1968

Nobel Prize in Physics

Luis Alvarez

Alvarez developed large liquid-hydrogen bubble chambers and, with them, catalogued dozens of short-lived hadron resonances — particles that exist for billionths of a nanosecond before decaying. The catalogue was bewildering before the quark model explained it, and foundational after. He also later proposed, with his son Walter, that the Cretaceous extinction was triggered by an asteroid impact.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Lars Onsager

Onsager derived his reciprocal relations in 1931, showing that in a system near equilibrium the matrix of transport coefficients is symmetric — heat flow and temperature gradients, electrical current and voltage, diffusion fluxes and concentration gradients all connected by a single elegant constraint. The result unified diverse phenomena in irreversible thermodynamics; the chemistry committee waited 37 years to give him the prize.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Robert W. Holley · H. Gobind Khorana · Marshall W. Nirenberg

By 1966, Nirenberg and Khorana had deciphered all 64 codons of the genetic code using synthetic polynucleotides — determining which three-letter sequence of RNA specifies which amino acid. Holley completed the picture by sequencing the first transfer RNA molecule, showing how the code is actually read. Life had been running this software for three billion years before anyone worked out what it said.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Yasunari Kawabata

Kawabata was the first Japanese author to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. His novels — Snow Country, The Sound of the Mountain, The Old Capital — use a prose influenced by classical Japanese poetry and haiku: spare, imagistic, dwelling in what is not said as much as what is. The committee cited his narrative mastery in expressing the essence of the Japanese mind, which was perhaps the most accurate thing a Swedish academy has ever said about anything.

Nobel Peace Prize

René Cassin

Cassin was the principal drafter of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, and later founded the International Institute of Human Rights in Strasbourg. The declaration is not legally binding, which is its greatest weakness; it has also been cited in courtrooms on every continent, which is its quiet persistence.

ACM A.M. Turing Award

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Richard W. Hamming

Hamming's 1950 paper introduced error-correcting codes — mathematical schemes that allow a receiver to detect and fix errors in transmitted data without requiring the sender to resend. Hamming codes underpin everything from satellite transmissions to computer memory; he also gave a famous lecture, "You and Your Research," about how to have a productive scientific life, which many engineers found more immediately useful.

Apollo 8: first crewed orbit of the Moon

On 21 December 1968, Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders became the first humans to leave low Earth orbit, entering lunar orbit on Christmas Eve and completing ten loops over 20 hours. Anders photographed the Earth rising over the lunar horizon — a small blue sphere against the black, with no visible borders — and the photograph has not stopped circulating since.

Intel Corporation founded

On 18 July 1968, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore — who had co-invented the integrated circuit at Fairchild Semiconductor — founded NM Electronics, shortly renamed Intel. Their first product was a memory chip; their third was a microprocessor, and the computing industry thereafter organised itself around their roadmap, including Moore's Law, which Moore had already articulated in 1965.

Death of George Gamow

George Gamow

Gamow died on 19 August 1968 in Boulder, Colorado, aged 64. He was one of the early and serious proponents of the Big Bang theory and predicted — with Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman in 1948 — that relic radiation from the early universe should still be detectable as a microwave glow. Penzias and Wilson detected exactly that in 1964 and received the Nobel; Gamow, who had been right first, did not.