1979

Nobel Prize in Physics

Sheldon Glashow · Abdus Salam · Steven Weinberg

Three physicists — working independently through the 1960s — found that the weak nuclear force and electromagnetism are not separate phenomena but two aspects of a single electroweak force, unifiable in a framework that predicted the existence of the W and Z bosons. Those particles were found at CERN in 1983, more or less exactly where the equations said they would be.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Herbert C. Brown · Georg Wittig

Brown's hydroboration reaction adds hydrogen and boron across a double bond with remarkable selectivity, giving chemists precise control over where atoms end up in a molecule. Wittig's reaction converts a carbonyl group into an alkene using a phosphorus compound, with equal precision. Both are now standard tools in pharmaceutical synthesis, used millions of times a year without great ceremony.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Allan M. Cormack · Godfrey N. Hounsfield

Hounsfield built the first clinical CT scanner at EMI Laboratories — installed in a hospital in 1971 — by combining X-ray projections taken from many angles and using a computer to reconstruct a cross-sectional slice through the body. Cormack had worked out the mathematics independently years before. Together they gave medicine a way to see inside a living person without cutting them open.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Odysseus Elytis

Elytis's long poem Axion Esti, published in 1959, fused the Greek Orthodox liturgy, surrealism, the light and stone of the Aegean, and the suffering of the Second World War into something that is simultaneously national epic and personal lyric. It was set to music by Mikis Theodorakis and became, in Greece, something between a poem and a hymn.

Nobel Peace Prize

Mother Teresa

Born Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu in Skopje, Mother Teresa founded the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta in 1950 and built a global network of hospices, schools, and leprosy clinics. She served the dying poor on a scale that made the organisational ambition remarkable, whatever one thinks of the theology, and declined the conventional Nobel banquet in favour of donating the catering cost to the hungry.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Theodore W. Schultz · Sir Arthur Lewis

Schultz demonstrated that investing in human capital — education and health — produced economic returns comparable to investing in machinery, a proposition that governments had intuited but never quite quantified. Lewis built the dual-sector model showing how labour moves from subsistence farming to industrial work and what that migration does to wages on both sides.

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Turing Award

Kenneth E. Iverson

Iverson invented APL, a programming language built around a dense notation for array operations that looks, to the uninitiated, like an encrypted message from a different civilisation. His Turing lecture, "Notation as a Tool of Thought," argued that the notation you use shapes the ideas you are capable of having — which is either a profound epistemological point or a polite way of explaining APL.

Voyager 1 discovers active volcanoes on Io

On 5 March 1979, Voyager 1 swept past Jupiter and discovered a thin ring around the planet and three new moons. Navigation engineer Linda Morabito, examining post-encounter images, noticed an enormous umbrella-shaped plume rising 280 kilometres above the surface of Io. It was a volcanic eruption — the first active volcanism ever observed on a world other than Earth, and there were at least seven more erupting simultaneously.

Voyager 2 Jupiter flyby confirms Io volcanism and extends survey

Voyager 2 reached Jupiter on 9 July 1979, four months after its twin, and found that Io's volcanoes were still going — some had changed in the interval, which was itself scientifically useful. Its 17,000 images of the Jovian system extended and confirmed the Voyager 1 findings, including the ring system and the astonishing variety of surface textures on the four large moons.

Three Mile Island nuclear accident

On 28 March 1979, a sequence of equipment failure and operator error caused a partial meltdown of the Unit 2 reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania — the worst accident in American commercial nuclear history. Radioactive releases were relatively small and no direct health effects were established, but the accident's effect on public confidence was not small, and new nuclear plant construction in the United States essentially stopped.

Skylab reenters the atmosphere

Skylab had been unoccupied since 1974, its orbit slowly decaying. On 11 July 1979, higher-than-predicted solar activity had expanded the upper atmosphere enough to bring it down ahead of schedule, and the 77-tonne station disintegrated over the Indian Ocean and Western Australia in a shower of debris that caused no injuries but prompted the Shire of Esperance to issue NASA a $400 fine for littering.