1957

Nobel Prize in Physics

Chen Ning Yang · Tsung-Dao Lee

For two decades, physicists had assumed that the weak nuclear force obeyed the same left-right symmetry as the other forces. Yang and Lee looked carefully at the experimental evidence in 1956 and noticed this assumption had simply never been tested. Chien-Shiung Wu tested it shortly after with a cobalt-60 experiment and found the symmetry broken — a result described at the time as the most startling discovery in physics since the neutron.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Lord Todd

Alexander Todd synthesised ATP, FAD, and related coenzymes, working out the exact chemical linkages that form the backbone of nucleic acids and establishing the structural chemistry of the molecules that power and carry information in every living cell. It is difficult to find a more consequential piece of synthetic chemistry from the decade.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Daniel Bovet

Bovet developed the first antihistamines — drugs that block the body's allergic response — and synthesised compounds that mimic the muscle-relaxing effects of curare, making modern surgery significantly more civilised than it had previously been. The field he established, synthetic pharmacology, is the reason a medicine cabinet today looks nothing like one from 1900.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Albert Camus

Camus was 43 when he received the prize, and visibly uncomfortable about it. The committee cited his "important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience" — a description accurate enough but somewhat flattening of novels like The Stranger and The Plague, which are also, among other things, extremely well-made books.

Nobel Peace Prize

Lester Bowles Pearson

When Britain, France, and Israel invaded Egypt in 1956 over the Suez Canal, Pearson proposed the first United Nations Emergency Force — an interposition of international troops between the combatants that gave everyone a way to step back without losing face. The model he invented for separating armies without ending wars has been in use ever since.

Sputnik 1: first artificial Earth satellite

On 4 October, the Soviet Union launched an 83.6-kilogram aluminium sphere from the Baikonur Cosmodrome and placed it in orbit around the Earth. Sputnik 1 completed a circuit every 96 minutes and broadcast a radio signal audible to anyone with the right receiver — which is to say, to everyone. The shock in Western governments was genuine: the Space Race began that night.

Sputnik 2: first living creature in orbit

On 3 November, a stray dog named Laika became the first animal to orbit Earth, launched aboard Sputnik 2. She died from overheating within hours when the thermal control system failed — a fact Soviet authorities withheld for decades, describing her death as peaceful and planned. The mission proved that living organisms could survive launch and orbit, which was the objective, and the honesty problem was apparently considered secondary.

Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank completed

The 76.2-metre steerable radio dish at Jodrell Bank had its first light on 2 August, becoming the largest fully steerable radio telescope in the world. Within months of Sputnik's launch it was the only instrument on Earth capable of tracking the carrier rocket by radar — a capability no one had specifically planned for, but which demonstrated immediately why large radio observatories were worth having.

Death of John von Neumann

John von Neumann

Von Neumann died of cancer in Washington on 8 February, aged 53, having made foundational contributions to quantum mechanics, game theory, functional analysis, cellular automaton theory, and the logical architecture of the stored-program computer. The last of those is the design on which virtually every computer since has been built. He had also contributed to the Manhattan Project, which he found less troubling than some of his colleagues did.