1946

Nobel Prize in Physics

Forty Years of Squeezing Matter Harder

Percy W. Bridgman

Percy Bridgman began squeezing matter in his Harvard laboratory around 1905, and then — finding no particular reason to stop — kept going for the better part of four decades, building and rebuilding his own apparatus each time the pressures he wanted exceeded anything a catalogue could provide. By the 1940s he had reached the neighbourhood of 100,000 atmospheres, a regime so far outside ordinary experience that matter simply stopped behaving as textbooks predicted: phases appeared that had no business existing, viscosities went strange, and familiar substances revealed entirely unfamiliar selves. The work was unglamorous almost by design — Bridgman was the opposite of a showman, an experimentalist who regarded speculative theory with something between indifference and mild suspicion. He also gave physics the operational definition: the notion that a concept is nothing more than the set of operations used to measure it, which turned out to be a rather consequential idea to slip into the literature. Without his high-pressure maps, much of geophysics and materials science would have had to begin from scratch — the behaviour of the Earth's mantle, for instance, is not obviously inferrable from what iron does at sea level.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

An Enzyme Turns Out to Be a Protein

James B. Sumner · John H. Northrop · Wendell M. Stanley

In 1926, James Sumner — working with one hand, having lost the other to a shooting accident in his youth — crystallized urease from jack bean meal and announced that enzymes were proteins. The biochemical establishment received this claim with the particular warmth it reserves for ideas that overturn settled hierarchies, and Sumner spent roughly a decade being told he was wrong. John Northrop and Wendell Stanley eventually crystallized pepsin, trypsin, and tobacco mosaic virus by similar means, and between them they made the case so thoroughly that continued resistance became untenable. The 1946 Chemistry prize divided accordingly — half to Sumner for the original insult to received wisdom, half to Northrop and Stanley for the industrious piling-on that followed — and in handing it over, the committee quietly ratified the principle that biological chemistry is chemistry, full stop. What we owe them is the conceptual groundwork for every enzyme the pharmaceutical industry now manipulates: the whole apparatus of molecular biology that followed assumed, as a starting point, that Sumner had been right.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

X-Rays Could Rewrite the Fly's Genes

Hermann J. Muller

Hermann Muller had spent years trying to induce mutations in Drosophila by chemical and temperature means, with results so variable they were nearly useless — and then in 1927 he turned an X-ray tube on his flies and watched the mutation rate jump by a factor of somewhere between 100 and 150. The message was stark: mutations are not just rare accidents that accumulate in the fullness of geological time; they can be manufactured, deliberately, by radiation. Muller grasped the corollary immediately and stated it at a volume his colleagues found uncomfortable — that routine medical and occupational X-ray exposure carried a genuine heritable cost, and that society ought to care about this — at a moment when X-ray machines were proliferating and enthusiasm for radiation ran rather ahead of caution. His politics made him a complicated figure: he spent years in the Soviet Union, fled after falling out with Lysenko, and testified in ways that gave anti-communists ammunition. The science, however, was impeccable, and his insistence on the mutagenic properties of radiation underlies every radiation protection standard written since, and every oncology protocol that distinguishes therapeutic dose from carcinogenic one.

Nobel Prize in Literature

A Glass Bead Game Against Despair

Hermann Hesse

Hermann Hesse had spent the years of the First World War writing pacifist journalism under a pseudonym, after which German nationalists burned his books and the Nazis later took up where the nationalists left off; he had emigrated to Switzerland in 1912 and stayed, more or less out of necessity. Through all of this he kept producing novels of remarkable inwardness — Siddhartha in 1922, Steppenwolf in 1927, and finally The Glass Bead Game in 1943, a labyrinthine meditation on the life of the mind set in a fictional future province — and when the Swedish Academy awarded him the prize in 1946, citing his "inspired writings" of "classical humanitarian ideals," it was recognising a body of work that had refused to become either propaganda or despair. His readership would surge again two decades later, when a new generation discovered that a novelist who took seriously the question of what inner life is for had more to say to them than any amount of social realism. The work endures less because it reflects its moment than because it resolutely refuses to.

Nobel Peace Prize

A Dismissed Professor, Vindicated at 79

Emily Greene Balch · John R. Mott

Emily Greene Balch had already paid the kind of price the peace movement often exacts from its most serious members: Wellesley College dismissed her from her economics professorship in 1919 for her opposition to the First World War, ending a twenty-year academic career without ceremony or apparent regret on the college's part. She went on to co-found the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom with Jane Addams and others, and when the prize came to her in 1946, at the age of 79, it was the committee's acknowledgment of a life organised around an unfashionable conviction maintained at personal cost. John Mott had spent five decades building international Christian fellowship through the YMCA and the World Student Christian Federation, crossing borders that nationalism was busy fortifying and treating young men across half a dozen countries as members of the same project. The two laureates had little in common stylistically, but the pairing had a logic: one had refused a war, the other had spent the same decades building the kind of cross-border human relationships that make the next war a fraction harder to start.

Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

A Cycle Linking Muscle to Liver

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Carl Ferdinand Cori

The Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation awarded its first prizes in 1946, and Carl Cori's appearance among the inaugural laureates was a fair advertisement for the committee's judgment. He and his wife Gerty had spent two decades at Washington University in St. Louis mapping the enzymatic pathway by which glycogen is broken down and resynthesised in muscle and liver, a loop that became known as the Cori cycle — one of the central mechanisms of carbohydrate metabolism, connecting the work done by a sprinting muscle to the glucose stored in the liver in terms that biochemistry could actually follow. The Lasker, in Cori's case, was not so much a tip as a reliable forecast: the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine arrived the very next year, shared with Gerty and with Bernardo Houssay. The Lasker committee has built its reputation on exactly this kind of early call, and the Cori cycle's importance only grew as diabetes research came to depend on understanding precisely what goes wrong when glucose metabolism fails.

Willard Libby proposes radiocarbon dating

Charcoal, Asked How Old It Is

The logic Willard Libby laid out in 1946 was almost indecently elegant: cosmic rays strike nitrogen in the upper atmosphere and produce carbon-14 at a rate steady enough to be treated as a constant; living organisms absorb it continuously through food and air and so maintain a fixed ratio of carbon-14 to ordinary carbon-12; the moment an organism dies that intake stops, and the carbon-14 begins to decay at a known half-life of roughly 5,730 years, ticking away like a clock the organism set at the moment of its death. Present the remains, read the remaining carbon-14, calculate how long ago the clock was wound. He confirmed the first age measurements in 1947, received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1960, and handed archaeologists a tool they had been managing without for the entirety of human civilisation. Before Libby, ancient organic material had to be dated by geological context, stylistic comparison, or informed guesswork. Afterwards, a piece of charcoal from a fire lit ten thousand years ago could be queried on its own terms — which is, if you think about it, a rather extraordinary thing to be able to do with charcoal.

ENIAC publicly unveiled

Thirty Tons, Five Thousand Sums a Second

On Valentine's Day 1946, the University of Pennsylvania pulled back the curtain on the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer — 30 tons of machinery, 18,000 vacuum tubes, 70,000 resistors, and roughly 5 million soldered joints, occupying a 1,800-square-foot room and consuming enough power to noticeably dim the lights in the surrounding neighbourhood when it was switched on. ENIAC could perform roughly 5,000 additions per second, a speed for which reporters at the time had no adequate comparison and so resorted to phrases involving atomic nuclei and artillery shells. The machine had been designed during the war to compute artillery firing tables — a job then done by teams of human calculators, also called "computers," who worked in parallel with adding machines — but by the time the public saw it, scientists from Los Alamos had already been quietly feeding it thermonuclear calculations. It broke down frequently, the vacuum tubes failing at a rate that required constant attention; one operator later remarked that a functioning run of more than a few hours counted as a triumph. What it proved was not that computing was fast but that computing could be fast, and that was sufficient for the queue that formed immediately outside the door.