1957

Nobel Prize in Physics

The Mirror That Lied

Chen Ning Yang · Tsung-Dao Lee

For two decades, the principle of parity — the notion that nature has no preference between left and right, that physics looks the same in a mirror — had been an article of faith so comfortable no one had thought to check it. Yang and Lee, reviewing the literature in 1956, noticed with some embarrassment that for the weak nuclear force specifically, this cherished symmetry had never actually been tested; it was assumption all the way down. They wrote a paper pointing this out and suggesting experiments that could settle the matter, then waited while Chien-Shiung Wu and her team cooled cobalt-60 atoms to near absolute zero and watched which way electrons flew during beta decay — and they flew the wrong way, decisively and reproducibly. The mirror universe does not obey the same rules as ours. I. I. Rabi, who had seen rather a lot by then, called it the most startling result in physics since the discovery of the neutron, and the Nobel committee moved with unusual speed, awarding the prize within a year. Wu, who did the experiment, was not included, which is a different kind of asymmetry and one that took considerably longer to acknowledge.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Letters Into Words, Chemically

Lord Todd

By the early 1950s, biologists understood roughly what nucleotides were but not precisely how they were assembled — which is a bit like knowing a book contains sentences without knowing how letters join into words. Alexander Todd, working at Cambridge with systematic rigour over more than a decade, synthesised ATP, FAD, ADP, and a succession of related coenzymes, establishing the exact phosphate-ester and glycosidic linkages that hold these molecules together and demonstrating that the same chemical architecture underpins both the transfer of energy and the storage of information in living cells. The twin discoveries — that ATP is the cell's universal energy currency and that the nucleotide linkage would turn out to be DNA's backbone — were not made in the same gesture, but Todd's synthetic chemistry made both possible to understand precisely. Made a life peer as Baron Todd in 1962, five years after the Nobel, he occupied a fairly singular position as a man whose molecules were in every cell on Earth while he himself later sat in the House of Lords. A world without his structural work is one where molecular biology begins later and tentatively, still squinting at molecules whose architecture it can only guess.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

A Poison, Made Precise

Daniel Bovet

In the 1930s, surgery relied on enormous doses of general anaesthetic to achieve the muscle relaxation needed to operate on a body that would otherwise clench against the knife — a situation comfortable for no one except the anaesthetic manufacturers. Curare, the arrow poison of South American indigenous peoples, was known to produce profound muscle relaxation, but extracting consistent doses from botanical sources was not, to put it mildly, a precision science. Daniel Bovet, working first at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and later in Rome, spent years mapping the pharmacology of curare's active principle and synthesising artificial analogues that could be produced in known concentrations, stored reliably, and reversed when surgery was done. He had also, earlier in his career, played a central role in developing the first antihistamines, drugs that tamed the body's allergic overreaction with a specificity that distinguished between the symptom and the patient. The field he helped create — rational synthetic pharmacology, where you design a molecule to target a specific receptor rather than grind up whatever leaf seems to help — is the method behind nearly every drug developed since. Without it, a general anaesthetic is still, in the old phrase, a calculated gamble.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Philosophy That Felt Like Weather

Albert Camus

Camus was forty-three when the announcement came from Stockholm, the second-youngest writer ever to receive the prize, and by most accounts he wore his distinction with the same ambivalence he brought to most inherited categories. He had grown up in poverty in Algiers, the son of an illiterate mother and a father killed at the Marne before Camus could form a memory of him — a biography that made him permanently suspicious of grand systems, whether fascist or Marxist, that required you to sacrifice the present person for the future ideal. The Stranger gave that suspicion its most economical form: a man who refuses to perform emotions he does not feel, and is condemned as much for the refusal as for his crime. The Plague offered a slower, more humane variation — the same absurd universe, but populated by people who show up anyway and do the work. The Nobel committee cited his earnestness and the clarity of his moral vision, which is true as far as it goes; what the citation undersells is that he was also a remarkably disciplined prose stylist, capable of making philosophy feel like weather. He died in a car accident three years later, at forty-six, and left behind an unfinished novel whose manuscript was found in the wreckage.

Nobel Peace Prize

A Bureaucratic Offramp From War

Lester Bowles Pearson

In October 1956, Britain, France, and Israel launched a co-ordinated military operation against Egypt, ostensibly to secure the Suez Canal following Nasser's nationalisation of it — and managed in the space of a fortnight to unite the United States and the Soviet Union in opposing them, which was not the most common outcome of Cold War diplomacy. Lester Pearson, Canada's Foreign Minister, saw the crisis for what it was: a situation where the parties could not back down without losing face, and where face was the entire problem. His solution was the United Nations Emergency Force, the first of its kind — a neutral body of international troops interposed between the combatants, not to compel peace but to make retreat possible without dishonour. It was, in essence, a bureaucratic offramp constructed under extreme pressure, and it worked. The Suez Crisis ended; the UNEF occupied Sinai; the combatants withdrew. Pearson went on to become Canada's Prime Minister and introduce universal healthcare, a busy few years even by the standards of people who collect Nobels. The peacekeeping model he invented has been deployed, with variable success, in dozens of conflicts since — which may be the most honest possible assessment of an idea that remains indispensable precisely because the alternative is worse.

Sputnik 1: first artificial Earth satellite

A Beep the Whole World Heard

On 4 October, engineers at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan used a modified R-7 intercontinental ballistic missile — the same rocket the Soviets had been developing to carry nuclear warheads — to place an 83.6-kilogram polished aluminium sphere into low Earth orbit. Sputnik 1 had no instruments to speak of, just a radio transmitter broadcasting a steady beep on frequencies any amateur could receive, and it completed one circuit of the Earth every 96 minutes. The beeping was deliberate: Korolev and his team wanted the whole world to be able to confirm, in real time, that it was up there. The confirmation arrived, and with it a wave of alarm in Washington that no intelligence briefing had prepared the government for, partly because the CIA's estimates of Soviet rocket capability had been quietly optimistic. Western newspapers spent a useful few days explaining that a satellite could pass over any country on Earth without warning; Western governments spent the following years explaining this to each other in classified settings and drawing up budgets accordingly. The Space Race did not begin with a bang but with a beep, at a frequency of about 20 megahertz, and everyone heard it.

Sputnik 2: first living creature in orbit

One Way, and They Knew It

Laika was a stray from the streets of Moscow — picked partly because strays were judged to be more resilient than pampered dogs — and on 3 November 1957, thirty-two days after Sputnik 1's launch, she became the first animal to orbit the Earth. The mission was assembled in under four weeks, driven by the political requirement to have something dramatic in orbit for the fortieth anniversary of the October Revolution, and Sputnik 2 had no re-entry system; there was no plan for Laika to come back. Soviet authorities described her death as peaceful and scheduled, occurring after several days in orbit once her oxygen supply was exhausted. In 2002, Oleg Gazenko, one of the scientists who had trained her, acknowledged publicly that she died within hours of launch from overheating when the thermal control system failed — and added, with evident discomfort, that he regretted the mission. What the mission did establish, beyond reasonable doubt, was that a living mammal could survive the forces of launch and the radiation environment of low Earth orbit, which was the information needed to plan for a human. It was a useful result, obtained at a cost that the people who obtained it later found difficult to account for cheerfully.

Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank completed

The Dish That Owed Nobody Anything

The idea of building a 76.2-metre fully steerable radio dish in the Cheshire countryside had seemed, to many in the British Treasury, a characteristic piece of astronomical overreach, and by the time the Lovell Telescope was completed in August 1957 its costs had gone so far over budget that Bernard Lovell faced the genuine possibility of personal bankruptcy and criminal proceedings. Then, on 4 October, the Soviets launched Sputnik. Within weeks, the Jodrell Bank telescope was the only instrument on Earth capable of tracking the carrier rocket by radar — a capability no one had specifically planned for, the dish having been designed for cosmic radio sources rather than objects in low Earth orbit. The timing was, to put it scientifically, very good. The telescope's debts were quietly absorbed, questions about cost overruns became questions about Cold War readiness, and Lovell was knighted. The instrument went on to track the early Soviet and American lunar probes, detect pulsars, and remain in productive scientific use for decades; it is still operating. It is a reminder that large, general-purpose scientific instruments have a way of being useful for things their builders had not imagined, and that the Treasury is not always the best judge of what those things will be.

Death of John von Neumann

The Man Who Designed Your Memory

John von Neumann

John von Neumann died in Washington on 8 February 1957, aged fifty-three, of bone cancer that his colleagues suspected — though could not prove — was related to his presence at nuclear tests in the Pacific. The list of fields in which he had made foundational contributions is the kind that invites suspicion: quantum mechanics, functional analysis, game theory, ergodic theory, set theory, operator algebras, cellular automaton theory, and, most consequentially for daily life, the logical architecture of the stored-program computer. The last of these — the design in which a single memory stores both data and the instructions for processing it, allowing programs to be changed without rewiring hardware — is what you are using right now, in whatever device is displaying these words. He had also contributed to the design of the implosion lens for the Fat Man bomb, and was less troubled by this than some colleagues thought he should be, though he was privately unnerved by what he had seen at the Trinity test. Klaus Fuchs, who had also worked at Los Alamos and was rather more troubled, later passed the bomb design to Moscow; von Neumann learned this and was furious. He died, reputedly, dictating from memory the opening chapters of a book on the brain and the computer that he had not quite had time to finish.