1964

Nobel Prize in Physics

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

Townes, Basov, and Prokhorov independently developed the maser — stimulated emission of microwaves from excited atoms — and from that work the laser followed as naturally as light follows from the sun. The technology was so new that nobody was quite sure what it was good for; the answer, it turned out, was almost everything.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin

Hodgkin determined the structures of penicillin, vitamin B12, and insulin using X-ray crystallography — a technique that requires processing enormous quantities of diffraction data by hand, which she and her team did before computers existed to help them. Vitamin B12 alone took eight years.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Konrad Bloch · Feodor Lynen

Bloch and Lynen independently worked out the multi-step pathway from simple acetate molecules to cholesterol — a biosynthetic route so convoluted it requires 37 separate enzymatic steps, which is either a triumph of molecular engineering or an argument that evolution really does make things up as it goes.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Jean-Paul Sartre

Sartre declined, stating that he did not wish to be institutionalised — the first Nobel laureate to refuse the prize voluntarily. The committee awarded it anyway, and he remains the only person to have declined the Nobel Prize in Literature, which is exactly the sort of gesture one would expect from a man who had spent his career arguing that existence precedes essence.

Nobel Peace Prize

Martin Luther King Jr.

King was 35 when he received the prize — at the time the youngest recipient in Nobel Peace Prize history — and he donated the full prize amount to the civil rights movement. He had been conducting his non-violent campaign against racial segregation in the United States since the Montgomery bus boycott nine years earlier.

Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Renato Dulbecco · Harry Rubin

Dulbecco and Rubin were recognised for their work on Rous sarcoma virus and the mechanisms by which viruses convert normal cells into tumour cells — establishing the basic principles of viral oncology that would later underpin the discovery of oncogenes.

Quark model proposed independently by Gell-Mann and Zweig

On 4 January 1964, Murray Gell-Mann submitted a paper proposing that hadrons are composed of fundamental constituents he named quarks — apparently after a line in Finnegans Wake. George Zweig at CERN arrived independently at the same idea and called them aces. Neither man expected them to be taken literally as real objects; the experimental evidence that they are took another decade to arrive.

Higgs mechanism proposed

Peter Higgs published a two-page paper on 19 October 1964 showing that spontaneous symmetry breaking in gauge theories can give mass to the force-carrying bosons — the mechanism that explains why the W and Z particles are heavy while the photon is not. François Englert and Robert Brout had published a related result weeks earlier. The predicted scalar boson was confirmed experimentally 48 years later at the LHC.

CP violation discovered in neutral kaon decays

James Cronin and Val Fitch at Brookhaven found that long-lived neutral kaons occasionally decay into two pions, violating the symmetry between matter and antimatter that particle physicists had assumed was inviolable. Published in Physical Review Letters in July 1964, the result had no tidy explanation; it still doesn't, and the asymmetry it hints at may be why the universe contains matter at all.

Cosmic microwave background detected at Bell Labs

Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were using a large horn antenna in Holmdel, New Jersey, when they found a faint isotropic hiss at 7.35 cm wavelength that refused to go away — not pigeons in the receiver, not interference from New York, but a microwave glow with a blackbody temperature of about 3.5 K coming uniformly from every direction in the sky. Robert Dicke's group at Princeton recognised it immediately: the afterglow of the Big Bang, still detectable 13.8 billion years later.

Bell's theorem published

John Stewart Bell proved in November 1964 that any local hidden-variable theory — any attempt to explain quantum mechanics by appealing to unknowns that respect ordinary causality — must satisfy certain inequalities. Subsequent experiments violated those inequalities, which means either locality or realism, or both, must go. Bell considered it the most important result in physics; others were less sure what to do with it.

Ranger 7 returns first close-up images of the Moon

On 31 July 1964, NASA's Ranger 7 transmitted 4,308 photographs in the final 17 minutes before impact, sending back images with resolution hundreds of times better than anything achievable from Earth. The Moon was, as it turned out, heavily cratered all the way down — not the relatively smooth surface that some scientists had hoped for.