1983

Nobel Prize in Physics

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar · William A. Fowler

Chandrasekhar had worked out in 1930 that a white dwarf cannot be more massive than about 1.4 times the Sun without collapsing under its own gravity — a limit the astrophysical establishment found so uncomfortable that Eddington publicly ridiculed it. Fowler received the other half for tracing how every element heavier than hydrogen was forged inside stars.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Henry Taube

Taube sorted out how electrons pass between metal atoms in solution, distinguishing the two fundamentally different mechanisms by which this transfer occurs. The work turned inorganic reaction chemistry from a collection of observations into something that could be reasoned about from first principles.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Barbara McClintock

McClintock had shown in the 1940s and 1950s that certain sequences of maize DNA could detach from one chromosomal location and reinstall themselves elsewhere — mobile genetic elements in a genome that everyone else believed was fixed. She worked on largely alone and largely unacknowledged until transposons were found across all of life, and the Nobel committee caught up with the 1940s.

Nobel Prize in Literature

William Golding

Lord of the Flies had been rejected by twenty-one publishers before finding a home in 1954; by 1983 it was lodged in the syllabuses of schoolchildren who perhaps did not always notice that Golding was describing them. The Nobel cited his novels for illuminating, through myth and realistic narrative together, what the human animal does when the rules are taken away.

Nobel Peace Prize

Lech Wałęsa

Wałęsa had helped found Solidarity in 1980 and led the first mass independent trade union in the communist bloc, surviving martial law and continued detention to remain its symbol. Polish authorities made clear he would not be permitted to return home if he went to Oslo, so his wife accepted the prize on his behalf.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Gerard Debreu

In his 1959 Theory of Value Debreu used topology and convex analysis to prove rigorously what Adam Smith had argued by intuition: that under general conditions competitive markets can settle into a consistent set of prices. The mathematics was unimpeachable; whether the conditions were realistic was a separate question Debreu was content to leave to others.

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Turing Award

Dennis M. Ritchie · Kenneth L. Thompson

Thompson designed the original Unix kernel at Bell Labs in 1969, fitting an operating system into a discarded minicomputer with 8KB of memory. Ritchie then invented C as the language to rewrite it in, which made Unix portable: suddenly the same system could run on entirely different hardware. Most of the software infrastructure of the modern world descends, more or less directly, from those two decisions.

Discovery of the W and Z bosons at CERN

The Glashow-Salam-Weinberg theory of the electroweak force had predicted the W and Z bosons in detail, which was either reassuring or alarming depending on how much you trusted theorists. Carlo Rubbia's UA1 experiment at CERN's Super Proton Synchrotron announced the W boson in January and the Z in May 1983, at precisely the masses the theory required. Rubbia and van der Meer collected the 1984 Nobel.

Isolation of the HIV virus

On 20 May 1983 Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, Luc Montagnier, and colleagues at the Institut Pasteur published in Science the isolation of a retrovirus from patients with lymphadenopathy and early AIDS symptoms. The finding pointed to a cause, and therefore, in principle, to a target. Montagnier and Barré-Sinoussi received the Nobel in 2008.

Pioneer 10 crosses Neptune's orbit — first spacecraft to exit the solar system's major planets

On 13 June 1983 Pioneer 10, launched eleven years earlier with a plaque describing its human makers in case anyone should ever find it, crossed Neptune's orbit and became the first human-made object to pass beyond all the major planets. It kept sending faint signals back for another twenty years.

Sally Ride becomes first American woman in space

On 18 June 1983 Sally Ride flew aboard Challenger on STS-7, becoming the first American woman and, at 32, the youngest American to reach orbit. The six-day mission deployed two satellites and operated the shuttle's robotic arm; Ride subsequently described the experience as the most fun she had ever had.