1982

Nobel Prize in Physics

Kenneth G. Wilson

Near a phase transition — water approaching its boiling point, iron losing its magnetism — matter behaves in ways that depend on scale in a precise and universal fashion. Wilson's renormalization group showed how to account for fluctuations at every length scale simultaneously, and in doing so explained why systems as different as magnets and fluids share identical critical exponents.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Aaron Klug

Klug combined X-ray crystallography and electron microscopy into a single technique capable of reconstructing three-dimensional structures from flat projections — a kind of molecular tomography. With it he determined the architecture of viruses, chromatin, and transfer RNA at atomic resolution.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Sune K. Bergström · Bengt I. Samuelsson · John R. Vane

Prostaglandins had been known to exist since the 1930s — short-lived lipid signals that regulate inflammation, pain, and blood clotting — but their structures and mechanisms were opaque. Bergström and Samuelsson isolated and characterised them; Vane discovered that aspirin works by blocking their synthesis, which neatly explained several thousand years of folk medicine at a stroke.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Gabriel García Márquez

The Colombian novelist had spent decades writing fiction in which the miraculous and the mundane coexist without embarrassment, both treated by the narrator with the same patient attention. One Hundred Years of Solitude had been out for fifteen years before the Nobel committee caught up; the book had not been waiting.

Nobel Peace Prize

Alva Myrdal · Alfonso García Robles

Myrdal spent years at the UN documenting precisely how little progress disarmament talks were making, and wrote The Game of Disarmament to say so publicly. García Robles had gone further, persuading Latin American nations to sign the 1968 Treaty of Tlatelolco and make their region — the first inhabited one on Earth — free of nuclear weapons.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

George J. Stigler

Stigler turned economic tools on the regulators themselves, arguing that industries subject to government oversight tend, over time, to capture the agencies meant to restrain them. The observation was cynical only in the sense that it appeared to be accurate.

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Turing Award

Stephen A. Cook

Cook's 1971 proof that the Boolean satisfiability problem is NP-complete did something rarely achieved in mathematics: it gave a name and a shape to a difficulty that had been lurking in dozens of unrelated problems. The question of whether NP equals P — whether hard problems are secretly easy — remains the most famous open question in computer science.

Fields Medal (ICM 1982/1983)

Fields Medal

Alain Connes · William Thurston · Shing-Tung Yau

The 1982 congress was postponed because Poland was under martial law; it was held in Warsaw in 1983 instead. Connes received the medal for noncommutative geometry, Thurston for a sweeping new picture of three-dimensional manifolds, and Yau for proving the Calabi conjecture — a result with consequences for string theory that the physicists later found very convenient.

Identification of prions as infectious proteins

Stanley Prusiner published evidence that the agent behind scrapie, kuru, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease was not a virus or bacterium but a misfolded protein capable of inducing other proteins to misfold — a process with no known precedent in biology. The claim was met with widespread scepticism; the 1997 Nobel Prize arrived as the evidence accumulated.

Venera 13 lands on Venus and returns first color surface images

The Soviet Venera 13 touched down on Venus on 1 March 1982 and began transmitting colour photographs from a surface at 457 °C under pressure eighty-nine times that of Earth's atmosphere. It was designed to last 32 minutes; it lasted 127. The images showed a bleak orange plain of flat slabs under a yellowish sky, and then the probe went silent.

First permanent artificial heart implanted in a human

On 2 December 1982 surgeon William DeVries implanted Robert Jarvik's polyurethane device into Barney Clark, a 61-year-old retired dentist at the University of Utah, intending it as a permanent replacement for a failing heart. Clark lived for 112 days, tethered to an air compressor the size of a washing machine, before dying of multiple organ failure — a result that was simultaneously a tragedy and a proof of concept.