1973

Nobel Prize in Physics

A Graduate Student Finds a Free Current

Leo Esaki · Ivar Giaever · Brian D. Josephson

Classical physics insists that a particle stopped by a barrier is stopped; quantum mechanics, with characteristic insolence, says there is always a small probability it will simply appear on the other side. Leo Esaki confirmed this tunnelling experimentally in semiconductor p-n junctions in 1957, and Ivar Giaever found the same phenomenon operating in superconductors — useful demonstrations both, but still confirmations of what theory had predicted. Then Brian Josephson, while still a Cambridge graduate student, went further: he calculated that a supercurrent could flow with zero voltage applied across a tunnel junction between two superconductors, and that the junction's response to magnetic fields would be extraordinarily sensitive. The Josephson effect, as it is now called, became the basis for the SQUID — a superconducting quantum interference device — which can detect magnetic fields thousands of times weaker than those produced by the human heart, enabling brain imaging technologies that do not involve sliding anyone into a noisy cylinder. Josephson did all this before he had his doctorate, which does rather set a standard.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

An Iron Atom Wears Two Rings at Once

Ernst Otto Fischer · Geoffrey Wilkinson

Ferrocene arrived in 1951 by accident — chemists attempting to make fulvalene produced instead an orange powder that stubbornly refused to decompose, react, or otherwise behave as a compound containing iron had any right to behave. The structures proposed to explain how two cyclopentadienyl rings could be bonded to a single iron atom ranged from the plausible to the frankly desperate, until Ernst Otto Fischer in Munich and Geoffrey Wilkinson in London, working independently and with some competitive urgency, arrived at the same answer: the iron atom sits between the two parallel rings and bonds to the entire electron cloud of each simultaneously — a so-called sandwich compound. It was a mode of bonding that had no real precedent in organic chemistry, and recognising it opened a vast new terrain of transition-metal organometallic chemistry that would eventually yield catalysts for industrial processes from pharmaceutical synthesis to polymerisation. Wilkinson, upon hearing that Fischer had reached the same conclusion, reportedly said something brisk and unrepeatable. They shared the prize anyway.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

The Bees Were Giving Directions

Karl von Frisch · Konrad Lorenz · Nikolaas Tinbergen

For a long time, the study of animal behaviour was split between laboratory psychologists who preferred rats and mazes and felt that watching animals in the wild was insufficiently rigorous, and naturalists who watched animals in the wild but lacked the apparatus to make much of what they saw. Karl von Frisch spent decades doing something neither camp quite approved of — patiently decoding the dances of honeybees in their hives — and eventually demonstrated that a figure-eight waggle run on a vertical comb encodes both the compass direction of a food source relative to the sun and its distance from the hive, with an accuracy that a navigator might envy. He was not widely believed until the evidence became more or less unanswerable. Konrad Lorenz described imprinting — the mechanism by which young animals form lasting attachments during a critical developmental window — and Nikolaas Tinbergen gave the whole emerging field of ethology its four organising questions: what causes the behaviour, how does it develop, what function does it serve, and how did it evolve? Together they made it respectable to ask what animals are actually doing and why, which turns out to be a rather good question.

Nobel Prize in Literature

A Continent as a Condition of the Soul

Patrick White

Patrick White spent much of his life being magnificent and miserable in Australia, a country that, as he saw it, produced an abundance of both landscape and philistinism. He had lived in England and served in the RAF, but returned after the war to a sheep farm outside Sydney and began writing the dense, visionary, mercilessly interior novels that would eventually alarm readers on several continents. Voss — about a doomed German explorer driving himself and his party to destruction in the Australian interior — distilled the continent's peculiar spiritual ferocity into something that read like Dostoevsky recast under blinding light; The Tree of Man found the same depth in an ordinary farming couple. He was the first Australian to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the Swedish Academy's praise for his 'epic and psychological narrative art' did not especially soften his view of what passed for cultural life back home. He was offered — and declined — a knighthood. What he left is a body of work in which the vast, indifferent Australian landscape serves not as scenery but as a condition of the soul.

Nobel Peace Prize

He Refused a Peace That Wasn't Real

Henry Kissinger · Le Duc Tho

The Paris Peace Accords, signed in January 1973, ended direct American military participation in the Vietnam War after nearly a decade of fighting that had killed upward of two million people, devastated a country, and divided another. The prize was awarded jointly to Henry Kissinger, the American Secretary of State who had negotiated the agreement, and Le Duc Tho, the North Vietnamese envoy on the other side of the table — a pairing that prompted two members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee to resign in protest. Le Duc Tho then delivered what may be the most mordant Nobel gesture on record: he declined to accept his share of the prize on the grounds that peace had not, in actual fact, been achieved, since fighting between North and South Vietnam was continuing. He remains the only person ever to refuse a Nobel Peace Prize specifically because the premise of the award was, in his assessment, factually incorrect. Kissinger reportedly found this awkward.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Mapping an Economy's Tangled Circle

Wassily Leontief

An economy is an almost pathologically tangled web: steel goes into cars, electricity goes into steel, coal goes into electricity, railway freight goes into coal, and steel goes into railways — a circle that conventional supply-and-demand analysis could sketch but never fully untangle. Wassily Leontief, who had fled Russia and then Germany before finding his footing at Harvard, proposed in the 1930s that this tangle could be mapped as a matrix: each row showing what a given sector sells to every other, each column showing what it buys. The arithmetic required to solve a system of such equations for a whole national economy was, at the time, formidable — indeed it was essentially impractical until computers arrived — but Leontief did what he could with mechanical calculators and a great deal of determination. Once computing power caught up, input-output analysis became a standard instrument of economic planning, used by governments tracing the effects of an energy shock, or a tariff, or a war, through every sector simultaneously. The specific prediction he made with it — the so-called Leontief paradox, showing that the United States exported labour-intensive goods despite being capital-rich — kept trade economists arguing productively for decades.

ACM A.M. Turing Award

The Programmer Learns to Navigate

Turing Award

Charles W. Bachman

In the early 1960s, storing structured data on a computer was less a solved problem than an ongoing negotiation between the data and the hardware, usually resolved in favour of neither. Charles Bachman, working at General Electric, designed the Integrated Data Store — IDS — which gave records a fixed place in memory and allowed programs to navigate between them along predefined links, rather than hunting through tape sequentially and hoping for the best. It was the first network-model database system to work at industrial scale, and it established ideas about data independence and navigable record structures that would underpin every database that followed, including the relational databases that eventually superseded it. When Bachman delivered his Turing Award lecture in 1973, he called it 'The Programmer as Navigator,' comparing the task of traversing a database to reading a nautical chart — a metaphor precise enough to make the underlying insight vivid. Without his work, the question of how to organise persistent data might have taken considerably longer to answer, and nearly everything that runs on a computer depends on having answered it.

Boyer-Cohen gene cloning in bacteria demonstrated

A Borrowed Gene, Passed to the Next Generation

Restriction enzymes — the molecular scissors that cut DNA at specific sequences — had been characterised in the early 1970s, and by 1973 the tools for a genuinely audacious experiment were all, for the first time, in the same room. Herbert Boyer at UCSF and Stanley Cohen at Stanford took antibiotic-resistance genes from two different plasmids, cut them with restriction enzymes, spliced them into a hybrid plasmid using DNA ligase, and introduced the result into Escherichia coli. The bacteria not only took up the recombinant DNA but reproduced it faithfully, expressing resistance to both antibiotics — proof that a gene from one organism could not just be inserted into another but could be read, copied, and passed to the next generation as though it had always been there. The elegance of the demonstration was matched only by its implications, which took a few years to sink in and then produced an entire industry. Boyer would go on to co-found Genentech; the first human insulin produced by bacteria arrived in 1982. A world without that 1973 experiment is one in which diabetics are still dependent on insulin extracted from pigs and cattle, with all the supply constraints that entails.

Pioneer 11 launched toward Jupiter and Saturn

A Slingshot Off Jupiter, Aimed at the Rings

Pioneer 10 had already been dispatched toward Jupiter, which was ambitious enough; Pioneer 11, launched on 5 April 1973, was given a still more demanding itinerary. It would fly past Jupiter, but the real objective was to use the giant planet's gravity as a slingshot — bending the spacecraft's trajectory across the solar system and sending it on a long arc toward Saturn, some 900 million miles from the Sun, a target no human artefact had ever approached. The manoeuvre worked, and Pioneer 11 reached Saturn in September 1979, making its closest approach over the ringed planet's north pole at a distance of about 21,000 kilometres. With instruments that by any later standard were primitive, it discovered two previously unknown moons and a previously unknown ring, and measured the structure of Saturn's magnetosphere for the first time. It crossed the orbit of Neptune in 1990, having long since fallen silent, and is now somewhere beyond the edge of the heliosphere — carrying, like its twin, a plaque designed to tell any finder where it came from. The odds of that finder existing are very small. The plaque is there anyway.