1965

Nobel Prize in Physics

A Hair's Width From New York to LA

Sin-Itiro Tomonaga · Julian Schwinger · Richard P. Feynman

Quantum electrodynamics — the theory describing how light and electrons push and pull at each other — had been producing infinite answers since the 1930s, which is the sort of result that suggests something has gone wrong. Working independently during and after the Second World War, Tomonaga in wartime Tokyo, Schwinger at Harvard, and Feynman at Cornell each found a way to cancel those infinities in a procedure called renormalization, arriving at a theory whose predictions match experimental measurement to ten decimal places — a precision roughly equivalent to measuring the distance from New York to Los Angeles and being wrong by the thickness of a human hair. Feynman packaged his approach as small pictorial diagrams, deceptively casual-looking squiggles that physicists still doodle on napkins and whiteboards seventy years later; Schwinger's competing formulation was so dense with apparatus that it was said most readers surrendered before the halfway point. Freeman Dyson eventually showed all three approaches were equivalent, which unified the results but did nothing for Schwinger's prose style. The QED framework they built underlies every transistor, every laser, every piece of modern electronics — the invisible architecture of the electric world.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Molecules Built Like Blueprints, Not Guesses

Robert B. Woodward

For most of the nineteenth century, organic synthesis was driven by accident and intuition — a chemist would attempt to assemble a complex natural molecule and mostly discover what did not work. Robert Woodward changed the terms of the project entirely. Between the 1940s and 1960s, he synthesised quinine, cholesterol, cortisone, strychnine, reserpine, chlorophyll, and — in a collaboration with Roald Hoffmann that itself produced the Woodward-Hoffmann rules — vitamin B12, each molecule requiring the construction of dozens of atoms in precise three-dimensional sequence, a feat demanding that every intermediate step be planned, anticipated, and controlled. He worked with a meticulousness bordering on the theatrical: his group meetings were legendary for their length and rigor, his blackboard diagrams immaculate. The Nobel committee gave him the prize alone, in 1965, for work that elevated organic synthesis from skilled improvisation to something approaching engineering. Today, the pharmaceutical industry's ability to manufacture molecules of essentially arbitrary complexity traces a direct line back to the methods and aesthetic that Woodward insisted upon.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

The Genome Turns Out to Have Switches

François Jacob · André Lwoff · Jacques Monod

For a long time the genome was imagined as a kind of static catalogue — a parts list from which cells simply read off whatever protein they needed. Working at the Institut Pasteur in Paris through the late 1950s, François Jacob, André Lwoff, and Jacques Monod dismantled that comfortable picture. Studying the way bacteria switch the digestion of lactose on and off depending on what food is available, they identified the operon: a cluster of genes governed by a single regulatory element, a molecular switch that could be flipped by a repressor protein binding to or vacating the DNA nearby. The genome, they showed, is not a list but a programme — dynamic, context-sensitive, capable of responding to its environment rather than simply broadcasting. Monod later wrote the philosophical meditation Le Hasard et la Nécessité, which extended these ideas into territory uncomfortable for everyone; he seemed to enjoy that. Every subsequent field of molecular biology — gene regulation, developmental biology, the entire logic of how a fertilized egg becomes a different organism from its neighbour on the dish — descends from the operon model their work established.

Nobel Prize in Literature

A River Keeps Flowing Through the Slaughter

Mikhail Sholokhov

Mikhail Sholokhov spent most of the 1920s and early 1930s writing And Quiet Flows the Don, his four-volume account of the Don Cossack community being fed, one way and another, into the grinding machinery of revolution, civil war, collectivization, and historical progress. The novel follows Grigory Melekhov through two decades of catastrophe with a documentary particularity — the smell of hay, the weight of a scythe, the specific texture of grief — that sets it apart from the agitprop fiction surrounding it, and the Swedish Academy recognised it as one of the great chronicles of a people caught between forces none of them chose. Sholokhov's own political accommodation with the Soviet regime was less edifying; he became a reliable tribune for whatever position Moscow currently required, which made his literary achievement all the more incongruous. The novel endures precisely because its tragedy does not belong to any single ideology: both sides in the civil war are shown capable of tenderness and atrocity, and Grigory ends the book with almost nothing — which, in the circumstances, feels exactly right.

Nobel Peace Prize

Peace, Measured in Fed Children

United Nations Children's Fund

UNICEF was founded in December 1946 as a temporary emergency fund to feed and clothe European children in the rubble of the Second World War, and it was supposed to dissolve once the immediate crisis passed. It did not dissolve. Instead it gradually widened its remit to children everywhere who lacked adequate food, clean water, vaccines, and schooling — which turned out to be rather a large number of children — and by 1965 it was operating in over a hundred countries. The Nobel committee's decision to award the Peace Prize to an institution rather than an individual was unusual; the reasoning, implicit but clear, was that the most durable kind of peace is built in early childhood rather than in treaty rooms, that a generation of children who survive and learn are a more reliable foundation for stability than any accord signed between governments. UNICEF has since been present at every major humanitarian crisis of the past eighty years, which is either a testament to the organisation's resilience or a dispiriting commentary on the frequency of such crises.

Alexei Leonov performs first spacewalk

A Suit Too Swollen to Come Home

The mission plan for Voskhod 2 called for Alexei Leonov to exit the spacecraft, float outside for a few minutes, and return. On 18 March 1965, he did exit the spacecraft and spent 12 minutes and 9 seconds in open space, becoming the first human being to drift freely beyond any vehicle, tethered to the craft by a five-metre cable. What the mission plan had not accounted for was the behaviour of his spacesuit in vacuum: without the pressure of atmosphere around it, it ballooned outward — fingers too stiff to grip, arms unable to bend — until he could not fit back through the airlock the way he had come. He spent about twelve minutes trying, in rising heat and falling oxygen, before deciding to bleed air pressure from the suit manually, risking decompression sickness, until he could squeezing in headfirst and haul himself back. The incident was not mentioned in the Soviet press. Leonov later described the experience in characteristically laconic terms; the details emerged over decades, a little at a time, which is itself a small lesson in how space agencies communicate with their publics.

Mariner 4 returns first close-up images of Mars

No Canals, Only Craters

By mid-1965, the received picture of Mars had been built up over a century of hopeful telescopic observation: canals, seasonal colour changes interpreted as vegetation, a planet that was cold and thin-aired but perhaps not entirely uninviting. On 14 July 1965, Mariner 4 swept past Mars at a distance of about 9,800 kilometres and spent twenty-five minutes transmitting 22 photographs back to Earth — the first close-up images ever taken of another planet's surface. They showed craters. Hundreds of craters, ancient and uneroded, preserved by an atmosphere barely one percent as dense as Earth's at sea level, cold enough to freeze carbon dioxide directly out of the air. No canals. No vegetation. No polite ambiguity. The images took days to process using equipment that would embarrass a modern pocket calculator, and teams at JPL hand-coloured printouts of the raw data strips before the digital processing was complete, so impatient was everyone to see. What they saw settled the question of life on Mars for a generation, and though the question has been reopened in quieter, more technical forms since, Mariner 4's photographs remain the moment when Mars became, definitively, a place rather than an idea.

Gemini 4: first American spacewalk

The Saddest Order He Ever Obeyed

Three months after Leonov's improvised exit from Voskhod 2, NASA arranged a more deliberate one. On 3 June 1965, Edward White opened the hatch of Gemini 4 above the Pacific and spent approximately 23 minutes outside the capsule, manoeuvring with a hand-held oxygen jet gun — a device he was said to have found delightful and which ran out of propellant too quickly. He drifted above Hawaii and then the Gulf of Mexico, trailing his tether, while commander James McDivitt photographed him and mission control in Houston relayed the instruction to return inside. White acknowledged the order and did not immediately comply. He described being told to get back in the capsule as the saddest moment of his life — a sentiment that strikes most people as entirely reasonable, given the alternative was floating over the Pacific in a suit with a direct view of the curvature of the Earth. He died two years later in the Apollo 1 fire, which makes the photograph of him hanging over the clouds, orange-suited, grinning, all the more worth looking at.

Death of Winston Churchill

An Essay on Aliens, Lost for Decades

Winston Churchill

Winston Churchill died on 24 January 1965, aged ninety, having outlived most of his century's catastrophes and several of its hoped-for improvements. His relationship with science was more substantive than is sometimes recalled: as First Lord of the Admiralty and then Prime Minister, he was an early and forceful advocate for radar, pushed hard for the British atomic bomb programme, and supported the application of operational research — the use of mathematics and statistics to military and logistical problems — at a time when most generals regarded such methods with suspicion. He also wrote a 1939 essay speculating, with reasonable accuracy, on the probability of extraterrestrial life, which was lost for decades and rediscovered in a NASA archive in 2016. He held honorary doctorates from dozens of universities, which says something either about the breadth of his intellectual curiosity or the eternal willingness of institutions to associate themselves with the famous. The funeral, the largest in British history to that point, was watched by millions on television — a medium he had regarded with some wariness, and which had the last word.