1975

Nobel Prize in Physics

Aage N. Bohr · Ben R. Mottelson · James Rainwater

Atomic nuclei, it had been assumed, were spherical. Rainwater suggested in 1950 that outer nucleons could distort the core into a football shape; Aage Bohr and Mottelson built the full collective model from that insight, reconciling the single-particle behaviour of individual nucleons with the collective behaviour of the whole nucleus — a feat made more resonant by the fact that Aage's father Niels had won the same prize in 1922.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

John Cornforth · Vladimir Prelog

Molecules can be mirror images of each other, and the difference matters enormously in biology — one form of a drug can heal while its mirror twin harms. Cornforth used isotope labelling to determine the exact three-dimensional mechanism of biosynthetic enzymes; Prelog codified the rules for specifying which version of a chiral molecule you are holding.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

David Baltimore · Renato Dulbecco · Howard M. Temin

The central dogma of molecular biology held that information flows one way — DNA to RNA to protein — but Baltimore and Temin independently found reverse transcriptase, the enzyme that certain viruses use to run the film backward, copying RNA back into DNA. Dulbecco showed how tumour viruses then stitch that DNA into the host cell's chromosome, which is a disconcerting thing to discover a virus can do.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Eugenio Montale

Montale's Italian poetry — concentrated, spare, full of sea-light and moral shadow — stands at the opposite end of the spectrum from Neruda's abundance. Ossi di Seppia, his first collection, takes its title from cuttlefish bones washed up on the Ligurian shore, which is a quietly precise image of his entire sensibility.

Nobel Peace Prize

Andrei Sakharov

Sakharov helped design the Soviet hydrogen bomb, then spent the following decades arguing publicly against everything the Soviet state stood for in terms of human rights and nuclear weapons. The government refused him a passport to travel to Oslo; his wife Elena Bonner accepted the prize on his behalf while he remained in Moscow, a dissident in his own country.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Leonid Vitaliyevich Kantorovich · Tjalling C. Koopmans

Kantorovich independently developed linear programming in the Soviet Union in 1939 for timber industry planning, entirely unaware that similar mathematics were being developed in the West. He and Koopmans, who arrived at activity analysis from a study of shipping routes, were recognised for the insight that scarcity and optimisation problems can be solved precisely.

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Turing Award

Allen Newell · Herbert A. Simon

Newell and Simon built the Logic Theorist and the General Problem Solver and proposed the physical symbol system hypothesis — the idea that any system manipulating symbols according to rules is, in the relevant sense, thinking. It was a bold claim that proved more controversial the closer you looked at it, which may be why it generated so much interesting argument.

Lasker Award (Clinical Medical Research): CT scanner

Albert Lasker Clinical Medical Research Award

Godfrey N. Hounsfield · William Oldendorf

Hounsfield at EMI Laboratories built the first clinical CT scanner — installed at Atkinson Morley Hospital in 1971 — by applying X-ray projections from many angles and using a computer to reconstruct cross-sections of the body's interior without cutting it open. The prize recognised that this was not a small improvement on existing imaging but an entirely different idea.

Apollo-Soyuz Test Project: first US-Soviet crewed docking

On 17 July 1975, Thomas Stafford and Aleksei Leonov shook hands through a connecting tunnel 210 kilometres above the Earth — two men from countries that had been pointing nuclear weapons at each other for thirty years, floating in a joint spacecraft. The nine-day mission included 44 hours of joint operations and established docking protocols that would matter greatly to the International Space Station two decades later.

MITS Altair 8800: first commercially successful personal computer

The Altair appeared on the cover of Popular Electronics in January 1975 with an Intel 8080 processor, no keyboard, no screen, and no operating system — programs were entered via rows of toggle switches. Four thousand orders arrived within three months at $397 assembled. Bill Gates and Paul Allen read the magazine in a Harvard dorm room and immediately wrote an interpreter for the machine, which turned out to be the more consequential response.