1978

Nobel Prize in Physics

Pyotr Kapitsa · Arno Penzias · Robert Woodrow Wilson

Kapitsa, working in the 1930s, found that liquid helium cooled below 2.17 Kelvin flows without any viscosity — up the sides of its container, through microscopic cracks, over every barrier — a behaviour so strange it required a new word: superfluidity. Penzias and Wilson's half of the prize was for the 1964 discovery that the universe has a temperature: 2.7 Kelvin, the faint glow left from the Big Bang, filling the sky equally in every direction.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Peter Mitchell

In 1961 Mitchell proposed that the energy released by respiration drives a proton pump across the inner mitochondrial membrane, and that the flow of protons back through that membrane — like water through a turbine — produces ATP. The idea was initially dismissed as too mechanical, too hydraulic; it took more than a decade of evidence before the field conceded he had been right.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Werner Arber · Daniel Nathans · Hamilton O. Smith

Bacteria have restriction enzymes that cut invading viral DNA at specific sequences — a molecular immune system of sorts. Smith isolated the first such enzyme that recognised a particular sequence and cut precisely there; Nathans used a set of these tools to produce the first genetic map of a viral chromosome; Arber had worked out the theoretical basis for why the system exists.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Singer wrote in Yiddish — a language whose speakers had been largely destroyed — about a world of Polish-Jewish life that no longer existed, and somehow the resulting stories managed to be warm, funny, and shot through with demons. He accepted his prize in Stockholm, and in a brief speech noted that children still believe in God, in the family, and in the supernatural, and that serious literature should take all three seriously.

Nobel Peace Prize

Anwar al-Sadat · Menachem Begin

At Camp David in September 1978, brokered by Jimmy Carter in thirteen days of exhausting negotiation, Egypt and Israel reached the agreements that would produce the first peace treaty between Israel and an Arab state. It cost Sadat his life — he was assassinated in 1981 by opponents who considered it a betrayal — and Begin his reputation in much of the world over Lebanon.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Herbert Simon

Economists had long assumed that agents making decisions were, at least in theory, perfectly rational — maximising expected utility with full information. Simon observed that real people and organisations operate under cognitive limits and imperfect data, and that they therefore satisfice rather than optimise: they find solutions that are good enough. The observation was obvious to anyone who had ever been a person; formalising it took rigour.

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Turing Award

Robert W. Floyd

Floyd's 1967 paper "Assigning Meanings to Programs" established how to reason formally about what a piece of code actually does, using assertions attached to each step that must remain true for the program to be correct. The approach became Hoare logic; Floyd's contribution was foundational to the entire discipline of formal program verification.

Fields Medal

Fields Medal

Pierre Deligne · Charles Fefferman · Grigory Margulis · Daniel Quillen

At the 1978 International Congress in Helsinki, Deligne completed Weil's conjectures linking number theory and geometry; Fefferman made deep contributions to analysis; Quillen founded higher algebraic K-theory; Margulis proved superrigidity results for lattices in Lie groups. Margulis, a Soviet citizen, was not permitted to travel to Helsinki to collect his medal.

Discovery of Charon, moon of Pluto

On 22 June 1978, James Christy at the U.S. Naval Observatory noticed a stubborn elongation in photographs of Pluto taken at Flagstaff — an elongation that moved in a way that could only mean a satellite. Charon is so large relative to Pluto, roughly half its diameter, and orbits so closely that the two bodies keep the same face permanently turned toward each other, like two dancers locked in a mutual gaze.

Birth of Louise Brown, the first IVF baby

Louise Joy Brown was born by caesarean section at Oldham General Hospital on 25 July 1978, the result of work by physiologist Robert Edwards and gynaecologist Patrick Steptoe that had begun more than a decade earlier. The medical reaction ranged from cautious endorsement to ethical alarm; Louise Brown turned out to be entirely healthy, which settled at least part of the argument.

Einstein X-ray Observatory launched

The Einstein Observatory, launched on 13 November 1978, was the first fully imaging X-ray telescope ever put into orbit. X-rays from space cannot be focused like visible light — they pass straight through ordinary mirrors — but the telescope's grazing-incidence optics managed it, revealing X-ray emission from stellar coronae, pulsars, and the hearts of distant galaxies that ground-based astronomy could never have seen.