1956

Nobel Prize in Physics

William B. Shockley · John Bardeen · Walter H. Brattain

Bardeen and Brattain demonstrated the point-contact transistor at Bell Laboratories in December 1947; Shockley developed the junction transistor theory shortly after. The device replaced the vacuum tube — fragile, hot, and the size of a thumb — with something smaller, cooler, and solid, and the electronics that followed from that substitution are visible from where you are sitting right now.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Sir Cyril Hinshelwood · Nikolay Semenov

Semenov and Hinshelwood, working independently, each developed a quantitative theory of branched chain reactions — the chemistry of why some reactions proceed steadily while others explode. Their work gave scientists the tools to analyse combustion and detonation with rigour rather than anxious approximation.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

André F. Cournand · Werner Forssmann · Dickinson W. Richards

In 1929 Forssmann threaded a catheter through a vein in his own arm, walked to an X-ray room, and photographed it sitting in his heart — an experiment so alarming to his supervisors that he was dismissed. Cournand and Richards took the technique he had demonstrated on himself and turned it into a clinical tool for measuring cardiac output and pulmonary pressures with real precision, which is the sort of trajectory medical innovation occasionally requires.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Juan Ramón Jiménez

Jiménez had been living in exile since the Spanish Civil War when the prize found him, recognised for lyrical poetry the committee described as "an example of high spirit and artistic purity." He is best remembered for Platero y yo, an elegy for a small donkey that manages to be neither sentimental nor slight.

Neutrino experimentally confirmed

Wolfgang Pauli had proposed the neutrino in 1930 to rescue the conservation of energy from an awkward experimental anomaly, and had privately bet it would never be detected. On 20 June 1956, Frederick Reines and Clyde Cowan published in Science the first direct detection of the antineutrino, caught by a large liquid-scintillator detector placed next to the Savannah River nuclear reactor. Pauli had been wrong about the detectability, right about everything else.

FORTRAN manual published — first high-level programming language

IBM published the first FORTRAN programmer's reference manual in October, prepared by John Backus and his team. The compiler shipped to users of the IBM 704 in April 1957, translating human-legible mathematical notation into machine code well enough to make assembly language optional for scientific work. That a machine could be told what to do rather than instructed how to do it was not, at the time, obvious.

Calder Hall — first nuclear power station to deliver commercial electricity

Queen Elizabeth II opened Calder Hall in Cumberland on 17 October, connecting it to the UK National Grid — the first nuclear plant anywhere to deliver electricity in commercial quantities. The Magnox reactor also produced plutonium for the British weapons program, so the same facility was simultaneously keeping the lights on and building bombs, which gave its supporters and critics something different to emphasise.

Mid-Atlantic Ridge rift valley mapped — key evidence for seafloor spreading

Maurice Ewing and Bruce Heezen at the Lamont Geological Observatory reported that the Mid-Atlantic Ridge was not an isolated feature but a continuous mountain range more than 64,000 kilometres long, running along the entire length of the ocean floor and possessed, along its crest, of a central rift valley. The finding was the structural clue that, combined with subsequent paleomagnetic surveys, eventually made plate tectonics unavoidable.