1962

Nobel Prize in Physics

Lev Landau

Landau built a comprehensive theory of superfluidity — the bizarre state in which liquid helium-4 flows without any resistance whatsoever, climbing the walls of its container if given the chance. His broader reach covered plasma physics, quantum field theory, and phase transitions, and he managed all of it despite spending a year in a Stalinist prison that would have finished off most people.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Max F. Perutz · John C. Kendrew

Perutz spent 22 years solving the structure of haemoglobin; Kendrew worked out myoglobin, a smaller relative. X-ray crystallography in those days meant months of arithmetic and patience, but when the shapes emerged, you could see for the first time how a protein's three-dimensional fold determines everything it does — the discipline of structural biology began here.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Francis Crick · James Watson · Maurice Wilkins

In April 1953 Watson and Crick proposed the double helix of DNA, guided in crucial part by X-ray diffraction data from Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin; the model immediately suggested how the genetic text copies itself, and the whole of molecular genetics followed from that insight. Franklin had died in 1958 and the prize cannot be awarded posthumously, which is a fact the committee has never been asked to explain.

Nobel Prize in Literature

John Steinbeck

Steinbeck wrote about people who work with their hands and get broken by the country they believed in — migrant farm workers in The Grapes of Wrath, ranch hands in Of Mice and Men — with a directness that made the comfortable reader slightly uncomfortable, which is generally the point.

Nobel Peace Prize

Linus Pauling

Pauling had already won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954; now he received the Peace Prize for spending the intervening years gathering scientists' signatures against nuclear testing and presenting petitions to the United Nations, a campaign that contributed to the 1963 Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. He is one of four people to have won two Nobel Prizes, and the only one to win them in different fields entirely.

Fields Medal

Fields Medal

Lars Hörmander · John Milnor

Hörmander built a general theory of linear partial differential equations that unified a scattered field under a single powerful framework. Milnor discovered that a seven-dimensional sphere can have exotic smooth structures — meaning you can give it a geometry incompatible with the obvious one — a result so surprising that several colleagues initially refused to believe it.

First identification of a quasar: 3C 273

Cyril Hazard used a lunar occultation with the Parkes Radio Telescope to precisely locate the radio source 3C 273, and Maarten Schmidt then examined its optical spectrum at Palomar — finding emission lines that appeared ordinary until he realised they were hydrogen lines shifted 15.8% toward the red. The object was not in our galaxy; it was at cosmological distance, and brighter than anything that far away had any right to be.

First visible-spectrum LED demonstrated

In October 1962, Nick Holonyak Jr. at General Electric made a semiconductor junction emit red light — a visible-spectrum light-emitting diode, the first of its kind. The diode was a curiosity then; a few decades later its descendants would illuminate every screen, traffic light, and kitchen under-cabinet on the planet.

John Glenn — first American to orbit Earth

On 20 February 1962, John Glenn orbited Earth three times aboard Friendship 7 in under five hours. Midway through, telemetry suggested the heat shield might have loosened; Glenn was asked to keep his retrorocket pack attached during re-entry as a precaution, and he flew the last stretch manually not knowing whether the shield would hold. It did.

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

Launched 10 July 1962, Telstar 1 relayed the first live transatlantic television signal on 23 July — images bouncing between Maine and Brittany in the time it takes light to travel the distance. It also transmitted telephone calls, data, and faxes, and made the idea of an instantaneously connected world feel, for the first time, like engineering rather than fiction.

Mariner 2 — first successful planetary flyby

NASA's Mariner 2 drifted past Venus on 14 December 1962, sweeping to within about 34,800 km — close enough to measure a surface temperature above 450 °C, confirm the existence of the solar wind, and find no detectable magnetic field. Any lingering hope of a tropical Venus turned to ash.

Death of Niels Bohr

Niels Bohr

Niels Bohr died of heart failure on 18 November 1962 in Copenhagen, aged 77. His atomic model of 1913, the correspondence principle, and the concept of complementarity were foundational to quantum theory; his Copenhagen institute became the world centre for theoretical physics between the wars, and his habit of murmuring "you are not thinking, you are merely being logical" stayed with his students for life.