1980

Nobel Prize in Physics

James Cronin · Val Fitch

In 1964, Cronin and Fitch demonstrated that the decay of neutral kaons violates CP symmetry — the combined symmetry of charge and mirror reflection that physicists had assumed was inviolable. The violation is tiny, on the order of 0.2 percent, but it implies that matter and antimatter are not perfect opposites, which is ultimately why the universe contains matter at all rather than nothing.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Paul Berg · Walter Gilbert · Frederick Sanger

Berg received his half for the fundamental chemistry of recombinant DNA; Gilbert and Sanger shared the other half for independently inventing methods to read the sequence of bases in a DNA strand. Sanger's chain-termination method proved faster and cleaner than Gilbert's chemical approach and became the industry standard — it was also Sanger's second Nobel Prize in Chemistry, an accomplishment shared only with Linus Pauling and Marie Curie.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Baruj Benacerraf · Jean Dausset · George D. Snell

Snell spent years breeding mice to establish the major histocompatibility complex — the set of genes that determines why one mouse will accept a skin graft and another reject it; Dausset found the human equivalent, the HLA system; Benacerraf showed that immune-response genes within the MHC control precisely which foreign molecules a T-cell can recognise. The work explains both organ rejection and why different people respond differently to the same infection.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Czesław Miłosz

Miłosz had defected from communist Poland in 1951, written The Captive Mind — a dissection of intellectual capitulation to totalitarianism — and then spent decades at Berkeley in a kind of productive obscurity. At the time of the prize he was almost unknown outside Poland and émigré circles; the Nobel announcement required his name to be spelled out for most Western journalists.

Nobel Peace Prize

Adolfo Pérez Esquivel

An Argentine architect and pacifist, Pérez Esquivel co-founded the Servicio Paz y Justicia network across Latin America to document human rights abuses and support communities resisting military repression. The Argentine junta detained and tortured him in 1977 and 1978; the Nobel Committee gave him the prize two years later, which concentrated the world's attention on what had been done to him.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Lawrence R. Klein

Klein began building large-scale mathematical models of the entire U.S. economy in the 1950s — equations for consumption, investment, wages, prices, all connected — and kept refining them into the Wharton Econometric Forecasting model, which governments and corporations used for planning. The models were imperfect predictors and Klein knew it, which made him more careful about the limits of the exercise than most of his users.

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Turing Award

C. Antony R. Hoare

Hoare logic — the formal system of pre- and post-conditions for reasoning about whether programs do what they claim — gave software engineering the nearest thing it has to a proof technique. His Communicating Sequential Processes formalism handled concurrent systems. Neither is as widely used in practice as Hoare might have hoped, which tells you something about the relationship between theoretical computer science and the software industry.

Alvarez hypothesis: asteroid impact caused the end-Cretaceous mass extinction

Luis and Walter Alvarez, with Frank Asaro and Helen Michel, found a thin layer of iridium — a metal rare in the Earth's crust but abundant in certain asteroids — at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary at sites around the world, and proposed it was deposited by an enormous impact approximately 66 million years ago. The idea that the dinosaurs were killed by a rock from space was initially met with considerable scepticism; the discovery of the Chicxulub crater in the 1990s was not the outcome the sceptics had anticipated.

WHO declares smallpox eradicated

On 8 May 1980, the World Health Assembly formally certified what the evidence had shown for years: smallpox no longer existed anywhere on Earth outside two freezers, one in Atlanta and one in Novosibirsk. It was the first — and, so far, the only — time a human infectious disease has been deliberately erased. The last naturally occurring case was a Somali cook named Ali Maow Maalin, who survived it in October 1977.

Voyager 1 flyby of Saturn

On 12 November 1980, Voyager 1 swept within 124,000 km of Saturn's cloud tops and found that the rings, long assumed to be a few simple bands, were instead hundreds of ringlets — some kinked, some braided, one with a strange twisted structure in what became known as the F ring. Five new moons were discovered in the process, some of them shepherding the rings into their inexplicably precise boundaries.

Eruption of Mount St. Helens

At 8:32 on the morning of 18 May 1980, a magnitude 5.1 earthquake triggered the largest subaerial landslide in recorded history on the north face of Mount St. Helens in Washington State. The eruption that followed reduced the summit by 400 metres, deposited ash across eleven states, and killed 57 people. Geologists who had been monitoring the volcano from what they believed was a safe distance were among the dead.