1959

Nobel Prize in Physics

A Twin for Every Particle

Emilio Segrè · Owen Chamberlain

In 1928, Paul Dirac had written down an equation for the electron so elegant it almost felt like cheating, and noticed — with some unease — that it predicted a mirror-image particle of identical mass and opposite charge that nobody had yet seen. The positron was found in 1932, confirming the idea for electrons, but the proton was heavier and more complex, and for two more decades the antiproton remained a theorist's ghost. Emilio Segrè and Owen Chamberlain set about hunting it properly at Berkeley's Bevatron accelerator in 1955, smashing protons together at energies high enough that the collision debris ought to include the occasional antiparticle, then using a carefully arranged series of magnets and time-of-flight detectors to sift antimatter from the torrent of ordinary particles — a needle-in-a-haystack problem where the needle annihilates on contact with the haystack. They found it, unambiguous and reproducible, confirming that every particle of ordinary matter has a twin of opposite charge waiting somewhere to cancel it out. That the universe is made of matter rather than an equal mixture of both remains, several decades later, one of the more embarrassing open questions in physics.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Reading a Solution's Fingerprint

Jaroslav Heyrovsky

Prague in 1922 was not, by general consensus, the centre of the electrochemical world, but Jaroslav Heyrovsky was not especially concerned with the centres of things. He had noticed that a dropping mercury electrode — mercury dripping steadily through a capillary into a solution — behaved in pleasingly predictable ways when a voltage was applied across it, with the current rising in characteristic steps as different ions in the solution were successively reduced at the electrode surface. This relationship between voltage and current, which he called polarography, turned out to be a precise chemical fingerprint: given an unknown solution, you could identify what was in it and how much. The method was quiet and systematic in the way that genuinely useful laboratory tools tend to be, and it spread steadily into industrial quality control, clinical chemistry, and environmental analysis over the following decades. Heyrovsky spent thirty-seven years refining the instrument and its theory before Stockholm came calling in 1959 — a reminder that Nobel committees, like the courts of heaven, operate on their own schedule. A world without polarography is one where measuring trace metals in drinking water, or checking the purity of a pharmaceutical, requires considerably more fuss.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Copying the Copy Itself

Severo Ochoa · Arthur Kornberg

By the mid-1950s, the double helix had been described, the genetic code was known to live in DNA, and everyone agreed that cells somehow copied their nucleic acids — but the actual machinery doing the copying remained largely mysterious. Severo Ochoa, working at NYU, isolated polynucleotide phosphorylase, an enzyme that could string together RNA nucleotides in a test tube, providing the first tool for synthesising RNA outside a living cell and, incidentally, proving indispensable for cracking the genetic code a few years later. Arthur Kornberg at Washington University isolated DNA polymerase I from bacteria, demonstrating for the first time that DNA could be replicated in vitro — that the molecule could, under the right enzymatic conditions, make a copy of itself outside the cell that made it. The two men had, between them, found the molecular machines responsible for copying both kinds of nucleic acid, the permanent archive and the working transcript. Kornberg reportedly described his own excitement as so great that he barely slept for weeks. Every living cell replicates its genetic material continuously; every cancer drug that targets replication, every PCR test that amplifies DNA for diagnosis, traces its lineage back to understanding these enzymes.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Classical Fire, After the Rubble

Salvatore Quasimodo

Salvatore Quasimodo came of age during Italy's Hermeticism movement of the 1930s, when the dominant poetic ideal was compression and privacy: verse that turned inward, resistant to paraphrase, drawing on symbol and image rather than statement. His early poems — spare, allusive, rooted in the landscape of Sicily where he grew up — exemplified the mode perfectly and brought him genuine critical standing before the war. Then the war happened, and something shifted. The bombings of Milan, the partisans, the physical and moral rubble of fascism: these demanded a different kind of language, more direct, more civic, more willing to stand in the open and be understood. Quasimodo's post-war verse responded to that demand without abandoning the formal care of his earlier work — a difficult double act that the Swedish Academy recognised with the phrase 'classical fire.' Whether his later poems fully match the crystalline intensity of his early lyrics is a question Italian critics have never entirely resolved, which is perhaps the most honest tribute to a poet's complexity.

Nobel Peace Prize

Five Decades Against the Evidence

Philip Noel-Baker

Philip Noel-Baker had been at this longer than most. He served as a stretcher-bearer in the First World War, worked as a secretary to the British delegation at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, spent years at the League of Nations labouring over disarmament negotiations that the 1930s eventually made look faintly absurd, and then — undeterred in a way that can be read either as admirable or constitutionally unusual — carried on at the United Nations after 1945, writing a comprehensive scholarly study of the arms race published in 1958 as the Nobel Committee was presumably reading his file. He had also, in 1920, won Olympic silver in the 1,500 metres at Antwerp, making him one of the very few Nobel laureates to have also stood on a podium in a running vest. Five decades of consistent, methodical effort on a problem that conspicuously declined to be solved is, on reflection, as reasonable a criterion for the prize as any; persistence against the evidence is its own kind of courage.

Invention of the MOSFET transistor at Bell Labs

A Switch That Barely Sips Power

The transistor had already been invented at Bell Labs once, in 1947, and it was brilliant — but the original bipolar junction transistor had a problem: the silicon surface was electrically noisy and unstable, making it difficult to scale down or integrate reliably. Mohamed Atalla, an Egyptian-American engineer, proposed in the late 1950s that thermally growing a thin layer of silicon dioxide over the silicon surface would passivate it — chemically stabilise the dangling bonds that caused the noise — and he was right. Working with Dawon Kahng, Atalla demonstrated the first functional metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor in November 1959: a three-terminal switching device controlled by a voltage applied across an insulating oxide layer rather than a direct current, which meant it drew almost no power in its quiescent state. The MOSFET's ability to be switched on and off by voltage, to be made almost arbitrarily small, and to consume negligible power when idle made it the ideal building block for integrated circuits, and the semiconductor industry duly built everything on top of it. It is now the most manufactured device in human history, produced by the trillion annually — a number so large it mostly illustrates the failure of large numbers to convey anything.

Feynman's "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" lecture anticipates nanotechnology

No Law Forbids the Very Small

On 29 December 1959, Richard Feynman delivered a lecture at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society at Caltech with the air of someone pointing at something that had been sitting in plain view the whole time. He asked, with characteristic directness, whether there was any physical law that prevented storing information in individual atoms, or building machines component by component at the molecular scale, or writing the entire twenty-four volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica on the head of a pin. The answer, he noted, was no — not in principle, not according to the laws of physics as then understood. He proposed cash prizes for anyone who could build a working electric motor small enough to fit in a cube a 64th of an inch on a side, and for anyone who could write text small enough to be read by an electron microscope. The prizes were claimed, eventually. None of the actual nanotechnology Feynman envisioned existed yet — atomic-force microscopes, molecular machines, and quantum dots were all decades away — but the conceptual architecture he sketched in ninety minutes has been cited so often as the founding document of the field that it has almost become a myth in its own right. He was simply asking a question the laws of physics had not forbidden.

Luna 1 escapes Earth's gravity — first heliocentric object

Missing the Moon, Finding the Solar Wind

The plan was to hit the Moon. Launched by the Soviet Union on 2 January, Luna 1 was aimed directly at the lunar surface, which was either a statement of ambition or an admission that orbital mechanics in 1959 was still an art partly practised by feel. It missed — by approximately 5,900 kilometres, passing the Moon on 4 January and continuing outward into an orbit around the Sun, becoming the first human-made object to escape Earth's gravitational hold and enter heliocentric space. The miss was embarrassing in one sense and transformative in another, because the probe's instruments were working perfectly and measuring something nobody had measured before: a continuous, low-density stream of charged particles flowing outward from the Sun, later confirmed and named the solar wind. Luna 1 also confirmed that the Moon lacks any significant magnetic field, which told planetary scientists something important about its interior. The intended mission failed; the actual mission, accumulating quietly in the telemetry, was rather more interesting.

Luna 2 impacts the Moon — first contact with another celestial body

The First Touch of Another World

Eight months after Luna 1 drifted past, the Soviets tried again, with adjustments. On 14 September 1959, Luna 2 struck the lunar surface near the Sea of Serenity at roughly 3.3 kilometres per second, becoming the first human-made object to make physical contact with another world — an impact announced to the world partly by the sudden cessation of its radio signal. A cloud of metal and dust settled on the Moon, along with the probe's steel pennants engraved with the Soviet coat of arms, an early exercise in what might charitably be called interplanetary real-estate marking. Before impact, the probe had continued Luna 1's measurements, confirming the absence of a significant lunar magnetic field and taking further readings of the solar wind in interplanetary space, outside Earth's protective magnetosphere. The Moon, which had been observed by every human civilisation in recorded history, had just been touched for the first time. It turned out to be quite inert about the whole affair.

Luna 3 returns first images of the Moon's far side

The Far Side, Finally Seen

Since the Moon rotates at the same rate as it orbits the Earth, one hemisphere has always faced away from our planet — a fact known to every astronomer since orbital mechanics was understood, and tantalising precisely because there was no way to see it. On 4 October 1959, the Soviet Luna 3 probe changed that, executing a curved trajectory around the Moon and then, on 7 October, photographing roughly 70% of the far hemisphere during a 40-minute imaging session. The images were developed on board — Luna 3 carried an actual photographic film processing system, a genuinely extraordinary piece of miniaturisation — and then scanned and transmitted back across 470,000 kilometres as analogue signals. What they revealed surprised even seasoned lunar scientists: the far side was dramatically different from the near side, almost entirely covered in cratered highlands with very few of the dark basaltic plains, the maria, that dominate the face we see. The reason — that the nearside crust is thinner and more susceptible to ancient volcanic flooding — is still not definitively explained, sixty-five years later. Humans had been looking up at the same face for the entire duration of human history; here was the other half.

Leakeys discover Paranthropus boisei at Olduvai Gorge

A Skull Built for Grinding, Not Us

Mary and Louis Leakey had been excavating Olduvai Gorge in what is now Tanzania for nearly three decades, working through the Pleistocene sediments with the patience the geological record demands and the funding it never provides. On 17 July 1959, Mary found a fossil cranium protruding from the gorge wall — heavy, robust, nearly complete, with a pronounced sagittal crest running along the top of the skull and enormous flattened molars built for grinding tough vegetation. Potassium-argon dating placed it at approximately 1.75 million years old, older by a considerable margin than most known hominins at the time. Louis initially named it Zinjanthropus boisei, after the benefactor who had partially funded the dig, though it was soon reclassified as Paranthropus boisei, recognising its membership in the robust australopithecine lineage that diverged from the line leading to Homo and then went extinct, leaving no descendants. The discovery pushed the documented presence of early hominins in East Africa significantly further back in time, shifted the centre of paleoanthropological attention from South Africa to the Great Rift Valley, and helped secure the Leakeys the funding — from National Geographic — that allowed thirty more years of work. It was the skull that opened the door.