1937
A year in which electrons were confirmed as waves, vitamin C earned three chemists prizes simultaneously, and the physicist who first glimpsed the nuclear interior died in Cambridge, leaving the field he had built to others who would use it rather differently.
Nobel Prizes
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Nobel Prize in Physics
Clinton Davisson · George Paget Thomson
De Broglie had proposed in 1924 that particles with mass — not just light — should behave as waves. Davisson and Thomson proved it independently, each bouncing electrons off crystals and watching them diffract in the interference patterns that only waves can make. George Thomson's father J.J. Thomson had won a Nobel Prize for showing the electron was a particle; the son won one for showing it was a wave. Both were right.
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Nobel Prize in Chemistry
Norman Haworth · Paul Karrer
The committee split chemistry between carbohydrates and vitamins. Haworth had worked out the ring structure of sugars and determined the molecular structure of vitamin C; Karrer had established the structures of the carotenoids, vitamin A, and the B vitamins. Between them they had brought considerable clarity to the molecules that build and maintain the body.
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Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
Albert Szent-Györgyi
Szent-Györgyi had isolated vitamin C from paprika — abundant in Hungary, which proved convenient — and traced the biological combustion reactions that sustain cellular energy. He had an instinct for picking the right tissue from the right organism to reveal a principle that turned out to be universal.
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Nobel Prize in Literature
Roger Martin du Gard
Martin du Gard's eight-volume cycle Les Thibault followed two brothers through the disintegrations of early twentieth-century France — family, religion, idealism — with the patience of a naturalist and the sorrow of someone who had watched the era actually happen. He was not a fashionable writer, which may be why the committee liked him.
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Nobel Peace Prize
Robert Cecil, Viscount Cecil of Chelwood
Cecil had been one of the principal architects of the League of Nations and spent the intervening years trying to keep it functional while member states quietly ceased to believe in it. He received the prize as the League was in the process of demonstrating, with Ethiopia and then Spain, that it was not equal to the events of 1937.
Milestones
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Death of Ernest Rutherford
Ernest Rutherford
Rutherford died on 19 October in Cambridge from complications of a strangulated hernia, discovered too late. He had scattered alpha particles off gold foil in 1909 and realised, from the ones that bounced straight back, that the atom was mostly empty space with a tiny, massive nucleus at its centre — the founding image of modern physics, drawn from something as simple as a thin sheet of metal and patience.
No entries match that category.