1977

Nobel Prize in Physics

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

Disorder in a material — a jumble of atoms rather than a tidy crystal — turns out to create a fundamentally different kind of physics. Anderson showed that electrons can become trapped in disordered systems, unable to diffuse at all; Mott extended this to explain why some materials are insulators when classical theory predicts they should conduct; Van Vleck had earlier built the quantum-mechanical foundation of magnetism on which all three were building.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Ilya Prigogine

Classical thermodynamics describes systems approaching equilibrium: order decaying into disorder, a dropped cup becoming shards. Prigogine studied what happens far from equilibrium and found that under the right conditions — a continuous flow of energy — chaotic systems can spontaneously organise into ordered structures. Hurricanes are one example; living cells are another.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Roger Guillemin · Andrew V. Schally · Rosalyn Yalow

Guillemin and Schally spent years in fierce competition — and rather a lot of the same grant money — isolating the hypothalamic hormones that instruct the pituitary gland; each eventually identified the same molecules. Yalow's radioimmunoassay gave medicine a way to measure hormones present in concentrations so small they had previously been entirely invisible.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Vicente Aleixandre

Aleixandre survived the Spanish Civil War and Franco's dictatorship writing surrealist poetry of considerable force — much of it unpublishable under the regime — and became, quietly, the centre of the Generation of '27, which is what Spanish modernism called itself before the war put an end to the gathering.

Nobel Peace Prize

Amnesty International

Founded by a British lawyer in 1961 after reading about two Portuguese students imprisoned for raising a toast to freedom, Amnesty International had by 1977 grown into the world's largest human-rights organisation, campaigning through letters — millions of them — on behalf of political prisoners, torture victims, and those facing the death penalty.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Bertil Ohlin · James E. Meade

The Heckscher-Ohlin model of international trade — that countries export goods which intensively use their abundant factors — became, through Ohlin's elaboration, the standard framework for thinking about why Sweden exports furniture and Saudi Arabia exports oil. Meade worked out the welfare consequences of trade policy with unusual rigour, including the disconcerting finding that a customs union can sometimes make everyone worse off.

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Turing Award

John Backus

Backus led the IBM team that produced FORTRAN in 1957, the first programming language widely used for actual scientific work rather than as a research curiosity. He also invented Backus-Naur Form, the notation used to formally specify the grammar of programming languages — and in his Turing lecture argued, a little disconcertingly, that FORTRAN and its descendants were already obsolete.

Discovery of the rings of Uranus

On 10 March 1977, astronomers aboard the Kuiper Airborne Observatory were watching Uranus pass in front of a star when the star's light winked out briefly — several times — both before and after the planet itself crossed it. The planet had rings, only the second planetary ring system known in the solar system at the time, and nobody had expected them.

First full-body MRI scan of a living human

On 3 July 1977, Raymond Damadian and colleagues completed the first nuclear magnetic resonance image of a living human body — a cross-section through a volunteer's chest — after nearly five hours of scanning with their prototype INDOMITABLE machine. The image was blurry and required heroic patience to produce, but it was unambiguously there.

Voyager 1 and 2 launched toward the outer planets

Voyager 2 launched on 20 August 1977; Voyager 1 followed on 5 September. Both were aimed at a rare alignment of the outer planets that allowed gravity-assist trajectories past Jupiter and Saturn, a configuration that would not recur for 175 years. Voyager 1's faster path meant it overtook Voyager 2 within months, despite launching second.

Apple II personal computer introduced

On 17 April 1977, Apple Computer unveiled the Apple II at the West Coast Computer Faire — a machine with colour graphics, an integrated keyboard, and 4 KB of RAM for $1,298. It was not the first personal computer, but it was the first to look like a product rather than a construction kit, and that turned out to matter enormously.

Space Shuttle Enterprise completes first free-flight tests

The prototype orbiter Enterprise was released from a modified Boeing 747 at Edwards Air Force Base on 12 August 1977 and glided back to the runway without engines, proving that the shuttle's aerodynamics were sound. Five approach-and-landing tests followed through October, validating a design that would not make its first orbital flight until 1981.