1977

Nobel Prize in Physics

When the Timetable Was Abolished

Philip W. Anderson · Sir Nevill F. Mott · John H. Van Vleck

Solid-state physics had, for decades, built its triumphs on the premise of the perfect crystal — orderly atoms arranged in neat rows, through which electrons move like passengers on a well-organised railway. Anderson, working through the late 1950s, asked what happens when the timetable is abolished: in a sufficiently disordered lattice, he showed, electrons do not just travel slowly but stop travelling altogether, trapped in pockets of interference in a phenomenon now called Anderson localisation. Mott extended this to address a nagging empirical embarrassment — certain materials that textbook band theory insisted should be metals were, in practice, obstinate insulators — explaining them through electron-electron interactions that classical models had conveniently ignored. Van Vleck, the elder statesman of the three, had long before laid the quantum-mechanical groundwork for understanding how magnetic moments arise and interact in matter. Together, their work turned the messiness of real materials from a nuisance into a subject. The stakes are not abstract: localisation, disorder, and magnetic structure are precisely what govern the behaviour of semiconductors, and a world without that understanding is one still relying on vacuum tubes.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Order Feeding on Disorder

Ilya Prigogine

The arrow of time, as classical thermodynamics taught it, pointed in one direction only: toward equilibrium, toward uniformity, toward the grey lukewarm soup of maximum entropy. Boltzmann had established this; Clausius had named it; and the picture was bleak enough that Prigogine, a Belgian-Russian chemist of decidedly philosophical temperament, spent his career arguing it was incomplete. Working from the 1940s onward, he studied systems driven far from equilibrium by a sustained flow of energy, and found that rather than simply degrading into disorder, such systems can spontaneously generate and maintain organised structures — what he called dissipative structures, fed by the very throughput of energy that might otherwise seem to guarantee their dissolution. The Bénard convection cell, in which a heated liquid suddenly organises itself into elegant hexagonal rolls, is a canonical example. A hurricane is another. A living cell, rather more pointedly, is a third. The insight did not dissolve the second law, but it showed that the law, properly applied, permits far more interesting things than it forbids.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Two Rivals, One Molecule, and a Ruler for the Invisible

Roger Guillemin · Andrew V. Schally · Rosalyn Yalow

For nearly two decades, Roger Guillemin and Andrew Schally prosecuted one of the more expensive personal rivalries in the history of endocrinology, their two competing laboratories consuming substantial portions of the same federal grant money in pursuit of the same quarry: the tiny peptide hormones, released by the hypothalamus, that instruct the pituitary gland on when to act. Both men eventually succeeded, both eventually identified the same molecules — thyrotropin-releasing hormone, gonadotropin-releasing hormone, and others — and both arrived at Stockholm simultaneously. The prize committee declined to adjudicate whose discovery counted more, which was probably wise. The third laureate, Rosalyn Yalow, had solved an equally fundamental problem from a different angle entirely: how do you even detect a hormone present in the blood at concentrations of a few nanograms per millilitre? Her radioimmunoassay, developed with Solomon Berson in the 1950s, coupled the sensitivity of radioactive tracers to the specificity of antibody binding, and could suddenly measure things that had been, for all practical purposes, invisible. The technique spread beyond endocrinology to infectious disease, cancer markers, and drug monitoring — a general tool born from a specific curiosity.

Nobel Prize in Literature

The Poet Who Would Not Leave Madrid

Vicente Aleixandre

Vicente Aleixandre belonged to the Generation of '27, that brief and luminous gathering of Spanish poets — Lorca, Alberti, Cernuda among them — whose collective name derived from a tercentenary commemoration and whose collective fate was largely determined by a civil war. Aleixandre survived, which was not nothing; he had been seriously ill before the war and his physical fragility may have kept him from exile or worse. His surrealist early work, poems of erotic and cosmic force drawing on Freud and on an almost pantheist sense of the natural world absorbing and releasing human passion, was unpublishable under Franco's regime. He remained in Madrid anyway, never collaborating, becoming a quiet centre of gravity for younger writers who found their way to his house on Calle Velintonia. The poetry that eventually reached Spanish readers was extraordinary; that it reached them at all, written by a man who had refused to leave, is something the verse itself does not need to say.

Nobel Peace Prize

A Toast to Freedom, Then a Letter Campaign

Amnesty International

In 1961, a British lawyer named Peter Benenson read a newspaper account of two Portuguese students who had been imprisoned for raising a toast to freedom — a toast, at a Lisbon restaurant, to liberty — and was sufficiently irritated to write an article in The Observer calling for an international campaign on behalf of political prisoners. The article generated rather more response than he had expected, and from it grew Amnesty International: an organisation predicated on the unfashionable idea that writing letters on behalf of strangers in distant countries constituted a meaningful act. By 1977, it had become the world's largest human-rights organisation, with chapters in dozens of countries and a methodology — the adoption of individual prisoners of conscience, the careful documentation of torture, the tireless correspondence — that was as deliberately modest in its means as it was ambitious in its scope. The Nobel Committee cited its work on behalf of those facing imprisonment, torture, and execution for their beliefs. The organisation's particular genius was making the moral case with facts rather than rhetoric, and discovering that facts, patiently accumulated and clearly stated, were irritating to governments in ways that rhetoric alone rarely managed.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Why Sweden Sells Timber and Kuwait Sells Oil

Bertil Ohlin · James E. Meade

Eli Heckscher and his former student Bertil Ohlin had together constructed, in the early decades of the twentieth century, a framework for understanding why trade happens at all — not just that countries differ in what they can produce, as Ricardo had observed, but why they differ: each country tends to export goods that intensively use whatever productive factor it happens to possess in relative abundance. Sweden, well endowed with timber, exports furniture; Kuwait, well endowed with petroleum, exports oil. The model is appealingly intuitive and has proven stubbornly useful despite the considerable violence economists have since done to its assumptions. James Meade, working independently in the postwar years, brought unusual rigour to the welfare consequences of trade policy and arrived at conclusions that policymakers found somewhat inconvenient: a customs union, rather than straightforwardly benefiting its members, can under certain conditions make all parties worse off, depending on what trade it diverts and what trade it creates. The distinction between trade creation and trade diversion entered the policy vocabulary and stayed there, complicating the salesmanship of every regional agreement since.

ACM A.M. Turing Award

A Notation the Skeptics Said Would Never Compile

Turing Award

John Backus

Before FORTRAN, writing a program meant writing in machine code or assembly — instructions addressed directly to the hardware, in a notation that was precise, comprehensive, and deeply disagreeable. John Backus, leading an IBM team in the mid-1950s, argued that a compiler could translate a language resembling ordinary mathematical notation into efficient machine code, and that the efficiency loss compared to hand-coded assembly would be tolerable. His colleagues and supervisors were sceptical; so were most programmers. FORTRAN, delivered in 1957, proved the sceptics wrong with such thoroughness that within a few years the majority of scientific computing was being done in it. Backus also invented Backus-Naur Form, the compact notation now used to formally specify the grammar of programming languages — an elegant tool that made it possible to describe languages precisely enough to reason about them. His Turing Award lecture contained the mildly alarming observation that FORTRAN and its descendants were fundamentally limited in ways that all the improvements since 1957 had not fixed, and that something quite different was needed. He was probably right. The language he was criticising was still running nuclear simulations.

Discovery of the rings of Uranus

A Star Blinked Nine Times Over the Indian Ocean

On 10 March 1977, a team of astronomers aboard NASA's Kuiper Airborne Observatory — a converted C-141 flying over the Indian Ocean — had positioned themselves to watch Uranus pass in front of a distant star, a stellar occultation that would allow them to measure the planet's atmosphere with some precision. What they had not planned for was the star's light blinking out briefly, several times, before the planet arrived — and then blinking again, symmetrically, after the planet had passed. The pattern was unambiguous: Uranus had rings, a narrow set of them, nine in the initial accounting, dark enough that ground-based observers had never suspected their existence. Saturn's rings had been known since Galileo; the assumption that ring systems were Saturn's particular eccentricity died quietly that morning over the Indian Ocean. The Voyager 2 spacecraft, which had been launched for other purposes entirely, would pass Uranus in 1986 and find two more rings and ten previously unknown moons — a considerably richer system than the initial blinks had implied.

First full-body MRI scan of a living human

Four Hours and Forty-Five Minutes to See a Chest

Nuclear magnetic resonance had been a laboratory technique since the 1940s, used by chemists to interrogate the structure of molecules by watching how their hydrogen nuclei responded to magnetic fields. The idea of turning this into an imaging tool — of using the varying density of hydrogen in different tissues to map the interior of a body — was proposed in the early 1970s, and Raymond Damadian, a physician and scientist at Downstate Medical Center in New York, was among its most determined champions. His prototype machine, which he named INDOMITABLE with the understatement of a man who had spent years fighting for funding, produced on 3 July 1977 the first nuclear magnetic resonance image of a living human being: a cross-section through the chest of a colleague, acquired after four hours and forty-five minutes of scanning. The image was blurry and the machine was ungainly, but the signal was unambiguously there — distinct regions of different tissue, visible without radiation, without surgery, without harm. Forty-five years later, MRI scanners perform roughly forty million examinations a year in the United States alone, seeing tumours, strokes, and torn ligaments that X-rays and CT cannot reach.

Voyager 1 and 2 launched toward the outer planets

A Golden Record Aimed at the Dark

A planetary alignment of the kind required had not occurred since Thomas Jefferson was president, and would not occur again until the twenty-second century: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune arranged so that a spacecraft could visit each in sequence, borrowing gravitational energy from one to slingshot toward the next. The window opened in the late 1970s, and NASA had a pair of spacecraft ready. Voyager 2 departed on 20 August 1977; Voyager 1 followed on 5 September, aimed at a faster trajectory that would take it through the Jupiter and Saturn systems before curving north of the ecliptic plane. Despite launching second, Voyager 1 overtook its twin within months. Both carried golden records — grooved discs containing music, greetings in fifty-five languages, and the sounds of Earth, addressed to whoever might someday find them — which says something about the particular mood of 1977. Voyager 1 is now the most distant human-made object in existence, well into interstellar space, still transmitting. The signal takes more than twenty-two hours to arrive.

Apple II personal computer introduced

No Soldering Iron Required

The personal computers that existed before 1977 were, for the most part, honest about what they were: kits, sold in parts, aimed at enthusiasts willing to spend weekends with soldering irons. The Apple II, which Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak unveiled at the West Coast Computer Faire on 17 April 1977, was a different kind of proposition — a machine with a moulded plastic case, an integrated keyboard, a colour display, and 4 KB of RAM available for $1,298, with no assembly required of the purchaser. Wozniak's engineering was by most accounts remarkable: the colour graphics were produced by a circuit that exploited an artifact in the NTSC television standard, elegantly sidestepping the cost of dedicated hardware. The machine shipped with BASIC in ROM and expansion slots that would eventually accommodate the VisiCalc spreadsheet, which gave accountants and small-business owners a reason to buy a computer that had nothing to do with hobbyist enthusiasm. VisiCalc alone is credited with selling the Apple II to an entirely new audience; the Apple II, in turn, sold the idea that a computer could be a domestic object.

Space Shuttle Enterprise completes first free-flight tests

One Landing Attempt, Bolted to a 747 First

The Space Shuttle was, by the standards of normal engineering, a peculiar object to test: a glider the size of a commercial airliner, which would descend from orbit unpowered and land on a runway, permitted exactly one attempt per flight. Before committing that design to space, NASA needed to know whether it would actually fly, and to find out they bolted a prototype — designated Enterprise, after the Star Trek vessel, following a fan-letter campaign — to the back of a modified Boeing 747. The first free flight took place on 12 August 1977, when the 747 climbed to altitude over the Mojave Desert, released the orbiter, and astronauts Fred Haise and C. Gordon Fullerton flew it, unpowered, back to the lakebed at Edwards Air Force Base. Four more approach-and-landing tests followed through October. The aerodynamics were confirmed to be sound, the handling qualities acceptable, the concept plausible. Enterprise itself never reached space — it had no engines or proper heat shield and was used only for ground testing — but the five flights it did make proved the machine sufficiently for the programme to proceed toward the orbital vehicle that would first fly in 1981.