1975

Nobel Prize in Physics

A Nucleus Shaped Like a Football

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

For decades the standard picture of an atomic nucleus was almost comfortingly tidy: a spherical lump of protons and neutrons held together by the strong force, with individual nucleons moving in orderly shells like electrons in an atom. In 1950 James Rainwater, working at Columbia, proposed something that upset this neatness — that outer nucleons, lagging a little behind the collective motion, could deform the nuclear core into an elongated, football-like shape. Aage Bohr, the son of Niels and therefore born into the physics conversation the way other children are born into dentistry, took up the idea and with Ben Mottelson developed the full collective model, showing mathematically how individual nucleon behaviour and the coordinated motion of the whole nucleus could be reconciled rather than argued over. That the son should stand on the same Nobel stage as his father — Niels having won in 1922 — carries a kind of dynastic weight the prize committee cannot often have planned for. The practical reward of understanding nuclear shape is not abstract: the collective model underpins nuclear spectroscopy, informs how we think about fission, and gave theorists a framework reliable enough that it still structures the field today.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Your Hands Are Not the Same

John Cornforth · Vladimir Prelog

A molecule and its mirror image can have identical chemical formulae and yet be utterly different substances — the same way your hands are the same and not the same. Thalidomide made this grotesquely clear: one enantiomer eased morning sickness, its mirror twin caused devastating birth defects, and for a time pharmaceutical chemists had no reliable way to specify or enforce which version they were making. John Cornforth, an Australian-born chemist who was entirely deaf from his twenties and conducted research through written notes and lip-reading, used isotopically labelled hydrogen atoms to trace the precise three-dimensional choreography by which biosynthetic enzymes build cholesterol and other key molecules — proving that enzymes are achingly particular about chirality. Vladimir Prelog, working in Zurich, had meanwhile constructed the systematic notation — what became the R/S designations — that let chemists name which mirror form they were holding without ambiguity. Between them they gave medicinal chemistry the grammar it needed to discuss molecular handedness with precision, a contribution whose consequences grow quieter and more essential with every drug candidate that fails or succeeds on the basis of which form reaches the active site.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

The Dogma Ran Backwards After All

David Baltimore · Renato Dulbecco · Howard M. Temin

Francis Crick's central dogma of molecular biology was not quite a dogma in the theological sense — Crick himself was careful about what he meant — but it had acquired the social weight of one: genetic information flows from DNA to RNA to protein, and not in reverse. Howard Temin, working at Wisconsin through the 1960s, kept finding experimental results in RNA tumour viruses that made no sense under that one-way rule, and kept being told, politely, that he must be mistaken. He was not. Temin and David Baltimore independently discovered reverse transcriptase in 1970, an enzyme that copies RNA back into DNA and thus allows certain viruses to run the whole central dogma backwards before inserting themselves into a host cell's genome. Renato Dulbecco showed precisely how tumour viruses accomplish that insertion — stitching viral DNA into the chromosome with the sort of proprietary confidence one does not want to see in a virus. The medical consequences were not immediately obvious, but when HIV arrived a decade later, it would turn out to be exactly this class of virus, and every antiretroviral drug that has since kept the epidemic manageable depends on understanding the machinery Baltimore and Temin refused to disbelieve.

Nobel Prize in Literature

What the Tide Leaves Behind

Eugenio Montale

Eugenio Montale spent most of his working life in Genoa and Florence, and his poetry carries the topography with it: the Ligurian cliffs, the glare off salt water, the dry scrub of the Cinque Terre coast, all rendered with a precision that is the opposite of decoration. His first collection, Ossi di Seppia — Cuttlefish Bones — published in 1925, took its title from the bleached remnants washed up by the sea, which is a quietly exact image of what he was after: what remains when the living creature is gone, what the tide leaves behind. Against the fascist rhetoric of his era, which demanded poetry of swelling affirmation and nationalist conviction, Montale wrote verse that was compressed, resistant, and morally serious without being preachy — a kind of principled difficulty. The Swedish Academy cited his poetry for interpreting human values under the sign of an outlook without illusions, which is one of the more precise Nobel citations on record. The cuttlefish bones are still there on the beach; the poems hold.

Nobel Peace Prize

The Bomb-Maker Turned Dissident

Andrei Sakharov

Andrei Sakharov was, by his early thirties, one of the principal architects of the Soviet hydrogen bomb — a theoretical physicist of exceptional ability who had been given essentially unlimited resources and the uneasy gratitude of a state that preferred its weapons scientists not to think too hard about the consequences. He thought hard about the consequences. Through the 1960s and into the 1970s he wrote and circulated essays arguing for nuclear disarmament, democratic reform, and the kind of civil liberties the Soviet system treated as enemy propaganda — positions that cost him his security clearance, his institute position, and eventually his freedom of movement. When the Nobel Committee announced the Peace Prize in 1975, the Soviet government declined to give him a passport to travel to Oslo; his wife Elena Bonner read his lecture in his place, while Sakharov remained in Moscow under surveillance. The irony of a man who had made his country's most terrible weapon becoming its most prominent human rights advocate was not lost on anyone, least of all Sakharov.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Scarcity, Solved in a Filing Cabinet

Leonid Vitaliyevich Kantorovich · Tjalling C. Koopmans

In 1939 a Soviet mathematician named Leonid Kantorovich was asked by a plywood trust to help allocate work across eight machines to maximise output — an unremarkable planning problem that he solved by inventing, more or less from scratch, the mathematical discipline of linear programming. The result was promptly classified and largely ignored; the Soviet planning apparatus was not, at that moment, in the market for tools that might reveal how badly resources were being allocated. Tjalling Koopmans arrived at the same mathematics from the other direction, working on shipping route efficiency problems during the Second World War and building what he called activity analysis. The two men, separated by ideology and the Iron Curtain, had independently discovered that scarcity problems — and nearly all economic problems are, at bottom, scarcity problems — can be expressed as systems of linear inequalities and solved with genuine precision. The 1975 prize was a quiet acknowledgment that the most powerful idea in applied economics had been waiting in a Soviet filing cabinet for three decades, and that optimisation, unlike ideology, does not care which side of the curtain you are on.

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Thinking, Defined as Symbol Shuffling

Turing Award

Allen Newell · Herbert A. Simon

Allen Newell and Herbert Simon met at the RAND Corporation in the early 1950s and immediately began arguing productively about whether machines could think, which turned out to be the right argument to have. Their Logic Theorist program of 1956 proved 38 of the first 52 theorems in Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica — including at least one proof more elegant than the original, which the authors received with magnificent indifference. The General Problem Solver followed, and with it the physical symbol system hypothesis: the proposition that any system capable of manipulating symbols according to rules is, in the functionally relevant sense, exhibiting intelligence. This was either an extremely deep claim about the nature of mind or an admirably precise statement of what computers do, depending on who was doing the evaluating, and cognitive scientists and philosophers have been sorting that out ever since. The Turing Award recognised not only the programs but the framework — the idea that human problem-solving and machine computation were, at some level of abstraction, the same activity — which proved to be one of the more generative ideas of the century regardless of whether it is ultimately correct.

Lasker Award (Clinical Medical Research): CT scanner

Slices of a Living Skull

Albert Lasker Clinical Medical Research Award

Godfrey N. Hounsfield · William Oldendorf

The idea behind computed tomography is simple enough to state and genuinely extraordinary to have thought of: if you project X-rays through a body from many different angles and record what emerges, a computer can reconstruct, slice by slice, a detailed map of everything inside without disturbing a single cell. Godfrey Hounsfield, an engineer at EMI Laboratories who had previously worked on radar and computer design, worked this out and built the first clinical CT scanner, which was installed at Atkinson Morley Hospital in London in 1971. William Oldendorf had proposed and demonstrated the underlying principle independently in the early 1960s, and the Lasker Award acknowledged both contributions to a technology that had gone from concept to clinical instrument in roughly a decade — an unusually brisk journey. Before CT, the interior of a living skull was accessible to imaging only by injecting air or dye into the cerebrospinal fluid, a procedure that was about as comfortable as it sounds. Hounsfield declined a patent on the reconstruction algorithms so that the technology could spread freely, and it did: today more than 80 million CT scans are performed each year in the United States alone, each one finding things that would otherwise have required a surgeon to look.

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

A Handshake Above the Cold War

The space race had been, among other things, a very expensive way for two superpowers to demonstrate superiority without actually shooting at each other, and by 1975 both sides had apparently exhausted the metaphor. On 17 July, an Apollo capsule and a Soyuz spacecraft docked in low Earth orbit, and Thomas Stafford of Oklahoma and Aleksei Leonov of Siberia shook hands through a connecting tunnel 210 kilometres above the surface of a planet whose two dominant powers had spent the preceding thirty years pointing nuclear weapons at each other's cities. The nine-day mission included 44 hours of joint operations, shared meals, and the kind of stilted but genuine goodwill that emerges when people who have been told to be enemies are left alone together in a small metal tube. The docking adaptor they used — designed so that either country's spacecraft could dock with the other's — established the technical protocols that would later make the International Space Station possible. It was, by any sober accounting, a more useful thing to do with the technology than anything that came before it.

MITS Altair 8800: first commercially successful personal computer

Blinking Lights, No Keyboard, Everything Changed

The January 1975 cover of Popular Electronics showed a plain metal box with rows of toggle switches on the front panel and no screen, no keyboard, and no software — not an oversight but a complete description of the Altair 8800, built by a small Albuquerque company called MITS around Intel's 8080 processor. To run a program you flipped the switches one at a time to enter binary instructions, then threw another switch to execute them; output came back as blinking lights. MITS expected to sell a few hundred kits at $397. Four thousand orders arrived in the first three months. A Harvard sophomore named Bill Gates and his friend Paul Allen read the magazine, cold-called MITS to say they had written a BASIC interpreter for the machine — they had not yet written a line of it — then spent eight weeks producing one from scratch and flew to Albuquerque to demonstrate it. It worked on the first try. The Altair itself was soon superseded by machines that had, among other innovations, keyboards, but the episode established that there was a mass market for personal computing and that the more consequential product was the software, a lesson that Gates took rather seriously.