1947

Nobel Prize in Physics

A Prize Awarded to the Ceiling

Edward V. Appleton

In the early 1920s, the existence of an electrified layer high in the atmosphere had been proposed on theoretical grounds to explain why radio waves curved around the Earth rather than vanishing straight into space, but no one had measured it with any precision. Appleton, working first at King's College London, set about doing so with characteristic thoroughness: he varied the frequency of a BBC transmitter and watched for interference between the direct wave and the one bouncing back off the sky, timing the echo like a very patient bat. By 1927 he had pinpointed a conducting layer at roughly 200 to 400 kilometres altitude — what we now call the F-layer, and what carries his name — and gone on to map its seasonal fluctuations, its dependence on the sun, and its role in reflecting shortwave frequencies around the globe. Without it, long-distance radio communication would require an impractical chain of relay stations across every ocean. The Nobel Committee was, in effect, awarding a prize to the ceiling.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Three Steps Where Others Took Dozens

Sir Robert Robinson

Plant alkaloids are among nature's most devious molecules — morphologically complex, pharmacologically potent, and structurally opaque, the kind of chemistry that defeated entire careers in the nineteenth century and still humbled the best practitioners into the twentieth. Robinson, working in Oxford across several decades, systematically dismantled that opacity: he worked out the structures of morphine, strychnine, quinine, and scores of related compounds, and in doing so developed an electronic theory of organic reaction mechanisms — the idea that electrons shift along bonds in ways that govern how molecules attack and defend each other — which remains the conceptual skeleton of every undergraduate organic chemistry course taught today. He also developed a habit, in his later years, of being formidably right in argument, a trait his colleagues found both admirable and exhausting. His synthesis of the tropinone ring in 1917, achieved in three steps from what his predecessors had taken dozens to reach, was the kind of elegant shortcut that makes other chemists quietly recheck their own work.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Sugar's Long Commute Between Organs

Carl Cori · Gerty Cori · Bernardo Houssay

The body's management of blood sugar is not a simple tap but an elaborate feedback system involving muscle, liver, pancreas, and brain, and disentangling which organ was doing what occupied a substantial fraction of mid-century biochemistry. Carl and Gerty Cori — who had emigrated from Prague to St. Louis and worked as a genuine collaborative partnership at a time when such arrangements were common in marriage but rare in academia — traced the circuit by which lactic acid produced in exercising muscle travels to the liver and is there rebuilt into glycogen, the body's storage form of glucose; this loop is named after them. Gerty Cori became the first American woman to win a Nobel Prize in science, a distinction that should not have required waiting until 1947. The other half of the prize went to Bernardo Houssay of Buenos Aires, who demonstrated that pituitary hormones antagonise insulin's effects — connecting the brain, through its endocrine arm, to the problem of diabetes — and in doing so showed that glucose regulation is a conversation between organs, not a monologue from the pancreas.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Seventy-Seven Years of Offending the Right People

André Gide

By the time the Swedish Academy awarded Gide the prize — for writings of fearless truthfulness and keen psychological insight — he was seventy-seven years old and had spent roughly sixty years offending precisely the institutions that expected not to be offended. He had quarrelled openly with the Catholic Church, for which he nearly converted, then reconsidered; with the Communist Party, which he admired from a distance, visited the Soviet Union, and then described with an honesty the Party found deeply inconvenient; and with a significant portion of the French literary establishment, who found his insistence on complicating easy moralities rather irritating. His journals, his novels, and his provocations together amounted to a sustained argument that literature's duty is to describe what is actually there, however impolitic. He seemed, throughout, broadly unbothered. The Nobel address was received with the polite admiration owed to a man who has already said everything he wishes to say and means it.

Nobel Peace Prize

Feeding Every Side of the War

Friends Service Council · American Friends Service Committee

The Quakers had been running relief operations across European conflicts since the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, and by the 1940s they had refined a distinctive approach: deliver food, clothing, and medical supplies to civilians on all sides of a conflict, without inquiry into nationality, faith, or the politics of their government, on the quiet premise that hunger does not wait for a peace settlement. Through both World Wars, the British Friends Service Council and the American Friends Service Committee ran feeding programmes, refugee assistance, and reconstruction work in France, Germany, Austria, Poland, and beyond — often in circumstances where other organisations could not operate — funded by donations and conducted with minimal publicity. The Nobel Committee, awarding the prize jointly to both bodies, described their work as a silent contribution to the cause of peace. The Quakers, who had never sought recognition and had been doing this for most of a century, received the news with characteristic equanimity.

Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Heredity Was Never Made of Protein

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Oswald T. Avery · Homer Smith

In 1944, Oswald Avery, Colin MacLeod, and Maclyn McCarty published an experiment of quiet devastation: they showed that the substance transferring hereditary traits between strains of pneumococcal bacteria was not protein, as the consensus held, but deoxyribonucleic acid — DNA — a molecule then considered too monotonous in structure to carry the complexity of heredity. Avery, a mild and methodical bacteriologist at the Rockefeller Institute, had worked toward that conclusion for over a decade. He never received a Nobel Prize, a lapse that became, in retrospect, one of the more conspicuous oversights in the history of that institution; the Lasker Award in 1947 was among the few formal recognitions he received in his lifetime. Sharing the prize, Homer Smith was honoured for decades of meticulous quantitative work on kidney physiology, establishing how the kidney regulates the precise composition of body fluids — the kind of fundamental measurement that underpins every clinical nephrology textbook written since.

Transistor invented at Bell Labs

Two Gold Contacts, No Tube in Sight

The vacuum tube had been the workhorse of electronics since the first decade of the century: it amplified signals, switched currents, and made radio, radar, and the early computers possible, while consuming considerable power, generating considerable heat, and failing with depressing frequency. William Shockley's solid-state physics group at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, had been working for years on the theory that semiconductor materials might be made to do the same work without any of those inconveniences. On 23 December 1947, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain pressed two gold contacts, separated by a hair's breadth, against a slab of germanium and found that a small current applied at one contact controlled a much larger current at the other — amplification, in solid state, without a tube in sight. Shockley, who had not been present for the crucial experiment, went on to develop the junction transistor and shared the 1956 Nobel with Bardeen and Brattain. The three of them had, in an afternoon, made most of the twentieth century's technology inevitable.

Dennis Gabor invents holography

Thirteen Years Ahead of His Own Invention

Conventional photography records how bright the light is at each point on a surface; it discards, irrecoverably, the information about the direction the light came from — which is why a photograph is flat. Dennis Gabor, a Hungarian-born physicist working at British Thomson-Houston in Rugby on the seemingly unrelated problem of improving electron microscopy, realised in 1947 that if you could record not just the intensity but the phase of a light wave, you would preserve the three-dimensional structure of the original scene, and could reconstruct it later as a true wavefront rather than a projection. He called the method holography, from the Greek for "whole writing," and published the theory in Nature in 1948. The practical difficulty was that 1947 had no coherent light source intense enough to make the method work well with visible light; the laser, when it arrived in 1960, made Gabor's idea suddenly and brilliantly practical, and earned him the 1971 Nobel Prize in Physics. He had been thirteen years ahead of the technology needed to fully demonstrate his own invention.

Death of Max Planck

Physics Did Not Wait for His Comfort

Max Planck

Max Planck died on 4 October in Göttingen, aged eighty-nine, having lived long enough to see the hypothesis he proposed in 1900 grow into an entire branch of physics that now describes the behaviour of matter at every scale below the visible. The proposal had been, at the time, a mathematical contrivance: faced with the failure of classical physics to account for the radiation spectrum of a heated black body, Planck supposed — reluctantly, almost apologetically — that energy was not emitted continuously but in discrete packets proportional to frequency, each packet of size hν, where h is the constant now bearing his name. He considered it a formal trick, a way of making the equations work, and expected someone would shortly explain why it worked in properly continuous terms. No one ever did. Einstein used the same idea five years later to explain the photoelectric effect; Bohr used it to model the hydrogen atom; Heisenberg and Schrödinger built quantum mechanics from it. Planck, a deeply conservative physicist who had reluctantly introduced the most radical idea in modern science, spent his later decades watching the consequences multiply in directions he had not anticipated and did not always find comfortable. Physics did not wait for his comfort.