1946

Nobel Prize in Physics

Percy W. Bridgman

Bridgman spent decades constructing apparatus capable of producing pressures up to hundreds of thousands of atmospheres and then finding out, systematically, what happened to matter under those conditions. Anomalous phase transitions, strange viscosities, and the behaviour of materials far outside ordinary experience — all of it patiently mapped by a man who built his own equipment.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

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

Sumner received half the prize for crystallizing the enzyme urease in 1926 and proving that enzymes are proteins — a claim that met considerable resistance at the time. Northrop and Stanley shared the other half for extending the crystallization technique to pepsin, trypsin, and tobacco mosaic virus, establishing that viruses, too, could be handled as chemical entities.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Hermann J. Muller

Muller had shown in 1927 that X-rays dramatically increase the mutation rate in Drosophila, proving that mutations are not simply rare accidents waiting to happen but can be caused deliberately by radiation. The finding carried an obvious and uncomfortable corollary about human exposure to X-rays, which Muller stated plainly and early.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Hermann Hesse

The Swiss-German author was honoured for writings of classical humanitarian ideals and fine style — the committee had Siddhartha and The Glass Bead Game especially in mind. Hesse had been largely dismissed by the Nazi cultural establishment, a fact he wore without particular complaint.

Nobel Peace Prize

Emily Greene Balch · John R. Mott

Balch, at 79, was honoured for decades of peace work including co-founding the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, having been dismissed from her professorship at Wellesley for her opposition to the First World War. Mott received his share for building international religious fellowship through the YMCA and the World Student Christian Federation across more than half a century.

Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Carl Ferdinand Cori

Carl Cori was recognized for his work on the enzymatic conversion of glycogen to glucose — the Cori cycle — in the first year the Lasker prizes were awarded. The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine followed the very next year, a sequence that would become a reliable pattern for the Lasker committee.

Willard Libby proposes radiocarbon dating

At the University of Chicago, Willard Libby reasoned that cosmic rays produce carbon-14 in the upper atmosphere at a steady rate, that living organisms incorporate it, and that after death it decays at a known pace — meaning organic material carries its own clock. He presented the theoretical basis in 1946 and confirmed it with the first age measurements in 1947, handing archaeology a tool it had never had.

ENIAC publicly unveiled

On 14 February, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer was demonstrated to the public at the University of Pennsylvania — 30 tons of machinery containing roughly 18,000 vacuum tubes, capable of thousands of arithmetic operations per second. Reporters struggled to find an analogy for its speed. Scientists immediately formed a queue to use it.