1979

Nobel Prize in Physics

Two Forces Turn Out to Be One

Sheldon Glashow · Abdus Salam · Steven Weinberg

By the 1960s, physicists had catalogued four fundamental forces governing the universe, and an embarrassing question hung in the air: why should there be so many? Glashow, working in the early 1960s, and then Salam and Weinberg each independently, arrived at a mathematical framework showing that electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force — the force that governs radioactive decay — are not two separate things at all but two faces of a single electroweak interaction, distinguishable only because the universe happens to be cold enough to have broken their original symmetry. The theory predicted, with precise specificity, the masses of two then-hypothetical particles: the W and Z bosons. That is the sort of prediction you either stake your career on or quietly shelve. CERN found both particles in 1983, at almost exactly the predicted masses, which settled the matter decisively. Without the electroweak unification, the Standard Model of particle physics — the most accurate scientific theory humans have ever constructed — would not exist, and neither would the generations of accelerator design, detector engineering, and theoretical physics that follow from it.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Placing One Atom Exactly Where You Want It

Herbert C. Brown · Georg Wittig

Organic chemistry in the mid-twentieth century was, among other things, a discipline obsessed with control: the ability to place a specific atom or functional group at a precise location in a molecule, rather than getting a messy statistical mixture of products. Herbert Brown's hydroboration reaction, developed in the late 1950s, added hydrogen and boron across a carbon-carbon double bond with a selectivity that gave chemists precisely that kind of control — the boron lands on the less-hindered carbon, reliably, and can then be replaced with almost any group the chemist desires. Georg Wittig, meanwhile, devised a complementary reaction using phosphorus ylides that converts a carbonyl group into an alkene with equal exactitude. The two methods address different structural problems, and together they cover an enormous amount of synthetic territory. Both reactions are now so deeply embedded in pharmaceutical manufacturing that they occur, somewhere on Earth, millions of times a year — quietly, without ceremony, in the synthesis of drugs that treat everything from infections to depression. Chemistry's most powerful moments tend not to announce themselves.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

A Body, Sliced Without a Knife

Allan M. Cormack · Godfrey N. Hounsfield

For most of medical history, seeing inside a living human body without opening it required either guesswork or X-ray images that superimposed every tissue into a single flat shadow — a fog through which skilled radiologists learned to read, and everyone else squinted. Godfrey Hounsfield, an engineer at EMI Laboratories in England, conceived the idea of taking many X-ray projections from different angles and feeding them to a computer that could reconstruct, mathematically, a cross-sectional slice through the body in which each tissue appeared separately and clearly. He built the first clinical scanner, installed at Atkinson Morley Hospital in 1971, and the images it produced of brain structure were unlike anything medicine had seen before. Allan Cormack, a South African physicist working at Tufts University, had solved the relevant mathematics independently in the early 1960s and published it in journals that the engineering community barely read — one of those exercises in parallel discovery that science produces with some regularity. Together, they gave radiologists a third dimension and gave medicine the ability to diagnose strokes, tumours, haemorrhages, and injuries with a speed and certainty that was simply unavailable before; a world without CT scanning is one where surgical decisions are routinely made in the dark.

Nobel Prize in Literature

A Hymn Built From Light and War

Odysseus Elytis

Odysseus Elytis — born Odysseas Alepoudellis in Crete in 1911, the name a pen-name constructed from roots meaning Greece, hope, and freedom — spent his life trying to reconcile the luminosity of the Aegean with the darkness of the century in which he was obliged to live it. His central work, Axion Esti (meaning 'worthy it is,' borrowing the first words of a Byzantine hymn), published in 1959, attempted something formally ambitious: a fusion of Greek Orthodox liturgical structure with surrealist imagery, personal lyric, and the memory of the Albanian campaign in the Second World War during which Elytis served as a young officer. The result is simultaneously a national epic and a deeply private meditation on suffering, light, and continuity with the ancient Greek world that Elytis felt all around him. Mikis Theodorakis set sections of it to music in 1964, and the recording circulated under the military dictatorship in ways that printed poetry could not always manage. It became, in Greece, something positioned between a poem and a hymn — which is perhaps what Elytis intended all along.

Nobel Peace Prize

She Skipped the Banquet, Fed the Poor Instead

Mother Teresa

Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu was born in Skopje in 1910 to an Albanian family, entered a convent at eighteen, and by the late 1940s had concluded that the specific vocation she was called to pursue lay in the streets of Calcutta rather than inside one. She founded the Missionaries of Charity in 1950, initially with a small group of sisters and a mandate to serve those so poor, so sick, or so abandoned that few other institutions were willing to admit them. Over the following decades she built a global network of hospices, leprosy clinics, and homes for the dying that operated in dozens of countries, insisting throughout on a philosophy of direct, personal, unhurried attention to individual suffering. The scale of the organisational achievement was remarkable whatever one thought of its theological underpinnings, and she had the characteristic directness of someone who has spent decades beside people who are dying: at the Nobel ceremony, she declined the conventional banquet and asked that the $192,000 catering cost be donated instead. She received the prize, shook some hands, and went back to Calcutta.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

People Are Not Just Labour, They're Capital

Theodore W. Schultz · Sir Arthur Lewis

For much of the twentieth century, mainstream economic thought treated human beings as inputs — labour — to be combined with capital and land in ratios that the standard models could optimise, but whose underlying quality was largely assumed constant. Theodore Schultz, working at Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s, made the provocation formal: education and health are investments, they yield measurable returns, and the returns are often higher than those on physical machinery. He called it human capital, and while the term has since become so familiar as to sound obvious, it reorganised the way economists and governments thought about why some countries grow and others stagnate. Arthur Lewis, from Saint Lucia and trained in London, approached development economics from a different angle, building the dual-sector model that described how labour migrates from low-productivity subsistence agriculture to higher-productivity industrial sectors, and what that migration does to wages, surplus, and accumulation on both sides of the transition. The two frameworks are not the same theory, but they pointed in the same direction: that the fate of poor countries could not be read from their endowments of physical resources alone.

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Notation Shapes What You Can Think

Turing Award

Kenneth E. Iverson

Kenneth Iverson created APL in the early 1960s, initially as a notation for describing algorithms in his textbook on programming — a notation so compact and symbol-dense that it looks, to anyone encountering it for the first time, like an encrypted communication from a parallel civilisation. The language was built around operations on entire arrays rather than on individual elements processed in loops, which meant that a line of APL could perform transformations that would require dozens of lines in conventional code; practitioners described the experience of writing it as thinking at the level of the problem rather than the level of the machine. His Turing Award lecture, delivered in 1979 and titled 'Notation as a Tool of Thought,' made the underlying argument explicit: the notation a scientist or mathematician or programmer uses does not just express ideas they already have, it actively shapes which ideas are accessible to them in the first place. It is either a profound epistemological point about the relationship between language and cognition, or a very elegant way of explaining why APL looks the way it does. Probably both.

Voyager 1 discovers active volcanoes on Io

A Plume 280 Kilometres Above a Moon

On 5 March 1979, Voyager 1 swept through the Jovian system at roughly 35 kilometres per second, returning images that transformed Jupiter's neighbourhood from a set of inert dots into a collection of genuinely strange worlds. The spacecraft discovered a thin ring around Jupiter and three previously unknown moons, which was already a useful haul. But it was a navigation engineer named Linda Morabito, examining post-encounter images while checking the probe's position against background stars, who noticed something no one had ever seen on another world: an enormous umbrella-shaped plume rising 280 kilometres above the surface of Io, backlit against the darkness of space. She had found an active volcanic eruption. When the imaging team examined the full set of Io pictures, they found at least seven distinct eruptions occurring simultaneously, which meant that Io — squeezed and heated by the competing gravitational pulls of Jupiter and the other large moons — is the most volcanically active body in the solar system. Earth had, until that moment, been the only volcanically alive world anyone had evidence of.

Voyager 2 Jupiter flyby confirms Io volcanism and extends survey

The Volcanoes Had Already Rearranged Themselves

Four months after Voyager 1's pass, its twin arrived at Jupiter on 9 July 1979, carrying a slightly different instrument configuration and the enormous advantage of knowing what to look for. Io's volcanoes were still erupting — but not quite as before. Some of the plumes observed by Voyager 1 had subsided; new ones had appeared; the configuration of surface markings had shifted in the interval between the two encounters, visible even from spacecraft moving at interplanetary speeds. That mutability was itself scientifically valuable, demonstrating that Io's volcanism was not a fixed background condition but a dynamic, evolving system. Voyager 2 returned some 17,000 images of the Jovian system, extending the ring system's documentation, revealing extraordinary variety in the surface textures of the four large Galilean moons, and confirming, in short, that the outer solar system was considerably more active and peculiar than the pre-Voyager picture had suggested. The two spacecraft, together, constituted the first systematic survey of a planetary system other than our own inner one.

Three Mile Island nuclear accident

The Meltdown Nobody Was Hurt By

In the early morning of 28 March 1979, a stuck-open pilot-operated relief valve in the Unit 2 reactor at Three Mile Island, combined with a series of operator responses that made a manageable equipment fault significantly worse, produced a partial meltdown of the reactor core — the worst accident in the history of American commercial nuclear power. The actual radioactive releases were relatively modest: independent analyses found no clear statistical signal of increased cancer rates in the surrounding population, and the plant's containment structures performed more or less as designed. What the containment structures could not contain was the event's effect on perception. The accident coincided, with unfortunate timing, with the theatrical release of 'The China Syndrome,' a film about a nuclear reactor accident; the two fed each other in the public imagination in ways that careful dosimetry could not easily counter. New nuclear plant orders in the United States had already slowed; after Three Mile Island, they effectively stopped for a generation. The gap between actual harm and perceived risk has rarely been more consequential.

Skylab reenters the atmosphere

A $400 Fine for Littering, From Australia

Skylab had been empty since its last crew departed in February 1974, occupying a low Earth orbit that no one had quite managed to boost before the Space Shuttle — which was to have done the job — ran persistently behind schedule. Solar activity in the late 1970s was higher than models had predicted, which expanded the upper atmosphere enough to drag the 77-tonne station down faster than NASA's trajectory analysts had anticipated, narrowing the window for a controlled re-entry that was, in any case, largely theoretical. On 11 July 1979, Skylab broke apart over the Indian Ocean and Western Australia, scattering debris across a broad corridor that included the Shire of Esperance. No one was injured — the odds of the fragments finding a person across that largely empty landscape were always reassuringly low — but the Esperance council issued NASA a $400 fine for littering, a sum that NASA did not pay for twenty-two years, and then only after a California radio station organised a fundraising drive on NASA's behalf. The station itself had been an extraordinary scientific platform; the end of it was somewhat more whimsical.