1956

Nobel Prize in Physics

A Sliver of Germanium Learns to Amplify

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

In the autumn of 1947, Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, was home to a peculiarly focused group of physicists who had been charged with the unlikely task of improving the telephone. John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, working at the semiconductor bench while their supervisor William Shockley orbited the project at some remove, demonstrated on 16 December 1947 that a small slab of germanium with two gold contacts pressed close together could amplify an electrical signal — no vacuum, no filament, no slow warm-up, no fragile glass envelope to shatter. Shockley, who had not been in the room, then worked out the theory of the more practical junction transistor, the design that propagated everywhere. The vacuum tube the transistor displaced was large enough to hold in one hand and hot enough to feel from six inches away; the device that replaced it was smaller than a pencil eraser and cool to the touch. A world still running on tubes would be one in which a computer fills a room and a smartphone is unimagined; the transistor, now manufactured by the trillion on a single chip, is probably the most reproduced human artifact in history.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Fire Learns to Branch or Burn Clean

Sir Cyril Hinshelwood · Nikolay Semenov

Before Nikolay Semenov and Cyril Hinshelwood arrived at the problem in the late 1920s, the chemistry of fast reactions — combustion, explosion, the way a flame sustains itself or suddenly doesn't — was understood mostly by description rather than mechanism. Semenov, working in Leningrad, and Hinshelwood, in Oxford, reached essentially the same insight by different routes: that many such reactions proceed not in a simple chain but in a branched one, where each reactive intermediate can spawn two or more successors, causing the rate to accelerate exponentially until the reaction either runs out of fuel or, in the less orderly case, detonates. The distinction between a controlled burn and an explosion, it turned out, was largely a question of branching ratio. That insight gave chemists and engineers a genuinely quantitative grip on combustion, and it sits at the base of everything from internal combustion engine design to the analysis of what went wrong in industrial accidents — a theoretical framework that has probably prevented more disasters than most safety regulations.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

He Walked Himself to the X-Ray Room

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

In 1929, Werner Forssmann was a twenty-five-year-old surgical resident at a small hospital in Eberswalde, Germany, convinced that a thin tube inserted into a vein and advanced to the heart could be used to deliver drugs or measure pressures without the danger of puncturing the organ directly. Unable to get permission to try it on a patient, he threaded a urological catheter through a vein in his own left arm, walked the length of the hospital to the X-ray room, positioned himself under the fluoroscope, and photographed the catheter's tip sitting in his right atrium. His supervisors were not pleased; his career at that hospital promptly ended. André Cournand and Dickinson Richards, at Columbia and Bellevue in New York, spent the following decade transforming this alarming self-experiment into a precise clinical technique, measuring cardiac output, blood pressures across the heart's chambers, and the haemodynamic consequences of heart failure and lung disease. The prize arrived twenty-seven years after the catheter; without the technique it founded, cardiac surgery as we know it — including bypass operations and catheter-based valve repairs — would have remained too blind to the numbers it needed to proceed.

Nobel Prize in Literature

What Endures Is the Donkey

Juan Ramón Jiménez

Juan Ramón Jiménez left Spain in 1936 as the Civil War began and never returned, spending his remaining years in Cuba, the United States, and Puerto Rico — an exile's trajectory that gave his late poetry a quality of sustained, luminous homesickness. The Nobel Committee cited his lyrical poetry as an example of "high spirit and artistic purity," which is the sort of formulaic praise that usually tells you nothing but here happens to be accurate. His most beloved work, Platero y yo, written decades earlier, is an elegy framed as a series of prose poems about a small grey donkey in the Andalusian town of Moguer — tender without being mawkish, observant of death without melodrama, a book that has been read by Spanish schoolchildren for generations without being ruined by the association. His wife Zenobia, who had translated Tagore and served as his literary collaborator for decades, received the prize news at his side in a Puerto Rican hospital; she died three days later. Jiménez himself died within two years. What endures is the donkey.

Neutrino experimentally confirmed

Ghost Particle Caught Near a Reactor

Wolfgang Pauli proposed the neutrino in December 1930 in a letter addressed, with characteristic self-awareness, to "Dear Radioactive Ladies and Gentlemen" — a particle he needed to rescue energy conservation from an awkward discrepancy in beta decay, which was emitting electrons with a continuous range of energies when physics said there should be only one. He called it a desperate remedy and privately expressed doubt it could ever be detected, since it carried no charge and almost no mass and passed through matter as if the matter were not there. The proof that it was there came on 20 June 1956, when Frederick Reines and Clyde Cowan sent Pauli a telegram reporting that their large liquid-scintillator detector, positioned a few metres from the Savannah River nuclear reactor, had caught antineutrinos — confirmed by the characteristic double flash of gamma rays that followed their rare collisions with protons. Pauli reportedly celebrated with a case of champagne. He had been wrong about the detectability, spectacularly right about everything else, and the neutrino he conjured from an accounting problem has since turned out to be one of the most abundant particles in the universe — streaming through your body at roughly sixty-five billion per square centimetre per second, utterly indifferent to your existence.

FORTRAN manual published — first high-level programming language

Machines Learn to Read Mathematics

In the early 1950s, programming the IBM 704 meant writing in assembly language — a painstaking notation in which every instruction corresponded to a specific machine operation, and a scientist who wanted to solve a differential equation first had to think like a hardware manual. John Backus at IBM considered this arrangement a waste of time for everyone involved and proposed, over considerable internal scepticism, that a compiler could translate mathematical notation directly into machine code. IBM published the first FORTRAN programmer's reference manual in October 1956, and the compiler shipped to users of the 704 in April 1957; it produced code efficient enough that engineers who had predicted a fifty-percent performance penalty were surprised to find the penalty was negligible. The conceptual shift was more significant than the benchmark: for the first time, a programmer could describe what they wanted to compute rather than specify every step of how the machine should compute it. Scientific computing had been a specialist craft; FORTRAN made it a profession. Much of the atmospheric modelling, finite-element analysis, and numerical simulation that has accumulated since runs on code that either is FORTRAN or derives its habits from it.

Calder Hall — first nuclear power station to deliver commercial electricity

A Queen Pulls the Lever on Atomic Light

On 17 October 1956, Queen Elizabeth II pulled a lever at Calder Hall in Cumberland and connected the station's Magnox reactors to the UK National Grid — the first time nuclear fission had been used to generate electricity at commercial scale anywhere in the world. The occasion was presented as the dawn of an age of almost unlimited clean power, and the Pathé newsreel footage has the earnest optimism of a period that had recently been introduced to the atom under rather different circumstances and was relieved to find another use for it. Calder Hall's Magnox design also produced plutonium as a by-product, which fed the British weapons programme, meaning the same facility was simultaneously illuminating homes and accumulating bomb material — a duality that its boosters and critics chose to emphasise in opposite proportions. The station ran for forty-seven years before closing in 2003, far outlasting its design life. The legacy it established — that nuclear fission could and would be part of the civilian electricity supply — shaped energy policy arguments that have not yet resolved themselves.

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

A Seam Runs Around the Whole Earth

For most of the twentieth century's first half, the floor of the ocean was assumed to be an ancient, flat, geologically inert plain — the accumulated sediment of billions of years, undisturbed. Maurice Ewing and Bruce Heezen at Columbia's Lamont Geological Observatory had been systematically mapping that floor by echo-sounding and coring for years when, in 1956, they reported that the Mid-Atlantic Ridge was not a local feature but the central spine of a continuous global mountain range more than 64,000 kilometres long, threading through every ocean basin on earth. More striking still was what sat at the ridge's crest: a central rift valley, a cleft that ran along the summit like a seam. Heezen's colleague Marie Tharp had identified the rift from the sounding data earlier; Ewing had initially resisted the interpretation. The rift implied that the seafloor was being pulled apart, which was exactly what Harry Hess's seafloor spreading hypothesis required. When palaeomagnetic surveys in the early 1960s confirmed symmetrical magnetic stripes on either side of the ridge, the game was over: plate tectonics became unavoidable, and the ocean floor turned out to be not the oldest surface on the planet but the youngest, perpetually new.