1983

Nobel Prize in Physics

How a Star Learns to Die

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar · William A. Fowler

In 1930, a twenty-year-old Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar worked out on the steamship from Madras to Southampton that a white dwarf star above roughly 1.4 solar masses cannot hold itself together — it will collapse, catastrophically, into something denser and stranger. Arthur Eddington, then the most eminent astrophysicist in the world, publicly called this conclusion absurd and suggested that nature would surely intervene to prevent so disagreeable an outcome; the embarrassment to Chandrasekhar was profound and deliberate. Nature, as it turned out, did not intervene to oblige Eddington, and the Chandrasekhar limit is now the pivot on which the life or death of a star turns. William Fowler received the prize's other half for the quieter but equally vast achievement of tracing, through nuclear physics, how every element heavier than hydrogen was forged in the cores of stars and blasted outward by their deaths. Between the two of them, the Nobel committee in 1983 acknowledged the complete biography of matter: how it is made, and what happens when the furnace finally goes out.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Electrons Change Address, Carefully Tracked

Henry Taube

For much of the first half of the twentieth century, the reactions of metal ions in solution were catalogued rather than understood — chemists knew that electrons moved between dissolved metal atoms, but not how or why. Henry Taube, working at the University of Chicago and later Stanford, spent the 1950s distinguishing two fundamentally different mechanisms by which this electron transfer occurs: the inner-sphere pathway, in which atoms share a bridging ligand during the handoff, and the outer-sphere pathway, in which they do not touch at all. The distinction sounds almost philosophical until you realise it underpins the behavior of metalloenzymes, the design of industrial catalysts, and the corrosion of every pipe and bridge in the world. Taube turned inorganic reaction chemistry from a naturalist's collection of oddities into a discipline that could be reasoned about from principles rather than merely memorised. Not a dramatic transformation, in the way particle physics tends to be; just a deeper, more durable kind of understanding.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Genes That Refused to Stay Put

Barbara McClintock

Working alone at Cold Spring Harbor through the 1940s and 1950s, Barbara McClintock noticed that certain sequences of maize DNA were not fixed to their chromosomal positions — they could lift out, migrate, and reinsert themselves elsewhere, sometimes disrupting neighboring genes and producing the mosaic patterns of colour on maize kernels she had been studying for years. When she presented these findings, the response from the genetics community ranged from polite bafflement to quiet dismissal; genomes, the consensus held, were stable archives, not restless self-editors. She did not stop working, though she largely stopped publishing findings she knew would not be believed. It took the molecular biology revolution of the 1960s and 1970s to reveal that transposable elements, as they came to be called, exist throughout the living world — in bacteria, in insects, in humans — and that they have been reshaping genomes since well before there were geneticists to care. The Nobel committee caught up with her in 1983, by which point McClintock was eighty-one and the only question worth asking was what had taken so long.

Nobel Prize in Literature

An Island Strips Away the Rules

William Golding

The manuscript that became Lord of the Flies was rejected by twenty-one publishers before Victor Gollancz took it in 1954, a commercial gamble that paid off in a way the publishing industry could not quite have predicted: the novel became one of the most widely taught books in the English-speaking world, assigned to the very age group it anatomises with such uncomfortable clarity. Golding had been a schoolmaster, which perhaps gave him unusual access to the experiment the novel proposes — strip away the structures of civilisation from a group of boys, and observe — and he wrote with a control that makes the book's terrible final pages feel less like fiction than like a demonstration. The Nobel cited his ability to illuminate, through myth and realistic narrative woven together, the nature of the human animal when the rules are removed. That the book continues to be argued over, assigned, and read not as an adventure but as a diagnosis says something about the endurance of the question Golding was asking.

Nobel Peace Prize

An Empty Chair for the Electrician

Lech Wałęsa

In August 1980, a thirty-six-year-old electrician and union organiser named Lech Wałęsa climbed over the fence of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk to join a strike he had not started, and within weeks had helped forge Solidarity — the first independent, self-governing trade union in the communist bloc, and eventually an organisation with ten million members in a country of thirty-eight million. The Polish government imposed martial law in December 1981, detained Wałęsa for eleven months, and continued to make his life uncomfortable in the small, grinding ways that authoritarian states have perfected; he remained Solidarity's symbol regardless. When the Nobel committee named him for the 1983 Peace Prize, Polish authorities made clear he would not be permitted to return if he travelled to Oslo, so his wife Danuta collected the prize on his behalf and read his speech. The image of an empty chair in Stockholm is not a complicated symbol.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Proving the Invisible Hand Could Work

Gerard Debreu

Adam Smith had argued in 1776, by intuition and example, that competitive markets could coordinate the decisions of countless individuals into something like a consistent outcome — that prices, in the right conditions, could do the work of a central planner without any planner being required. What Smith could not do was prove it. Gérard Debreu, drawing on topology, set theory, and convex analysis in his compact 1959 monograph Theory of Value, provided exactly that proof: a rigorous demonstration that under specified conditions a general equilibrium of prices exists. The mathematics was essentially unassailable. Whether the conditions — perfect competition, complete markets, rational agents, no externalities — obtained in any actual economy was a separate question that Debreu was content, with characteristic precision, to leave to others. He had established what was possible; the rest was empirical detail. Economics has been arguing about that detail ever since.

ACM A.M. Turing Award

A Discarded Machine, Rebuilt as Unix

Turing Award

Dennis M. Ritchie · Kenneth L. Thompson

In 1969, Ken Thompson found a discarded PDP-7 minicomputer at Bell Labs with 8 kilobytes of usable memory and designed an operating system on it in three weeks, in part because he wanted a comfortable environment in which to play a game he had written. The result was Unix, which was elegant enough in its design that Dennis Ritchie then invented a new programming language — C — specifically to rewrite it in, and that rewrite made Unix portable: the same system, with the same philosophy, could now run on entirely different hardware. The philosophy in question — small tools that do one thing, pipes that chain them together, files as a universal abstraction — proved so generative that it propagated through every subsequent computing environment, including the ones that claimed to have replaced it. Linux, macOS, Android, and most of the servers underlying the internet are, at varying depths, descendants of what Thompson and Ritchie made in a Bell Labs corridor with a machine nobody else wanted.

Discovery of the W and Z bosons at CERN

The Theory Was Right, to the Kilogram

The Glashow-Salam-Weinberg theory of the electroweak force had been predicting the W and Z bosons since the late 1960s, specifying not just their existence but their masses with a precision that made particle experimentalists either excited or nervous, depending on how much they trusted theorists. Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer devised an audacious scheme to test it: collide protons with antiprotons at the CERN Super Proton Synchrotron, producing conditions energetic enough to materialise the predicted particles, which van der Meer's stochastic cooling technique would make possible by taming the otherwise unruly antiproton beam. UA1 announced the W boson in January 1983 and the Z in May, at very nearly the exact masses the theory had required. It was one of the more satisfying confirmations in physics history — not because anything surprising was found, but because one of the most mathematically intricate theories ever constructed turned out to be simply, specifically correct. Rubbia and van der Meer collected the Nobel the following year, a turnaround the committee rarely manages with such appropriate speed.

Isolation of the HIV virus

Naming What Was Killing Quietly

By early 1983 a strange and lethal syndrome had been spreading for several years, destroying the immune systems of patients who had no obvious reason to be immunocompromised, and the medical community's most urgent need was to know what was causing it. On 20 May 1983, Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, Luc Montagnier, and colleagues at the Institut Pasteur published in Science the isolation of a retrovirus — drawn from lymph-node tissue of a patient with early AIDS symptoms — that they named lymphadenopathy-associated virus; it would later be renamed HIV. The finding did not end the epidemic, which was still gathering speed, and did not immediately yield a treatment. What it provided was a target: a specific pathogen with a specific biology that could, in principle, be understood, modelled, and eventually suppressed. The antiretroviral therapies that have since made HIV a manageable chronic condition rather than a death sentence each trace their rationale back to the question that Barré-Sinoussi and Montagnier answered in 1983. Montagnier and Barré-Sinoussi received the Nobel Prize in 2008.

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

A Plaque Leaves the Planets Behind

Pioneer 10 had been launched in March 1972 carrying, among other instruments, a gold-anodised aluminium plaque etched with a diagram of a man, a woman, the solar system, and enough information to tell a finder where it came from and what built it — a small, touching act of optimism from a species that was just then sending its first probe through the asteroid belt. On 13 June 1983, eleven years and roughly five billion kilometres later, it crossed Neptune's orbit and became the first human-made object to have passed beyond all the major planets of the solar system. The spacecraft kept transmitting faint signals — the radio equivalent of a whisper across a continent — for another twenty years before NASA's Deep Space Network could no longer hear it. The plaque is still out there, moving at roughly 12 kilometres per second through interstellar space, which is either a hopeful thought or a lonely one depending on your disposition.

Sally Ride becomes first American woman in space

She Flew the Arm She Built

Sally Ride had been a ranked tennis player, then a Stanford physicist, before she answered a newspaper advertisement in 1977 that NASA had placed seeking astronaut candidates — and notably, for the first time, women. She was selected from eight thousand applicants and, on 18 June 1983, flew aboard Challenger on mission STS-7, becoming the first American woman and, at thirty-two years old, the youngest American to reach orbit. The six-day mission was busy by any measure: the crew deployed two communications satellites, conducted experiments, and Ride operated the shuttle's robotic arm, which she had helped develop. She later said, with the measured understatement of a physicist, that it was the most fun she had ever had. After her second flight she served on both the Rogers Commission investigating Challenger's 1986 destruction and the Columbia Accident Investigation Board; she spent her final years founding Sally Ride Science to draw young people, and particularly girls, into STEM. She never made a particular fuss about being first. She was simply, demonstrably, very good.