1962

Nobel Prize in Physics

A Fluid That Forgot Friction

Lev Landau

Lev Landau arrived at the problem of superfluid helium-4 in the late 1930s carrying a theoretical toolkit of unusual breadth — plasma physics, quantum electrodynamics, phase transitions — and he needed all of it. When cooled below 2.17 kelvin, liquid helium enters a state where viscosity vanishes entirely and the fluid will climb the walls of any container with the serene indifference of something that has ceased to acknowledge friction. Landau's genius was to describe this not as the absence of something but as the presence of a specific two-fluid structure of quantum excitations he called phonons and rotons, and the mathematics worked. The biographical note of some awkwardness is that he spent 1938 in a Soviet prison on a denunciation that was almost certainly false, was released only after Pyotr Kapitsa interceded personally with Stalin, and then produced some of the most important physics of his career. He received the Nobel while hospitalised following a serious car accident in January 1962, and never fully recovered; but the theory stands, and every physicist who has watched a beaker of liquid helium crawl upward over its rim has Landau to thank for the explanation.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Twenty-Two Years to See One Molecule

Max F. Perutz · John C. Kendrew

Max Perutz began trying to solve the structure of haemoglobin in 1937, when X-ray crystallography was still a discipline in which results arrived through months of hand-calculation and the proteins themselves declined to cooperate on any reasonable timetable. Twenty-two years is a long time to work on a single molecule, and several people told him so; the breakthrough came when he discovered in 1953 that attaching heavy atoms like mercury to specific sites could solve the phase problem that had stymied the field. John Kendrew, his colleague at Cambridge, applied the same method to myoglobin — haemoglobin's smaller, single-subunit cousin that stores oxygen in muscle tissue — and obtained its three-dimensional structure first, in 1957, at atomic resolution. What emerged from both structures was not just the shape of two particular proteins but a new discipline: structural biology, the understanding that a protein's function is inseparable from its three-dimensional fold. The active site of an enzyme, the hinge of a receptor, the pocket that binds a drug — all of it follows from atomic geometry. Medicine has been arranging its molecules to fit those geometries ever since.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

A Copying Mechanism, Politely Understated

Francis Crick · James Watson · Maurice Wilkins

On 25 April 1953, Nature published a 900-word paper by Francis Crick and James Watson proposing that DNA was a double helix — two sugar-phosphate backbones spiralling in opposite directions, linked by base pairs whose specific pairing rules meant that each strand carried a complete blueprint of the other. The insight that ended the paper, rendered with characteristic British understatement as "it has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material," was one of the more consequential sentences of the twentieth century. The structure had not emerged from a vacuum: Maurice Wilkins at King's College London, and Rosalind Franklin, also at King's, had produced X-ray diffraction images of DNA whose patterns Watson saw — in circumstances that remain contested — and which constrained the model critically. Franklin died of ovarian cancer in 1958, aged 37; Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously, and the committee left this particular arithmetic unexplained. The three men received the prize nine years after the paper, which is itself not unusual, but the silence about Franklin's contribution remained a minor scandal for decades and a somewhat larger one thereafter.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Looking Directly at the People Who Feed Us

John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck grew up in Salinas, California, among the farms and canneries of the Salinas Valley, and he never quite left them even when he was writing elsewhere. His great subject was the working body — hands calloused by the fields, backs bent over fish-gutting tables, families moving west in trucks that might not make it — and he described its dignity and its abuse with a plainness that refused sentimentality while remaining stubbornly compassionate. The Grapes of Wrath, published in 1939, followed the Joads from the Oklahoma Dust Bowl to California's migrant labour camps with an anger so controlled it felt like reportage; Of Mice and Men, two years earlier, compressed the same landscape of economic powerlessness into a tragedy of 30,000 words that has never quite stopped hurting. The Swedish Academy cited his "realistic and imaginative writings, combining sympathetic humour and keen social perception," which is accurate if somewhat mild for a writer who was accused of Communist sympathies and had his books burned in California towns. His legacy is less a political argument than a sustained insistence that the people agriculture depends on are worth looking at directly.

Nobel Peace Prize

Eleven Thousand Names Against the Bomb

Linus Pauling

Linus Pauling had already won one Nobel Prize — the Chemistry prize in 1954, for his work on chemical bonding and molecular structure — and spent much of the subsequent decade making himself persona non grata in Washington as a result of what he chose to do next. Beginning in the mid-1950s, he organised scientists across the Western and Eastern blocs to sign a petition calling for an end to nuclear weapons testing, ultimately gathering around 11,000 signatures and presenting them to the United Nations Secretary-General in 1958. The FBI opened a file on him; the State Department initially refused to renew his passport; he was called before a Senate subcommittee. The Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which prohibited atmospheric, oceanic, and outer-space nuclear tests, was signed in August 1963, and the Nobel Committee awarded Pauling the Peace Prize for 1962 — presented, pointedly, on the day the treaty entered into force. He is the only person to have received two unshared Nobel Prizes, a distinction that says something both about the range of his mind and about the particular period in which a chemist could conclude that activism was also his professional responsibility.

Fields Medal

A Sphere With Seven Different Faces

Fields Medal

Lars Hörmander · John Milnor

Lars Hörmander, then thirty-one, received the Fields Medal for a body of work that brought order to the sprawling territory of linear partial differential equations — the mathematical language in which heat diffusion, wave propagation, and the bending of spacetime are all written. Rather than treating each type of equation as a separate creature requiring separate methods, he constructed a general theory of pseudo-differential operators that gave analysts a single coherent framework, and his 1963 treatise on the subject became a standard reference for a generation of mathematicians. John Milnor's contribution was of a different kind and, in its way, equally unsettling: in 1956 he proved that the seven-dimensional sphere admits exotic smooth structures — ways of defining calculus on the sphere that are perfectly valid yet mutually incompatible, so that the "same" topological object can have multiple distinct smooth identities. Several of his colleagues initially declined to believe the result, which is the mathematical community's form of high praise. Between them the two medallists demonstrated in 1962 that mathematics was still capable of producing results that made experts momentarily wonder whether they had made an error.

First identification of a quasar: 3C 273

A Galaxy's Worth of Light, One Point Wide

The catalogue entry 3C 273 had been sitting in the Third Cambridge Catalogue of Radio Sources since 1959, a strong radio emitter at an unidentified location in the sky. The problem was positional precision: radio telescopes of the era could not locate a source accurately enough to identify what optical object, if any, corresponded to it. Cyril Hazard solved this in 1962 using a lunar occultation — timing the exact moment the moon's limb crossed the source as seen from the Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia, which gave a position accurate enough to point an optical telescope. Maarten Schmidt took the spectrum at Palomar and stared at it for weeks before realising, in early 1963, that the emission lines he was seeing were ordinary hydrogen lines — just shifted 15.8% toward the red, placing the source at a cosmological distance of roughly two billion light-years. To be that bright from that far away, 3C 273 would have to be intrinsically more luminous than an entire galaxy of a hundred billion stars, powered by something in a region the size of a solar system. The word "quasar" was coined shortly after. What Schmidt had found was a supermassive black hole actively consuming its surroundings, and its existence implied that the early universe had been far more violent than anyone had suspected.

First visible-spectrum LED demonstrated

A Magic One, Coaxed Into Red Light

Nick Holonyak Jr. had been working on semiconductor devices at General Electric's research laboratory in Syracuse, New York, when in October 1962 he coaxed a gallium arsenide phosphide junction into emitting coherent red light — not infrared, which had been done, but visible light, at a wavelength the human eye could actually detect. He called it a "magic one," a phrase that suggested both genuine wonder and the uncertainty of whether anyone outside the laboratory would care. His former supervisor at Illinois, John Bardeen — who had already won two Nobel Prizes, one of them for co-inventing the transistor — described it as a major advance; the popular press was largely indifferent. The LED spent its first decade as an expensive curiosity used in laboratory instruments and early digital displays, its cost declining slowly as manufacturing improved. Then the costs fell faster, and then precipitously, and then someone worked out how to make a blue LED from gallium nitride, which made white light possible, which meant that the incandescent bulb — unchanged in essential principle since Edison — finally had a serious competitor. The light currently falling on this page, wherever you are reading it, may well originate in a direct descendant of what Holonyak demonstrated in Syracuse in 1962.

John Glenn — first American to orbit Earth

Not Knowing If It Was the Shield Burning

On 20 February 1962, John Glenn climbed into the Mercury capsule Friendship 7 atop an Atlas rocket at Cape Canaveral, and four hours and fifty-six minutes later he was back — having completed three full orbits of Earth at roughly 28,000 kilometres per hour. The flight was not without incident. About two hours in, a telemetry sensor indicated that the heat shield securing the base of the capsule might have come loose, which would mean that Glenn would burn up during re-entry in a manner that the engineers on the ground could describe precisely but could not prevent. The decision was made to keep the retrograde rocket package attached rather than jettisoning it as planned, in the hope it would hold the shield in place; Glenn was told the situation and flew the re-entry manually, watching the rocket straps burn away outside the window and not knowing whether what he was seeing was the rocket pack or the shield itself. It was the rocket pack. The heat shield held. He splashed down in the Atlantic and became, briefly, the most celebrated man in the country — which obscures somewhat that two Soviet cosmonauts had already orbited the Earth before him, but the Cold War had its own conventions about what counted as a milestone.

Telstar 1 — first active communications satellite, first live transatlantic TV

A Quarter Second to Cross the Ocean

Telstar 1 was launched on 10 July 1962, a collaboration between AT&T, NASA, Bell Labs, and the British and French postal services, and it was small enough — about 87 centimetres across, weighing 77 kilograms — to make the ambition it carried seem almost immodest by comparison. On 23 July it relayed the first live television signal across the Atlantic, bouncing images between a ground station in Andover, Maine, and receiving stations in Goonhilly Downs, England, and Pleumeur-Bodou, France; the signal took roughly a quarter of a second to make the crossing, which is the time it takes light to travel that distance, and this was remarkable enough that people held their breath watching it. Telstar also handled telephone calls, teletype, and data transmissions, and its engineers discovered quickly that the Van Allen radiation belts were degrading its transistors faster than expected; it went silent in February 1963. But the concept had been proved: information could move between continents at the speed of light, reliably, without cables on the ocean floor. The global communications infrastructure that now carries most of human intercourse descends, in a fairly direct engineering lineage, from that 77-kilogram sphere.

Mariner 2 — first successful planetary flyby

Venus Was Trying to Kill You

NASA launched two Mariner probes toward Venus in July and August 1962; the first was lost when its Atlas rocket malfunctioned 294 seconds after launch. Mariner 2, the second attempt, survived the journey and on 14 December 1962 swept to within approximately 34,800 kilometres of Venus — close enough to spend 42 minutes scanning the planet with microwave and infrared radiometers, a magnetometer, and particle detectors. The results arrived with a kind of measured finality. Surface temperatures were above 425 degrees Celsius, far too hot for liquid water or any life that resembled the kind on Earth. The solar wind — a continuous stream of charged particles from the sun, whose existence had been theorised but not confirmed — was detected exactly as predicted. The planetary magnetic field was too weak to measure. Any lingering popular attachment to the idea of a warm, possibly habitable Venus, inherited from decades of science fiction that had placed everything from dinosaurs to human civilisations under its clouds, did not survive the encounter. Mariner 2 was also the first spacecraft to successfully complete an interplanetary flyby, which made 1962 the year humanity first touched another world and immediately learned it was inhospitable.

Death of Niels Bohr

A Permanent Seminar of Friendly Argument

Niels Bohr

Niels Bohr died of heart failure on 18 November 1962, in Copenhagen, aged seventy-seven — in the same house in which he had been born, which feels either symmetrical or like a Copenhagen interpretation of biography depending on your disposition. His 1913 atomic model, in which electrons occupied discrete energy levels and jumped between them by emitting or absorbing photons of specific frequencies, was quickly superseded by the full quantum mechanics of the 1920s, but by then Bohr had already done something more important than solve the atom: he had built, at the Institute for Theoretical Physics he founded in 1920, a culture in which the most talented young physicists in the world — Heisenberg, Pauli, Dirac, Gamow, among many others — worked in a permanent seminar of friendly argument. His concept of complementarity, which held that wave and particle descriptions of quantum objects were mutually exclusive but both necessary, helped establish the epistemological ground rules for a theory that continued to resist easy visualisation. He is said to have told students that anyone who is not shocked by quantum mechanics has not understood it. He spent the decades after the war working on peaceful uses of nuclear energy and on the dangers of the weapons he had helped build, and left physics — and a particular way of doing it — permanently changed.