1955

Nobel Prize in Physics

A Crack in Dirac's Perfect Equation

Willis E. Lamb · Polykarp Kusch

Paul Dirac's relativistic equation for the electron was, by any reasonable measure, one of the most beautiful things theoretical physics had produced: it predicted the hydrogen spectrum with eerie precision, and nearly everyone was satisfied to admire it. Willis Lamb was not. Working at Columbia in the mid-1940s with precise microwave techniques developed for wartime radar, he measured the energy levels of hydrogen and found a small but unmistakable split between two states that Dirac's equation insisted should be identical — a discrepancy of about 1,000 megacycles now called the Lamb shift. Polykarp Kusch, also at Columbia, then measured the magnetic moment of the electron and found it too was slightly larger than Dirac had calculated. Both anomalies were tiny. Both were real. The theoretical community spent the late 1940s building quantum electrodynamics — QED — specifically to account for them, producing in the process the most precisely tested theory in the history of science. The Nobel went to the two men who had made theorists uncomfortable enough to do something about it.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Building a Hormone From Scratch

Vincent du Vigneaud

The pituitary gland sits at the base of the brain, small enough to be overlooked and important enough to be ruinous when it misbehaves; for much of the early twentieth century its chemistry was as mysterious as the gland was inaccessible. By the 1940s, two of its hormones — oxytocin, which triggers labour and milk let-down, and vasopressin, which regulates blood pressure and water retention — had been isolated in crude form, but their actual structures were unknown. Vincent du Vigneaud at Cornell spent years working out the sequence of amino acids in both, and in 1953 he achieved something genuinely novel: the first laboratory synthesis of a polypeptide hormone, assembling oxytocin's nine amino acids in the correct order and confirming the structure by proving the synthetic version was biologically active. The achievement was precise enough to matter and audacious enough to startle: it showed that the body's chemical messengers were not some irreproducible biological magic but molecules that chemistry could, in principle, build and eventually redesign. Oxytocin itself has since attracted a quantity of popular enthusiasm somewhat in excess of what the evidence strictly supports, but that is a downstream problem du Vigneaud cannot be held responsible for.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

An Enzyme Needs Two Halves

Hugo Theorell

By the 1930s it was understood that cells oxidise nutrients to generate energy, but the molecular machinery doing the work was largely opaque. Hugo Theorell, a Swedish biochemist with a methodical temperament and excellent technique, set about dissecting it. His particular focus was the yellow ferment — a flavoprotein now understood as a key enzyme in cellular oxidation — and in 1934 he accomplished something conceptually important: he separated it into two components, a colourless protein and a small yellow prosthetic group, and showed that neither piece alone was catalytically active but that recombining them restored full function. This two-part architecture — a protein scaffold plus a smaller cofactor doing the actual chemistry — turned out to be a fundamental principle of enzyme biology, appearing across dozens of metabolic reactions. Theorell went on to work on peroxidases and the alcohol dehydrogenases, the latter with obvious implications for understanding how the liver copes with its burdens. The Nobel recognised decades of quiet, meticulous work that had illuminated the inner workings of the cell without ever making the front pages, which is roughly how most of biochemistry actually advances.

Nobel Prize in Literature

A Farmer Who Would Not Be Defeated

Halldór Laxness

Iceland in the twentieth century was a small, cold, remote island with a disproportionate literary inheritance — the sagas, composed in the thirteenth century, remain among the most supple and psychologically acute narratives in any European vernacular — and Halldór Laxness was, by general agreement, the man who had brought that tradition into the modern age. Born Halldór Guðjónsson in 1902, he spent years wandering between Catholicism, Expressionism, socialism, and America before settling back in Iceland and writing the books for which he is remembered: Sjálfstætt fólk, published in 1934–35 and translated as Independent People, which follows a subsistence sheep farmer's grinding, magnificent refusal to be defeated by debt, weather, and circumstance. The Nobel committee cited his epic power and the vivid pictures he drew of Iceland's history and nature. What the citation captured less well was the novel's extraordinary tonal range — the way it holds tragedy, mordant comedy, and genuine tenderness in the same sentence without any of them curdling the others. For readers outside Iceland it remains a discovery, which is perhaps the best kind of reputation a book can have.

Antiproton discovered at the Bevatron

The Mirror Particle, Finally Caught

When Paul Dirac published his relativistic equation for the electron in 1928, a troublesome implication fell out almost immediately: the mathematics seemed to require the existence of a positively charged electron, a mirror-image particle that had no business existing but that the equations insisted upon. The positron duly appeared in cosmic-ray tracks in 1932, which was gratifying; but the proton, eighteen hundred times heavier, was a more challenging test. To produce an antiproton required smashing particles together with enough energy to create a proton-antiproton pair from scratch, and in 1954 Berkeley's Bevatron accelerator was built with that specific threshold in mind. In October 1955, Emilio Segrè, Owen Chamberlain, Clyde Wiegand, and Thomas Ypsilantis used a carefully designed magnetic-deflection detector to sift the antiprotons out of the vastly more numerous pions the Bevatron produced — and there they were, right at the energy the theory had predicted. The universe contains both matter and antimatter; that it contains almost no antimatter today is one of the more important puzzles still outstanding. Segrè and Chamberlain collected the Nobel Prize four years later, which was gratifyingly prompt.

Salk polio vaccine declared safe and effective

Church Bells for a Vaccine

Polio had a particular genius for terror: it struck in summer, it struck children, and it struck at random, leaving some untouched and consigning others to iron lungs or twisted limbs with no discernible logic. Jonas Salk, working at the University of Pittsburgh, spent the early 1950s developing an inactivated vaccine — virus killed with formaldehyde, still capable of triggering immunity but unable to cause disease — and the clinical trial that tested it in 1954 was the largest in American history, involving nearly two million children. On 12 April 1955, Thomas Francis Jr. at the University of Michigan announced the results: the vaccine was safe and 80 to 90 percent effective against paralytic polio. The FDA licensed it the same day. Church bells rang. Teachers announced the news to classrooms. Parents wept in pharmacists' queues. The case count in the United States fell from nearly 58,000 in 1952 to under 6,000 by 1957, and polio in the Western hemisphere was eventually declared eradicated in 1994. Salk became the rare scientist whom ordinary people recognised by name, which he handled with more grace than celebrity usually permits.

Russell–Einstein Manifesto issued

Eleven Signatures Against the Bomb

By the mid-1950s the thermonuclear bomb existed, both superpowers had it, and the civil defence planners were drawing up leaflets about what to do when one arrived — advice that, in every honest assessment, amounted to a polite fiction. Bertrand Russell, aged 83 and not inclined toward comfortable fictions, drafted a statement in plain English about what hydrogen bombs could actually do and circulated it among the most eminent scientists he could reach. Albert Einstein signed it on 11 April 1955, four days before he died; ten others signed as well, including Max Born, Linus Pauling, and Joseph Rotblat. Russell read the manifesto publicly on 9 July, in a statement that was notably free of the woolly optimism that usually attends such appeals: it did not argue that wars could be abolished but that in a thermonuclear age the winners would resemble the losers so closely that the distinction would be academic. The document was not naive — it was, if anything, almost forensically clear-eyed. It led directly to the first Pugwash Conference in 1957, which established the durable, if unglamorous, tradition of scientists briefing governments on what their weapons can do before the governments use them.

Death of Albert Einstein

He Declined to Prolong It

Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein had been famous for so long — nearly half a century since the annus mirabilis of 1905, in which he had published the special theory of relativity, explained Brownian motion, and proposed the photoelectric effect in three papers in a single year, aged 26 — that it had become difficult to remember he was mortal. He died in Princeton on 18 April 1955 from a ruptured aortic aneurysm, aged 76. Surgeons offered to operate; he declined, saying that prolonging life artificially was tasteless and that he had done his share. He was right about most things. The general theory of relativity, completed in 1915, remains the framework within which GPS satellites are corrected and gravitational waves are predicted; his Nobel Prize came in 1921 for the photoelectric effect rather than relativity, which the committee apparently found less certain, a judgment history has since revised. He had spent his last decades seeking a unified field theory that would subsume electromagnetism and gravity into a single framework — he did not find it, and neither has anyone else. The search continues, in his absence, with the tools he made possible.