1964

Nobel Prize in Physics

A Bell Labs Boss Called It a Waste

Charles H. Townes · Nicolay G. Basov · Aleksandr M. Prokhorov

The maser — Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation — began with Einstein's 1917 observation that excited atoms could be nudged into releasing their energy on cue, a theoretical curiosity that sat largely dormant for three decades before Charles Townes in New York and Basov and Prokhorov in Moscow, each working independently on opposite sides of the Cold War's deepest chill, built actual devices that did it. Townes assembled his first maser in 1953 in a Columbia University basement; within a few years, the principle had been extended to visible light, and the laser was born. The technology was so new and its applications so unclear that a Bell Labs administrator reportedly complained to Townes that he was wasting the company's money — which is the sort of judgment that ages poorly. Lasers now cut steel, read the genome, carry telephone calls across oceans, correct short-sightedness, and measure the distance to the Moon to within centimetres. A world without stimulated emission is one where fibre-optic broadband doesn't exist, your surgeon's tools are blunter, and the barcode scanner at the supermarket is just someone's pencil.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Penicillin's Shape, Worked Out by Hand

Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin

X-ray crystallography works by firing X-rays at a crystal, recording the diffraction pattern they make, and then — through a great deal of mathematics — working backwards to the three-dimensional arrangement of atoms that produced it. In the 1940s and 1950s, that mathematics was performed by hand, on paper, by human beings with patience bordering on the heroic. Dorothy Hodgkin did it for penicillin, confirming the structure in 1945 and settling a debate about the beta-lactam ring that chemists had been having since Fleming's discovery; she then did it for vitamin B12, a molecule so complex — with 181 atoms at a time when the previous record was around 58 — that the work took eight years and required some of the earliest computing assistance available. She would later solve the structure of insulin, a project she began in 1934 and finally completed in 1969. At every stage her work gave pharmaceutical chemists the precise blueprints they needed to understand, modify, and synthesise molecules that keep enormous numbers of people alive. She was, by all accounts, also unusually kind.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Thirty-Seven Steps to Cholesterol

Konrad Bloch · Feodor Lynen

Cholesterol has acquired a formidable reputation for villainy, but it is also indispensable — a structural component of every cell membrane in the body and the raw material from which the body synthesises steroid hormones, bile acids, and vitamin D. How the body makes it from scratch, beginning with the two-carbon fragment acetate and arriving at the 27-carbon cholesterol molecule through a sequence of enzymatic transformations, was worked out in parallel by Konrad Bloch in Chicago and Feodor Lynen in Munich across the 1950s and early 1960s. The full pathway, it emerged, involves 37 separate enzymatic steps — a degree of metabolic elaborateness that is either a marvel of precision engineering or evidence that biochemical evolution does not much value elegance. Their mapping of this route explained not just how cholesterol is made but why and where it goes wrong in various diseases, and it provided the mechanistic foundation on which statins — among the most widely prescribed drugs in the world — were eventually designed. The pathway is convoluted; the consequences of understanding it were not.

Nobel Prize in Literature

The Prize He Refused to Keep

Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre had spent the better part of two decades arguing, with considerable philosophical rigour, that human beings are condemned to be free — that there is no fixed essence to a person, no predetermined nature that excuses any choice, and that accepting external definitions of oneself is a form of bad faith. When the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature in October 1964, he declined it, making him the first person to voluntarily refuse a Nobel Prize, explaining that he did not wish to be institutionalised or aligned with any institution that might constrain his independence. The committee gave him the prize anyway. He remains the only person ever to have refused the Nobel Prize in Literature, a gesture so consistent with his philosophy that one might almost suspect he had arranged it. His novels, plays, and essays — above all Being and Nothingness and the play No Exit — retain their grip not as period pieces but as serious arguments about responsibility, freedom, and the particular discomfort of other people.

Nobel Peace Prize

Youngest Laureate, Under Constant Watch

Martin Luther King Jr.

When Martin Luther King Jr. stood in Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in December 1964, he was 35 years old — the youngest person to receive the prize at that point in its history — and he had spent nine years conducting a campaign of deliberate, disciplined nonviolent resistance against racial segregation that had begun with the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955. By 1964, the Civil Rights Act had just been signed into law; the Voting Rights Act was still a year away; and King himself was under constant FBI surveillance, which had been authorised at the level of the attorney general. He donated the entire prize sum of $54,600 to the civil rights movement. His 1963 letter from Birmingham City Jail, written on scraps of newspaper in the margins of a statement by white clergy urging patience, remains one of the most incisive moral arguments of the twentieth century — a document that does not age because the patience it refuses has not aged either.

Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

A Virus That Rewrites the Orders

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Renato Dulbecco · Harry Rubin

In the early twentieth century, Peyton Rous had shown that a virus could cause cancer in chickens, a result so heretical to the prevailing understanding of malignancy that it took fifty years and a Nobel Prize to fully vindicate him. By the 1950s, Renato Dulbecco and Harry Rubin had developed the plaque assay technique, which allowed researchers to count virus particles with precision and to study how the Rous sarcoma virus transformed normal cells into tumour cells under controlled laboratory conditions. What they established were the basic principles of viral oncology: that a virus could permanently alter a cell's hereditary programme, switching it from orderly growth into continuous, unregulated proliferation. This was not just an account of one disease in chickens. The framework they built — that a virus could integrate into a cell's genome and pervert its regulation — directly enabled the discovery of oncogenes in the 1970s, and with it the modern understanding that cancer, viral or not, is ultimately a disease of corrupted genetic instruction.

Quark model proposed independently by Gell-Mann and Zweig

Three Quarks for Muster Mark

By the early 1960s, physicists had accumulated an embarrassment of subatomic particles — pions, kaons, eta mesons, baryons of various flavours — and the periodic table had been enough of a clue that underlying order was suspected somewhere. Murray Gell-Mann, who had already organised the zoo into a classification scheme he called the Eightfold Way, submitted a paper in January 1964 proposing that hadrons are composed of three kinds of fundamental constituents, which he named quarks after a line in Finnegans Wake — 'Three quarks for Muster Mark' — apparently because the word had the right air of arbitrariness. George Zweig at CERN arrived at the same conclusion independently and called them aces, which is the name that did not survive. Neither man was entirely sure the quarks were real objects rather than mathematical conveniences; Gell-Mann himself hedged for years. The experimental evidence — from deep inelastic scattering at SLAC in the late 1960s — settled the matter: there really are point-like things in there. The quark model is now the alphabet of the Standard Model of particle physics.

Higgs mechanism proposed

Why Anything Weighs Anything

The problem was embarrassingly basic: the mathematical framework of gauge theory, which describes fundamental forces with enormous elegance, insisted that the particles carrying those forces must have zero mass, yet the W and Z bosons — carriers of the weak force — are in practice about 80 and 91 times the mass of a proton. Something had to give mass to the theory without breaking it. In August 1964, François Englert and Robert Brout published one solution; weeks later, on 19 October, Peter Higgs submitted a two-page paper showing that spontaneous symmetry breaking could do the job, and noting in a second draft — after the journal referee prompted him — that the mechanism predicted an additional scalar boson. The paper was initially rejected by CERN's preprint server as insufficiently relevant to physics. The boson Higgs predicted was confirmed experimentally at the Large Hadron Collider in July 2012, forty-eight years later, at which point Higgs was 83 years old and reportedly found the whole affair somewhat overwhelming. The mechanism explains not just why W and Z bosons are heavy but why anything has mass at all.

CP violation discovered in neutral kaon decays

A Crack Between Matter and Its Mirror

The symmetry between matter and antimatter had seemed, to most physicists, more or less guaranteed — a consequence of deep mathematical principles suggesting that the laws of physics should look the same if you swap all particles for antiparticles and reflect everything in a mirror simultaneously. In the summer of 1964, James Cronin and Val Fitch at Brookhaven National Laboratory found, while studying the decays of long-lived neutral kaons, that this symmetry — CP symmetry — was violated at a small but definite and reproducible level. Published in Physical Review Letters in July, the result was clean and unambiguous and, for a while, had no tidy explanation. It still doesn't, not quite. The significance runs deeper than academic tidiness: the slight imbalance between matter and antimatter in the early universe — without which we would not exist, since matter and antimatter would have annihilated each other perfectly — requires precisely this kind of violation. Cronin and Fitch had found a crack in the laws of physics and, in finding it, had begun to explain why there is anything at all.

Cosmic microwave background detected at Bell Labs

Pigeon Droppings and the Oldest Light

Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were not looking for the Big Bang. They were radio astronomers at Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey, trying to use a large horn antenna — originally built for the Echo satellite programme — for precision radio astronomy, and they kept finding a faint, irritating hiss at 7.35 centimetres wavelength that refused to be explained away. They cleaned pigeon droppings from the receiver. They checked for interference from New York City. The noise remained, perfectly uniform in every direction, equivalent to a blackbody temperature of roughly 3.5 Kelvin. Forty miles away at Princeton, Robert Dicke's group had been preparing to search for exactly this signal — the cooled relic radiation from the early universe, predicted by George Gamow's Big Bang model years earlier — and when Penzias phoned them, Dicke reportedly put down the receiver and told his colleagues: 'We've been scooped.' The two pairs published adjacent papers in the Astrophysical Journal in 1965. What Penzias and Wilson had stumbled into was the afterglow of the universe's first few hundred thousand years, still faintly detectable 13.8 billion years later. It is, by a considerable margin, the oldest light anyone has ever seen.

Bell's theorem published

Einstein's Hunch, Made Testable

Albert Einstein had never been comfortable with quantum mechanics, and in 1935, together with Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, he had argued that the theory must be incomplete — that particles appear correlated across distance not because of any spooky instantaneous connection but because they carry hidden variables encoding their properties from the outset, like pre-written instructions. For nearly three decades this remained a matter of philosophical taste rather than testable physics. Then in November 1964, John Stewart Bell, a Northern Irish physicist then at CERN, published a proof showing that any local hidden-variable theory — any theory in which those instructions respect ordinary causality — must satisfy a specific set of statistical inequalities. This was not a philosophical position but a mathematical boundary. Subsequent experiments, beginning with Clauser and Freedman in 1972 and culminating in Alain Aspect's definitive tests in 1982, violated Bell's inequalities, decisively. Either there are no hidden variables, or the variables are not local, or both. Bell's theorem turned a metaphysical argument into an experimental one and, in doing so, permanently complicated what it means to say that reality exists independently of observation.

Ranger 7 returns first close-up images of the Moon

The Moon Was Not Smooth After All

Earlier lunar photographs, taken from Earth through telescopes, had suggested a surface that might, in the optimistic reading, be relatively smooth — smooth enough, some scientists worried, that a lander might simply sink into deep layers of fine dust like a ship into fog. Ranger 7 was designed to settle the question by the bluntest possible method: fly straight at the Moon and photograph it relentlessly until impact. On 31 July 1964, it did exactly that, transmitting 4,308 photographs in the final 17 minutes and 36 seconds before it struck the lunar surface, sending back images with resolution more than a thousand times finer than anything achievable from Earth. The Moon was not smooth. It was scarred by craters at every scale, right down to the smallest the cameras could resolve, which strongly implied craters at smaller scales still. The images were broadcast live on American television — an unusual piece of real-time scientific disclosure for the era — and they provided the surface data that engineers needed to design the Apollo landers that would follow five years later. Ranger 7 succeeded where its six predecessors had failed, and the photographs it sent back in its last quarter-hour remain among the most consequential ever taken.