1955

Nobel Prize in Physics

Willis E. Lamb · Polykarp Kusch

Lamb found a tiny discrepancy in the hydrogen spectrum — the "Lamb shift" — that Dirac's otherwise impeccable equation could not account for, and in doing so forced theorists to develop quantum electrodynamics to explain it. Kusch measured the magnetic moment of the electron with enough precision to reveal that it too disagreed slightly with Dirac's prediction; together, the two prizes were effectively a commission to build a better theory.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Vincent du Vigneaud

Oxytocin is a nine-amino-acid peptide that regulates labour, nursing, and — if popular science is to be trusted — a great many other things it may or may not actually do. Du Vigneaud synthesised it in 1953, the first polypeptide hormone ever made artificially, demonstrating that the chemistry of the body's signalling molecules was within reach of the laboratory.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Hugo Theorell

Theorell isolated the yellow ferment — a flavoprotein enzyme involved in cellular oxidation — and showed it was made of two separable parts: a protein and a smaller prosthetic group that actually did the chemical work. The two-component structure he demonstrated turned out to be a widespread feature of enzymes, and understanding it mattered for understanding life's chemistry at almost every level.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Halldór Laxness

Laxness was the first Icelander to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, recognised for an epic power that had renewed what the committee called "the great narrative art of Iceland" — a tradition with a legitimate claim to being the oldest in European vernacular prose. His novel Independent People follows a sheep farmer's decades-long struggle against debt and weather, which in Iceland amount to much the same thing.

Antiproton discovered at the Bevatron

Dirac's relativistic quantum mechanics had predicted in the 1930s that every particle should have an antimatter counterpart with opposite charge. The antiproton was the most consequential such counterpart to test for, and in October 1955, Segrè, Chamberlain, Wiegand, and Ypsilantis found it at the Bevatron accelerator in Berkeley — right where the equations said it would be, at the energy they had calculated. Segrè and Chamberlain received the Nobel four years later.

Salk polio vaccine declared safe and effective

On 12 April, Thomas Francis Jr. announced the results of the largest clinical trial in history: Jonas Salk's inactivated polio vaccine was safe and 80–90% effective against paralytic polio. The FDA licensed it the same day. Parents wept in the streets; church bells rang. The incidence of polio in the United States dropped sharply in the years that followed, and what had seemed like an annual catastrophe gradually became a memory.

Russell–Einstein Manifesto issued

On 9 July, Bertrand Russell released a statement signed by eleven prominent scientists — Einstein among them, who had signed it four days before his death — warning that hydrogen bombs posed an existential threat to humanity and urging governments to settle disputes without war. The manifesto was not naive; it was unusually clear-eyed about what the weapons could do. It directly produced the first Pugwash Conference in 1957.

Death of Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein

Einstein died in Princeton on 18 April from a ruptured aortic aneurysm, aged 76 — the 1921 Nobel laureate who had proposed special relativity at 26 and general relativity at 36 and had spent the decades since seeking a unified field theory he did not find. He declined surgery the night before he died, saying that prolonging his life artificially was in poor taste. He was right about most things.