1981

Nobel Prize in Physics

Nicolaas Bloembergen · Arthur L. Schawlow · Kai M. Siegbahn

Bloembergen and Schawlow showed that lasers could be pointed at matter with such precision that individual atomic species announce themselves by the colours they emit — a kind of spectroscopic name tag. Siegbahn, working separately, used electrons instead, reading the energy fingerprints of a surface's outermost atoms with comparable exactness.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Kenichi Fukui · Roald Hoffmann

Fukui noticed that chemical reactions tend to involve the outermost occupied and lowest empty orbitals of a molecule — the frontier, where electrons are most available for mischief. Hoffmann, with R. B. Woodward, translated orbital symmetry into a set of rules that tell chemists which reactions can proceed and which are, however appealing they look on paper, simply forbidden.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Roger W. Sperry · David H. Hubel · Torsten N. Wiesel

Sperry, working with patients whose brain hemispheres had been surgically separated, showed that the two halves carry on quite different mental lives and can, in a sense, disagree. Hubel and Wiesel mapped the visual cortex neuron by neuron, finding that the brain devotes elaborate columns of cells to detecting edges, orientations, and motion — and that the visual system must be used during a critical early window or it never properly assembles itself.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Elias Canetti

Born in Bulgaria, raised across five countries, writing in German: Canetti wore his displacement as a vantage point rather than a wound. His novel Auto-da-Fé and the sprawling study Crowds and Power circle the same obsession — what happens to individuals when masses form and the lights of ordinary reason go out.

Nobel Peace Prize

Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees

The UNHCR collected its second Nobel Peace Prize, twenty-seven years after its first, still doing the same unglamorous work: finding the displaced somewhere to be, and persuading the rest of the world to let them.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

James Tobin

Tobin asked how people distribute their assets across a menu of options with different risks, and why that choice ripples outward into investment, employment, and prices. His q-ratio — the ratio of a company's market value to the replacement cost of its assets — became a standard tool for judging whether investment is worth doing.

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Turing Award

Edgar F. Codd

While at IBM in 1970 Codd proposed that data be stored in simple tables of rows and columns, related to each other by shared values rather than by hard-wired pointers. The idea was considered impractically slow at the time; it now underlies virtually every database on the planet.

Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Barbara McClintock

McClintock had spent decades showing that stretches of maize DNA could pick up and relocate within the genome, a discovery so far outside the accepted picture of chromosomes as fixed structures that it was largely ignored for twenty years. The Lasker Award came in 1981; the Nobel would follow in 1983.

Space Shuttle Columbia makes its first flight (STS-1)

On 12 April 1981, John Young and Robert Crippen rode Columbia off the launchpad at Kennedy Space Center and into orbit — the first time a crewed spacecraft had launched without any prior uncrewed test flights. Two days later they landed on a dry California lake bed, and the era of the reusable orbiter quietly began.

Voyager 2 flyby of Saturn

Voyager 2 swept past Saturn on 25 August 1981, revealing unexpected braided and kinked structures in the rings that defied tidy explanation, and confirming that Enceladus — a small moon of ice — has a surface recently reshaped by geological forces. The flyby also bent the spacecraft's path toward Uranus, the next stop on a tour no one had fully planned when the probe launched in 1977.

IBM introduces the Personal Computer (IBM PC)

On 12 August 1981 IBM unveiled the Model 5150 at a New York press conference, priced from $1,565 and running an Intel 8088 chip at 4.77 MHz with Microsoft's MS-DOS. IBM intended a respectable business machine; what it got was an industry standard that others could clone, and the cloners duly obliged.

First clinical report of AIDS in the United States

On 5 June 1981 the CDC's weekly report described five young men in Los Angeles with a rare pneumonia and an immune system that had, for no apparent reason, stopped working. The brevity of that notice — a page and a half — was in no proportion to what it announced. By the end of the year, 337 cases had been counted and 130 people were dead.