thomsons Were Right
Clinton Davisson · George Paget Thomson
Louis de Broglie had proposed in 1924, on the basis of elegant mathematics and a certain theoretical boldness, that every particle with mass should also behave as a wave — a claim for which there was, at the time, precisely no experimental evidence. Davisson stumbled toward the proof partly by accident, noticing anomalous scatter patterns when electrons struck a nickel crystal whose surface had been accidentally recrystallised during a laboratory mishap; Thomson arrived at the same conclusion more deliberately, firing electrons through thin metallic films and watching diffraction rings that could only mean waves. The fact that each worked independently, on different continents, with different apparatus, and reached the same conclusion is either reassuring or faintly eerie, depending on your philosophy of science. The delicious footnote is genealogical: George's father, J. J. Thomson, had won the 1906 Nobel Prize for demonstrating that the electron was a particle. Both Thomsons were right, which tells you something important about questions phrased as either/or. Wave-particle duality is not a paradox we have learned to live with — it is the load-bearing structure of every transistor, every laser, every electron microscope that has since been built.
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The Patient Chemistry of Vegetables
Norman Haworth · Paul Karrer
The Chemistry committee of 1937 had the unusual problem of too many deserving candidates converging on the same corner of science at once, and resolved it in the sensible way: split the prize and cover more ground. Haworth, working in Birmingham, had spent years disentangling the ring structures of simple sugars — a problem more technically brutal than it sounds — and then determined the complete molecular structure of vitamin C, which he named ascorbic acid and, together with others, synthesised chemically for the first time. Karrer, in Zürich, had meanwhile worked out the structures of the carotenoids, including beta-carotene's relationship to vitamin A, and established the structures of riboflavin and other B vitamins, each a small molecule with outsized consequences for the bodies that must obtain them from food rather than manufacture them. Neither man was exactly a household name; neither deserved to be obscure. Between them they had mapped a molecular terrain whose practical yield — synthetic vitamin C alone is produced in the hundreds of thousands of tonnes per year — is rather staggering for what began as the patient chemistry of vegetables.
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Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
Peppers Held the Cure for Scurvy
Albert Szent-Györgyi
Albert Szent-Györgyi had the rare gift of knowing which tissue to use, and the rare luck of being Hungarian at a time when Hungary produced paprika in quantities sufficient to supply a biochemist's ambitions. He had first isolated vitamin C — which he called hexuronic acid, with the admirable modesty of someone not yet sure what he had — from adrenal glands, orange juice, and eventually red peppers, which turned out to contain so much of it that the structural chemistry became tractable in a way it simply had not been before. Beyond the vitamin, he traced the chain of biological oxidation reactions by which cells extract energy from food, work that laid the conceptual groundwork for what later became known as the citric acid cycle, even if the final assembly of that picture was left to Hans Krebs. Szent-Györgyi once said he had been in science his whole life trying to find where life begins, and had found only electrons — which, given 1937's physics prize, was not a bad place to end up. A world without his work on vitamin C would be one in which the molecular basis of scurvy, the disease that sank more naval expeditions than storms ever did, remained a mystery long after sailors had the empirical cure.
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Two Brothers, Undone by History
Roger Martin du Gard
Roger Martin du Gard spent much of his literary life writing Les Thibault, an eight-volume cycle following two brothers — the dutiful Oscar and the restless Jacques — through the slow dissolution of bourgeois France in the decades bracketing the First World War, a book whose ambitions recalled Tolstoy and whose prose rewarded the reader who was content to proceed without hurry. He was not fashionable, had no interest in being so, and lived in deliberate seclusion at his country house correcting manuscripts, which the Swedish Academy either admired or envied. The cycle is, among other things, a study in how idealism meets history: Jacques becomes a committed pacifist and socialist; 1914 kills him anyway, not from a bullet but from the general indifference of events to the convictions of individuals. That particular observation has not aged badly. Martin du Gard is not widely read today outside France, but that says more about the logistics of long-cycle fiction than about the quality of the enterprise, and the reader who does commit finds a novelist of remarkable patience and unsentimental precision.
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Eleven Million Votes, Politely Ignored
Robert Cecil, Viscount Cecil of Chelwood
Robert Cecil had been one of the small number of British statesmen who genuinely believed, after 1918, that the League of Nations could be made to work — not as a gesture of post-war optimism but as a functioning mechanism for collective security — and he spent the following two decades in the ungrateful business of trying to persuade governments of this while they devoted their energies to more immediate concerns. He had drafted significant portions of the League's covenant, helped establish the Peace Ballot of 1935 in which eleven and a half million Britons voted for collective resistance to aggression, and watched as the major powers treated the ballot's results as an invitation to do nothing in particular. The timing of the 1937 prize has the quality of a bitter joke: awarded as Italy was completing its conquest of Ethiopia and the Spanish Civil War ground through its second year, while Germany quietly rearmed and the League demonstrated, with increasing clarity, that it was not equal to any of it. Cecil received the prize with dignity and without illusion. The League's successor organisation, the United Nations, carries enough of his architectural thinking that the prize looks, in retrospect, rather better than it felt in the giving.
Milestones
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Artillery Shells Off Tissue Paper
Ernest Rutherford
Ernest Rutherford died on 19 October 1937 in Cambridge, from complications following the strangulation of a hernia that had gone too long unexamined — an end almost perversely undramatic for a man who had, in effect, invented the nucleus. The key experiment was conducted in Manchester in 1909 by Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden under Rutherford's direction: alpha particles fired at a sheet of gold foil, most passing straight through, a small fraction deflecting at extreme angles, a very few — famously — bouncing almost straight back. Rutherford later described his astonishment as comparable to firing artillery shells at tissue paper and watching them return; from that astonishment he deduced, correctly, that the atom was almost entirely empty space and that its mass was concentrated in a tiny, dense nucleus at the centre. The model has been revised in its particulars but not in its fundamental geometry. He had also discovered and named the proton, alpha and beta radiation, and transmutation of one element into another — and had collected a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908 for the transmutation work, causing him considerable amusement as a man who regarded himself as a physicist. The field he built would be used, within eight years of his death, for purposes he considered speculative at best and did not live to see.
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