1966

Nobel Prize in Physics

Herding Atoms With Light

Alfred Kastler

Alfred Kastler spent the late 1940s and early 1950s asking a deceptively simple question: could you use light to sort atoms by their internal quantum states, the way a patient drover herds sheep into separate pens? The answer, which he called optical pumping, was yes — shine polarised light on an atomic ensemble and you can nudge electrons up specific energy ladders, loading the atoms into whichever spin state you choose and leaving them there. The technique is, in the felicitous sense, violent only at the level of photons. What Kastler gave physics was a quiet, precise, non-destructive way to interrogate matter; it underpins the atomic clocks that define the second, the masers that amplify microwave signals from deep space, and the laser spectroscopy that now measures physical constants to a precision Kastler himself could not have imagined. A world without optical pumping would be a world whose GPS satellites drift, whose atomic time standards are coarser, and whose understanding of quantum transitions is correspondingly murkier — which is to say, a world slightly less certain of when and where it is.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Electrons Belong to No One Atom

Robert S. Mulliken

For most of chemistry's classical history, a bond between two atoms was treated as a private arrangement between them — electrons huddled between neighbours, loyalties fixed, the molecule a kind of polite society where no one mingled across the room. Robert Mulliken, working through the 1920s and 1930s, dismantled this picture almost entirely. In molecular orbital theory, electrons do not belong to any single atom; they inhabit orbitals that sprawl across the whole molecule, obeying quantum mechanics without reference to the neat bilateral transactions of valence-bond theory. It was a broader, stranger, and ultimately more powerful framework, capable of explaining the colour of organic dyes, the stability of aromatic rings, and the behaviour of polyatomic molecules that classical models simply could not reach. Mulliken also coined the word "orbital" in its chemical sense, which is the modest sort of neologism that ends up on the lips of every chemistry student in every language for the next century. The prize arrived in 1966, by which point molecular orbital theory had become so woven into the fabric of quantum chemistry that imagining the field without it requires the kind of effort better spent on other things.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

A Virus, and a Hunger, Both Named

Peyton Rous · Charles B. Huggins

In 1911, Peyton Rous ground up a tumour from a Plymouth Rock hen, filtered the result to remove all intact cells, and injected the cell-free filtrate into healthy chickens — which then developed cancer. His conclusion, that a virus could cause a malignancy, was received by the medical establishment with the warmth typically reserved for outright heresy, and Rous spent the next few decades being politely ignored. He was 87 when the Nobel arrived, which made the fifty-five-year delay the longest between a discovery and its prize on record, and also gave the committee's eventual vote a faint quality of apology. Charles Huggins shared the prize for a wholly different insight: that prostate cancer cells, rather than being autonomous rogue agents indifferent to the body's chemistry, were in fact dependent on male sex hormones, and could be controlled by surgically or chemically withdrawing that supply. The idea that cancer could be starved rather than merely cut or burned was, in 1941 when Huggins demonstrated it, genuinely novel. Together the two laureates established a durable principle: that cancer is not monolithic, that its vulnerabilities are real, and that finding them is worth the trouble.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Two Elegies for a Broken World

Shmuel Agnon · Nelly Sachs

The 1966 Literature prize was shared between two writers whose work is so marked by rupture that to read them consecutively feels less like a programme than a wound. Shmuel Yosef Agnon, the first Hebrew-language laureate, had spent a lifetime weaving the sacred and secular textures of east European Jewish life into fiction at once deeply rooted in traditional text and alive to its own impending loss; he wrote in a Hebrew that drew from every stratum of the language as if collecting fragments before they scattered. Nelly Sachs had escaped Berlin in 1940 on the last available Swedish visa, a rescue arranged at the personal intervention of Selma Lagerlöf, and spent the following decades writing poetry about what the Holocaust had consumed — not as documentary but as elegy, dense with biblical imagery and a grief so controlled it becomes a kind of formal discipline. The committee's citation for Sachs spoke of her lyrical and dramatic writing interpreting the destiny of the Jewish people; Agnon's described his narrative art, deeply rooted in the Jewish people. Both formulations are accurate and both are inadequate. What the two writers share is a reckoning with a civilisation that had, to different degrees and by different means, been ended — and a refusal to let the ending be the only word.

Inaugural ACM A.M. Turing Award

A Language Structured Like an Argument

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Alan J. Perlis

In 1966, the Association for Computing Machinery decided that computing needed a prize commensurate with its ambitions, named it for Alan Turing — who had died in 1954 without receiving anything of the kind — and gave the inaugural edition to Alan J. Perlis of Carnegie Mellon, which was at least an auspicious start. Perlis was recognised for his work on advanced programming techniques and compiler construction, including his central role in designing ALGOL, the language that introduced structured programming to the field and from which most of what followed — Pascal, C, Java, and their various descendants — can trace some portion of its DNA. He was also, by all accounts, a gifted and demanding teacher who helped establish the idea that computer science was a discipline, not a trade, and that it deserved a rigorous curriculum rather than a collection of tricks. The Turing Award itself has since become the field's closest equivalent to a Nobel: given annually, worth a million dollars (since 2014, funded by Google), and carrying the name of a man whose own treatment by the British state remains one of the more discomfiting episodes in the history of official ingratitude.

Fields Medal

Four Ways to Redraw the Map

Fields Medal

Michael Atiyah · Paul J. Cohen · Alexander Grothendieck · Stephen Smale

The 1966 Fields Medals were awarded at the Moscow congress to four mathematicians whose work had, between them, redrawn the maps of topology, set theory, algebraic geometry, and dynamical systems — which is not a sentence one gets to write about most four-year cycles. Michael Atiyah received the medal for the Atiyah-Singer index theorem, a result so far-reaching that it connects the analysis of differential operators to the topology of manifolds in ways that still generate new physics; Paul Cohen was recognised for proving that the continuum hypothesis — Georg Cantor's 1878 question about whether any infinite set sits in size between the integers and the reals — is independent of the standard axioms of set theory, meaning it can neither be proved nor disproved from them, which is a specific and rather vertiginous kind of answer. Alexander Grothendieck had, by this point, essentially rebuilt algebraic geometry from foundations up, using the language of schemes and sheaves and cohomology in a programme of such abstraction that some colleagues found it bracing and others found it alarming. Stephen Smale added the Poincaré conjecture in dimensions five and higher, solved by methods that do not work in the lower dimensions where the problem remained open for another four decades. A vintage year is usually a phrase people apply to wine; here it applies to mathematics and is, if anything, an understatement.

Luna 9 achieves first soft landing on the Moon

The Dust Was Only a Rumor

For years before Luna 9 flew, a faction of scientists had argued with genuine conviction that the lunar surface was not solid rock but a deep, treacherous layer of electrostatically charged dust — accumulated over billions of years of micrometeorite bombardment — into which any lander would silently disappear, taking its instruments with it. The debate was not frivolous; it was the kind of uncertainty that made mission planners nervous about committing hardware to a world nobody had yet touched. On 3 February 1966, the Soviet Luna 9 settled that argument with admirable finality: it bounced to a stop in the Ocean of Storms, unfolded four petal-like stabilising panels, deployed its camera, and over the next three days transmitted nine panoramic images of a stony, cratered surface that was, unmistakably, solid. They were the first photographs ever taken on the surface of another world. The pictures were remarkable for more than their scientific content: because Luna 9 used a transmission format compatible with wire-photo equipment, British astronomers at Jodrell Bank acquired the signal, hired a press photo-wire scanner, and decoded the images themselves — rather to the Soviets' annoyance, and rather to the benefit of posterity.

Venera 3 becomes first spacecraft to reach the surface of another planet

Silence, but the Aim Was True

Venera 3 was never designed to survive Venus — the engineers understood they were building a probe that would be crushed by atmospheric pressure and incinerated by heat before it had time to feel embarrassed about it — but reaching the surface at all was the point. Launched in November 1965 and arriving on 1 March 1966, it became the first human-made object to reach the surface of another planet, having crossed roughly 350 million kilometres on a trajectory calculated by people using slide rules and early computers. The irony is complete: contact was lost before atmospheric entry, so no scientific data were returned from the planet itself, making Venera 3 a triumph of navigation without a payload of discovery. What it demonstrated, quietly and in silence, was that interplanetary guidance was possible — that a machine built by human hands could be aimed at a moving dot in the sky and arrive. The Soviet Venus programme would take several more attempts and the better part of a decade before returning data from the surface; Venera 3 was the address to which all those later probes were ultimately sent.

Surveyor 1: first American soft landing on the Moon

Ground Firm Enough for Boots

Luna 9 had already settled the dust question — literally — by the time NASA's Surveyor 1 descended on 2 June 1966, but that did not make the American soft landing any less consequential. Surveyor 1 touched down in Oceanus Procellarum on its first attempt, which was not guaranteed; it then transmitted over 11,000 photographs before the first lunar night shut it down. Those photographs, along with data on soil bearing strength and thermal properties, were what the Apollo programme needed: not poetry but engineering confirmation that a crewed lander could set down without vanishing into the regolith. The worry about deep dust had been genuine enough that some engineers had designed contingency measures in case the surface was softer than expected. Surveyor 1 found bearing strength broadly comparable to wet sand — unremarkable, perhaps, but unremarkable was exactly what the mission planners wanted to hear. Three years and one month later, the information gathered by spacecraft like Surveyor 1 helped two men choose where to put their feet.