1970

Nobel Prize in Physics

The Stars and the Hard Drive, Explained

Hannes Alfvén · Louis Néel

Hannes Alfvén spent the 1930s and 1940s developing magnetohydrodynamics — the theory governing how electrically conducting fluids behave inside magnetic fields — at a time when most physicists regarded plasma as an awkward edge case rather than the dominant form of matter in the visible universe. His framework, initially dismissed by critics including Lev Landau, turned out to be the essential language for describing solar flares, the aurora, and the behaviour of plasma in fusion reactors that physicists are still, somewhat stubbornly, trying to make work. Sharing the prize was Louis Néel, who had quietly shown that magnetism comes in more flavours than simple ferro- or paramagnetism: in antiferromagnets, neighbouring atomic moments cancel each other in an orderly opposition, while in ferrimagnets they partially cancel, leaving a net field. Néel's ferrimagnets — materials with unequal opposing sublattices — turned out to be almost comically useful, forming the basis of the magnetic recording materials that stored data for decades. Between them, the two men handed physics a working vocabulary for both the stars and the hard drive.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Sugar Needs a Chaperone to Bond

Luis F. Leloir

Luis Federico Leloir did not have the easiest of starts: born in Paris in 1906, raised in Argentina, he completed his doctorate in Buenos Aires and then spent years working in conditions that could charitably be described as spartan — his institute's budget at one point required him to purchase chemicals out of his own salary. What he discovered nonetheless, beginning in the 1940s, was a class of molecules called sugar nucleotides: activated forms of simple sugars that serve as the cell's raw material for building complex carbohydrates. The cell, it turned out, does not simply lash glucose units together directly; it first couples each sugar to a nucleotide carrier — UDP-glucose being the paradigm case — and uses the chemical energy of that coupling to drive the assembly reaction. This explained how glycogen, cellulose, and the elaborate sugar coatings on cell surfaces are built, and opened the entire field of glycobiology. Storage diseases in which those pathways malfunction — glycogen storage diseases, disorders of glycosylation — became interpretable in Leloir's terms. He worked on the problem in relative obscurity, was awarded the prize late in life, and reportedly spent part of the prize money on laboratory equipment. A man who treated discovery as its own sufficient reward.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

How a Nerve Signal Switches Itself Off

Sir Bernard Katz · Ulf von Euler · Julius Axelrod

By the mid-twentieth century it was established that neurons communicate chemically across the synapse, but the question of what actually happens to those chemicals afterwards — how the signal is turned off, how the machinery is reset — remained murky. Bernard Katz, working in London, showed with extraordinary precision how the release of acetylcholine at the neuromuscular junction is both quantal and calcium-dependent: transmitter leaves the neuron in discrete packets, not in a continuous stream. Ulf von Euler in Stockholm had identified noradrenaline as the primary transmitter of the sympathetic nervous system — a finding that mapped the chemical identity of a whole wing of autonomic signalling. Julius Axelrod's contribution was perhaps the most clinically consequential of the three: he discovered that nerve terminals recover their own noradrenaline by actively re-absorbing it from the synaptic cleft rather than simply allowing it to degrade. This re-uptake mechanism, once understood, became an obvious target — block the transporter, and noradrenaline lingers longer. The result, a generation later, was the class of drugs that includes the selective serotonin and noradrenaline reuptake inhibitors prescribed to tens of millions of people for depression. Three men explaining how a switch works; a great many people are grateful the switch is better understood.

Nobel Prize in Literature

A Witness the State Could Not Silence

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had survived the gulag — eight years in the camps after a private letter mocking Stalin was intercepted in 1945 — and then done something the Soviet state found considerably more difficult to manage than imprisonment: he wrote about it with lucid, patient, annihilating precision. 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich', published in 1962 during a brief Khrushchev thaw, showed the machinery of the camp system through a single ordinary day; 'The Gulag Archipelago', compiled from 227 witness testimonies and his own experience, mapped the entire structure. The Swedish Academy awarded him the prize in 1970 for the ethical force with which he had pursued the traditions of Russian literature — a phrase that manages to be both scrupulously diplomatic and perfectly accurate. He could not travel to Stockholm to receive it, understanding that the Soviet Union would almost certainly decline to readmit him; the calculation proved correct when he was expelled from the country in 1974, the year he finally collected his medal. What persists is not the geopolitics but the writing itself: the way a gifted witness can make the invisible, and the wilfully unseen, impossible to look away from.

Nobel Peace Prize

Shorter Stalks, Hundreds of Millions Fed

Norman Borlaug

Norman Borlaug grew up poor in rural Iowa and spent the Second World War watching famine reports arrive from South Asia and decided, with the pragmatism of a plant breeder, that the right response was to breed better plants. Working under the Rockefeller Foundation's programme in Mexico from the 1940s, he developed semi-dwarf wheat varieties that were shorter-stemmed than traditional wheat — so they did not collapse under the weight of the grain they produced — and resistant to the rust fungi that had historically devastated harvests. The challenge was then persuading sceptical governments in Mexico, India, and Pakistan to plant them at scale, which required politics as much as agronomy; Borlaug seems to have been constitutionally indifferent to bureaucratic resistance. Indian and Pakistani wheat production doubled in the late 1960s. The Nobel Committee in Oslo awarded him the Peace Prize in 1970 with an estimate of lives saved running into the hundreds of millions — a figure that even generous rounding cannot make unimpressive. He accepted the prize and then went back to work, spending subsequent decades trying to extend similar results to Africa. The moral of the story is not complicated: one determined man with seeds and the willingness to argue changed the arithmetic of hunger.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Economics Learns to Show Its Work

Paul A. Samuelson

When Paul Samuelson arrived at Harvard in the 1930s, economics was taught largely as a literary discipline — long on historical narrative, qualitative argument, and the considered opinions of great men, short on mathematical rigour. Samuelson's 1947 treatise 'Foundations of Economic Analysis' changed the terms of entry: it imposed mathematical structure on welfare economics, consumer behaviour, and stability analysis with a thoroughness the field had previously regarded as either unnecessary or ungentlemanly. His correspondence principle — that stable equilibria and testable comparative-statics predictions are linked — gave economists a systematic method for generating hypotheses from theory. Simultaneously, the undergraduate textbook he published in 1948 translated the resulting neoclassical synthesis into something legible to first-year students, and proceeded to sell four million copies, shaping the way an entire generation understood supply curves and national income accounting. The first American to receive the prize in economic sciences, he was in some respects not a single person but the architect of a discipline: the technical language with which economics argued about itself for fifty years is substantially his. Whether that is an unqualified gift to the field remains a point of lively and occasionally bitter debate, which is perhaps the most characteristically economic thing about the legacy.

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Knowing Precisely How Wrong an Answer Is

Turing Award

James H. Wilkinson

Every time a computer solves a system of equations — and computers do this constantly, in everything from weather forecasting to the rendering of film — it commits a long sequence of tiny rounding errors, because floating-point arithmetic is not exact arithmetic. Before James Wilkinson, the accumulated effect of those errors was poorly understood: numerical analysts knew the problem existed and more or less hoped for the best. Wilkinson, working at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington from the late 1940s, developed backward error analysis, which reframed the question entirely: instead of tracking how errors propagate forward through a calculation, he asked what exact problem the computed answer actually does solve perfectly. The result is a rigorous framework for bounding the damage — precise statements about how far a numerical answer can stray from the true one, given the machine's arithmetic. His 1963 book 'Rounding Errors in Algebraic Processes' became the standard text. The Turing Award in 1970 recognised not just a technique but a way of thinking about computational reliability that remains the foundation of numerical analysis. Without it, the confidence with which engineers and scientists trust their simulations would be considerably less well founded than it currently appears.

Fields Medal

Smoothing Cusps, Bounding Ancient Equations

Fields Medal

Alan Baker · Heisuke Hironaka · Sergei Novikov · John G. Thompson

The 1970 Fields Medals at the International Congress in Nice covered terrain ranging from the very old to the very new with unusual breadth. Alan Baker was cited for his work in transcendence theory: he proved sharp lower bounds for linear forms in logarithms of algebraic numbers, giving the first effective tools for deciding which Diophantine equations — the kind Fermat liked to think about — have integer solutions and how large those solutions can be. Heisuke Hironaka received his medal for resolving singularities in algebraic geometry, a result that had defeated mathematicians for decades: he showed that any algebraic variety over a field of characteristic zero can be transformed, through a finite sequence of blowing-ups, into a smooth manifold without the nasty self-intersections and cusps that make varieties hard to study. Sergei Novikov was recognised for his contributions to topology, particularly his proof that the rational Pontryagin classes of a smooth manifold are topological invariants — a deep rigidity result. John G. Thompson shared recognition for the Feit-Thompson theorem, the proof that every finite group of odd order is solvable, a result whose proof occupied 255 dense pages of the Pacific Journal of Mathematics — at the time the longest proof ever published, a record that has since been surpassed but whose ambition has not quite been forgotten.

Apollo 13: oxygen tank rupture and safe return

Fifteen Minutes to Rewrite the Mission

At 21:08 Houston time on 13 April 1970, 200,000 miles from Earth, an oxygen tank in the Apollo 13 service module ruptured — the result of damaged insulation inside a tank that had been stirred, routinely, by a fan. The explosion vented the oxygen supply and crippled the command module's power and life support. Jim Lovell, Fred Haise, and Jack Swigert had approximately fifteen minutes to grasp what had happened, assess what remained, and decide to abandon the command module and retreat into the lunar module Aquarius: a spacecraft designed to keep two people alive for forty-eight hours, which now needed to support three people for four days along a free-return trajectory looping around the Moon. They powered everything down to fractions of normal consumption, endured temperatures near freezing, improvised a carbon dioxide scrubber from materials that did not quite fit together, and splashed down safely on 17 April. The mission has since been called a successful failure, which is one way to look at it; another is that the engineers who designed the abort options and the crew who executed them under conditions of genuine physical misery had built rather more contingency into the system than anyone knew. In an enterprise as unforgiving as space, the gap between a disaster and a very bad week is frequently a matter of what you thought to plan for.

IBM introduces the 8-inch floppy disk

Eighty Kilobytes You Could Carry

Before 1970, loading software or microcode into a computer meant feeding it a stack of punched cards — a medium that was bulky, fragile, sensitive to humidity, and inclined to jam at the worst possible moment. Alan Shugart and his team at IBM's San Jose facility addressed this inelegance by developing a flexible magnetic disk eight inches across, coated with iron oxide and enclosed in a square sleeve: the floppy disk. The first commercial version, introduced to load microcode into the System 370 mainframe, was read-only and held 80 kilobytes — the equivalent of roughly 3,000 punched cards, which it replaced with something that fit in a pocket and survived the journey. The read-write variant followed, and with it a new concept: data you could carry from one machine to another without a forklift. Over the following decades the disk shrank to 5.25 inches, then to 3.5 inches in a rigid plastic shell, and became the near-universal medium for distributing software through the 1980s and 1990s. The save icon on virtually every application currently in use is a picture of a 3.5-inch floppy, recognised instantly by users who have never touched one — a small monument to a format that carried computing through its most formative years.