1954

Nobel Prize in Physics

Max Born · Walther Bothe

Born received half the prize for his statistical interpretation of the quantum wavefunction — the proposition that what the equation describes is not a particle's position but the probability of finding it there. It was a reading of the mathematics that Einstein spent decades resisting and that experiments have consistently confirmed. Bothe received the other half for his coincidence method, a technique for detecting particles arriving simultaneously that became fundamental to particle physics.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Linus Pauling

Pauling spent years developing a quantitative account of why atoms bond to each other in the ways they do — concepts of electronegativity and resonance that gave structural chemistry a rigorous foundation. He would later receive the Nobel Peace Prize as well, making him the only person to win two unshared Nobel Prizes, a fact that his colleagues found either inspiring or deeply unfair depending on their own record.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

John F. Enders · Thomas H. Weller · Frederick C. Robbins

To make a vaccine you need large quantities of the virus, and poliovirus had stubbornly refused to grow anywhere except living nerve tissue. Enders, Weller, and Robbins discovered it could be cultivated in other tissue types, a finding so directly enabling of the Salk vaccine that the Nobel committee awarded the prize for the technique before the vaccine it made possible had even been announced.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Ernest Hemingway

The prize cited The Old Man and the Sea specifically, a novella about an aging Cuban fisherman who hooks a great marlin, fights it for three days alone at sea, and brings home the skeleton. Hemingway's stripped prose style — short declarative sentences, almost nothing explained — had by 1954 influenced so many writers that it was sometimes difficult to read the original without feeling you'd already seen it somewhere.

Nobel Peace Prize

Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees

The UNHCR had been established in 1950 to manage what everyone hoped was a temporary problem — the tens of millions of people displaced by the Second World War. The problem turned out not to be temporary, and the organization has not run out of work since.

Fields Medal

Fields Medal

Kunihiko Kodaira · Jean-Pierre Serre

Awarded at the International Congress in Amsterdam: Kodaira for major results on harmonic integrals and their application to algebraic varieties; Serre for developing algebraic topology using sheaf theory, at 27 the youngest Fields medallist to that date. The record would stand for decades.

First practical silicon solar cell demonstrated

On 25 April, Daryl Chapin, Calvin Fuller, and Gerald Pearson of Bell Laboratories demonstrated a silicon p-n junction cell that converted sunlight to electricity at around 6% efficiency — roughly ten times better than anything that had existed before. The New York Times put the announcement on its front page and described it as the beginning of harnessing virtually unlimited solar energy, which was accurate, though it took another half-century to get going.

Castle Bravo thermonuclear test

On 1 March at Bikini Atoll, Castle Bravo detonated at 15 megatons — roughly three times the predicted yield, because the designers had not accounted for a fusion reaction in the lithium-7 component. Radioactive fallout spread across 7,000 square miles of the Pacific and contaminated the crew of the Japanese fishing vessel Lucky Dragon No. 5. It was the largest nuclear test in American history, and it was an accident of scale.

Obninsk Nuclear Power Plant — first civilian nuclear electricity

On 27 June, the Obninsk plant near Moscow was connected to the Soviet grid, producing 5 megawatts of electrical power from a graphite-moderated reactor — enough for roughly 2,000 homes. It operated for nearly 50 years. The same year the United States was still refining weapons capable of vaporising islands; the Soviets were also building something meant to keep the lights on.

Death of Alan Turing

Alan Turing

Turing died on 7 June in Manchester, aged 41, from cyanide poisoning; the inquest returned a verdict of suicide. He had laid the theoretical foundations for all programmable computers, broken the Enigma cipher during the war, and published papers on computability, machine intelligence, and how a leopard gets its spots — the last of those being, characteristically, a question no one else had thought to ask mathematically. He had been chemically castrated by court order two years earlier as punishment for being gay.

Death of Enrico Fermi

Enrico Fermi

Fermi died of stomach cancer in Chicago on 28 November, aged 53 — the 1938 Nobel laureate who had directed the world's first controlled nuclear chain reaction in a squash court beneath the university in 1942. He was the kind of physicist who was equally comfortable at the blackboard and the laboratory bench, a combination rare enough that his colleagues called such people "Fermis" as a category of one.