1973

Nobel Prize in Physics

Leo Esaki · Ivar Giaever · Brian D. Josephson

Quantum mechanics says a particle can tunnel through a barrier it classically has no business crossing; Esaki and Giaever confirmed this experimentally in semiconductors and superconductors. Josephson was a graduate student when he predicted a still stranger effect — a supercurrent flowing with no voltage applied across a tunnel junction — which proved correct and eventually became the basis for the world's most sensitive magnetic field detectors.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Ernst Otto Fischer · Geoffrey Wilkinson

Ferrocene — two carbon rings with an iron atom sandwiched between them — was first synthesised in 1951, and chemists immediately argued about how it could possibly hold together. Fischer and Wilkinson worked out independently that the iron binds to the electron clouds of both rings simultaneously, establishing a new class of bonding that opened the entire field of transition-metal organometallic chemistry.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Karl von Frisch · Konrad Lorenz · Nikolaas Tinbergen

Von Frisch spent years decoding the waggle dance of honeybees — a figure-eight performed on a vertical comb that encodes both the direction and distance of a food source relative to the sun — and was not entirely believed until the evidence became overwhelming. Lorenz described imprinting; Tinbergen gave animal behaviour its four organizing questions: causation, development, function, evolution.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Patrick White

White's novels — Voss, The Tree of Man, The Eye of the Storm — brought Australia into world literature not as backdrop but as a spiritual landscape, arid and vast and full of inner weather. He was the first Australian to win the prize and, by most accounts, not especially delighted by the fuss that followed.

Nobel Peace Prize

Henry Kissinger · Le Duc Tho

The Paris Peace Accords ended direct American military involvement in Vietnam in January 1973. Le Duc Tho, the North Vietnamese negotiator, declined his half of the prize on the principled ground that peace had not in fact been achieved, making him the only person ever to refuse a Nobel Peace Prize for reasons of accuracy.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Wassily Leontief

An economy is an almost incomprehensibly tangled web of flows — steel into cars, electricity into steel, labour into electricity — and Leontief's input-output tables mapped it sector by sector, turning the tangle into a matrix you could actually calculate with. Governments and energy planners have been filling in their own versions ever since.

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Turing Award

Charles W. Bachman

When Bachman designed the Integrated Data Store at General Electric in the early 1960s, storing structured data on a computer was essentially unsolved as a practical problem. IDS was the first network-model database system worthy of the name, and Bachman's address upon receiving the Turing Award — "The Programmer as Navigator" — compared the task to reading a nautical chart, which was apt.

Boyer-Cohen gene cloning in bacteria demonstrated

Herbert Boyer and Stanley Cohen took antibiotic-resistance genes from two different plasmids, spliced them into a hybrid plasmid using restriction enzymes, and inserted the result into E. coli. The bacteria expressed both resistances. It was a clean demonstration that genes from one organism could be made to function in another — the founding experiment of what would become the biotechnology industry.

Pioneer 11 launched toward Jupiter and Saturn

Pioneer 11 launched on 5 April 1973 with the unusual ambition of going beyond Jupiter: it would use that planet's gravity to slingshot itself toward Saturn, which it reached in September 1979 — the first spacecraft ever to visit the ringed world, arriving with just enough functioning instruments to discover two new moons and a previously unknown ring.