1969

Nobel Prize in Physics

Murray Gell-Mann

Gell-Mann introduced the quark model and the Eightfold Way — a classification scheme that organised the proliferating zoo of subatomic particles into orderly families, predicting the existence of the omega-minus particle before it was found experimentally. He also coined the word "quark" from Finnegans Wake, which is either the most literary thing ever to happen to particle physics or the most physicsy thing ever to happen to Joyce.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Derek H. R. Barton · Odd Hassel

Hassel used electron diffraction to establish the three-dimensional geometry of cyclohexane — specifically that the ring prefers a "chair" conformation over a flat one. Barton took that insight and applied it to biologically important steroids and terpenes, showing that the three-dimensional shape of a molecule determines its chemical behaviour in ways that two-dimensional structural formulas cannot capture.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Max Delbrück · Alfred D. Hershey · Salvador E. Luria

The three scientists worked with bacteriophages — viruses that infect bacteria — and in doing so established the quantitative, genetic foundations of molecular biology: that bacteria evolve through mutation, that viruses have defined genetic structures, and that the principles underlying life can be studied rigorously in the simplest living systems. The field they created has not stopped producing Nobel Prizes.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Samuel Beckett

Beckett received the prize for writing that, in new forms for the novel and drama, finds elevation in the destitution of modern man. He accepted but declined to travel to Stockholm, avoiding public ceremonies with the consistency of a man whose plays are largely about waiting for things that do not arrive. His publisher collected the prize on his behalf.

Nobel Peace Prize

International Labour Organization

The International Labour Organization was awarded the prize on its 50th anniversary, recognised for creating international standards for working conditions and for the idea that social justice is a precondition for durable peace — a proposition as plausible now as it was in 1919.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences (inaugural)

Ragnar Frisch · Jan Tinbergen

The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel was awarded for the first time. Frisch coined the term "econometrics" and co-founded the Econometric Society; Tinbergen built the first large-scale macroeconometric models for national economic policy — the idea being that if you can write down the economy's behaviour as a system of equations, you might eventually be able to steer it. Results have varied.

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Turing Award

Marvin Minsky

Minsky co-founded the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and made foundational contributions to neural networks and symbolic AI — the study of whether and how machines might be made to think. He was alternately wildly optimistic and deeply rigorous about it, which is perhaps the only reasonable attitude.

Description of Thermus aquaticus

Thomas Brock and Hudson Freeze published the formal description of Thermus aquaticus, a bacterium living comfortably above 70 °C in the hot springs of Yellowstone. Nothing in it looked remarkable at the time. Two decades later, Kary Mullis extracted a heat-stable DNA polymerase from this organism and used it to invent the polymerase chain reaction — the technique that made modern genomics possible.

Three-dimensional structure of insulin determined

Dorothy Hodgkin and colleagues completed the X-ray crystallographic structure of insulin after 34 years of work — the longest sustained campaign in the history of protein crystallography. At 2.8 Å resolution, the spatial arrangement of insulin's 51 amino acids was at last clear; it was the largest protein structure solved to that date, and it had been started when the word "protein" was still relatively new.

Invention of the charge-coupled device (CCD)

Willard Boyle and George Smith at Bell Labs conceived the charge-coupled device on 17 October 1969 — a semiconductor that stores image information as packets of electric charge and reads them out in sequence. Every digital camera and telescope sensor for the next four decades would be built on this principle; Boyle and Smith received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2009.

Apollo 11: first crewed Moon landing

On 20 July 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed in the Sea of Tranquility; Armstrong stepped onto the surface at 02:56 UTC on 21 July. The crew returned 21.5 kg of lunar samples, deployed a seismometer and laser-ranging retroreflector, and splashed down on 24 July. It remains the farthest from Earth any human being has ever walked.

Apollo 12: second crewed Moon landing

Charles Conrad and Alan Bean landed at Oceanus Procellarum on 19 November 1969, within 200 metres of the Surveyor 3 probe that had been sitting there since 1967 — the first precision landing on the Moon. They deployed the first Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package and retrieved 34 kg of samples, including pieces of Surveyor 3 for analysis.

Soyuz 4 and 5: first crewed spacecraft docking with crew transfer

On 16 January 1969, Soyuz 4 and Soyuz 5 completed the first docking of two crewed spacecraft in orbit. Two cosmonauts transferred between the vehicles by spacewalk — still the only time in spaceflight history that a crew transfer has been accomplished by EVA rather than through an internal tunnel.

Mariner 6 and 7 flyby of Mars

In late July and early August 1969, Mariner 6 and 7 swept past Mars and returned over 200 images of the surface along with the first direct measurements of the atmosphere's temperature and composition — mostly carbon dioxide, thin, cold, and inhospitable. The missions ruled out a dense, life-friendly atmosphere, confirming what Mariner 4 had suggested four years earlier.

Venera 5 and 6 probe the Venusian atmosphere

Soviet probes Venera 5 and Venera 6 arrived at Venus on 16 and 17 May 1969, transmitting atmospheric data for over 50 minutes as they descended before being crushed by the pressure. They confirmed what Venera 4 had begun to establish: the Venusian atmosphere is overwhelmingly carbon dioxide, profoundly hot, and dense enough to collapse a probe designed to survive it.

First ARPANET message transmitted

On 29 October 1969, a message was sent over ARPANET from a host at UCLA to one at the Stanford Research Institute. The intended message was "login"; the system crashed after the first two letters, so the first word ever transmitted across what became the internet was "lo" — which is either an accident or the most portentous greeting in history, depending on your inclination.

First total artificial heart implanted in a human

On 4 April 1969, surgeon Denton Cooley at the Texas Heart Institute implanted a pneumatic total artificial heart designed by Domingo Liotta into patient Haskell Karp, sustaining him for 64 hours until a donor heart became available. The device worked; the transplant that followed did not, and Karp died 32 hours later — but the principle that an artificial heart could bridge a patient to transplant had been established.

Death of Wacław Sierpiński

Wacław Sierpiński

Sierpiński died on 21 October 1969 in Warsaw, aged 87, having published over 700 papers on set theory, number theory, and topology. He is remembered now chiefly through the fractal shapes that bear his name — the triangle, the carpet — which are defined by a recursive removal of pieces that leaves something that has area zero and length infinite, a description of which he would have approved.

Death of Otto Stern

Otto Stern

The German-American physicist Otto Stern died on 17 August 1969 in Berkeley, aged 81. His molecular beam method made it possible to measure atomic and nuclear magnetic moments with great precision; his measurement of the proton's magnetic moment — unexpectedly large — was an early sign that the proton has internal structure. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1943.