1986

Nobel Prize in Physics

A Gap Smaller Than an Atom

Ernst Ruska · Gerd Binnig · Heinrich Rohrer

Ernst Ruska built his first working electron microscope in Berlin in 1933, betting on the fact that electrons — with wavelengths far shorter than visible light — could resolve structure that optical microscopes could only guess at; the physics community took its time being impressed, and the Nobel arrived fifty-three years later, when Ruska was in his late seventies. By then the prize had to be shared with two men who had done something stranger still. In 1981, Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer at IBM Zurich developed the scanning tunnelling microscope, in which a metal tip is brought so absurdly close to a surface that electrons seep across the vacuum gap by quantum tunnelling — a process forbidden by classical mechanics and inevitable in quantum mechanics — and the tiny variations in that current, measured as the tip is raked across the surface, assemble themselves into a map of individual atoms. The gap between the needle and the surface was smaller than an atom is wide, which is precisely the kind of sentence that requires a quiet moment. Together the two instruments bracketed half a century of microscopy: one showed us cells and organelles in detail that transformed biology; the other showed us matter itself, one atom at a time, and opened the door to nanotechnology.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Watching One Collision at a Time

Dudley R. Herschbach · Yuan T. Lee · John C. Polanyi

For most of the twentieth century, a chemical reaction was something that happened to a flask full of molecules — billions of collisions averaged into a rate and a yield, the individual event forever invisible. Dudley Herschbach, beginning in the 1950s at Harvard, decided that was not good enough. He built crossed molecular beam machines in which two thin jets of molecules meet in a near-perfect vacuum, and by measuring the angles and velocities at which reaction products scatter he could read the dynamics of individual collisions: where the energy went, how the electron clouds rearranged, what the transition state must have felt like from the inside. Yuan Lee, his former student, took the technique to a new level of resolution at Berkeley, while John Polanyi at Toronto reached similar conclusions through infrared chemiluminescence — watching the faint glow of freshly made molecules still vibrating with the energy of their own birth. What the three established, between them, was that chemistry could be understood the way a collision physicist understands it: as geometry, trajectory, and energy transfer, visible in principle if not yet by eye. The field they founded is the reason drug molecules can be designed rather than merely stumbled upon.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Letters the Body Writes Itself

Stanley Cohen · Rita Levi-Montalcini

Rita Levi-Montalcini began her career doing neuroanatomy in a small laboratory she had installed in her bedroom in wartime Italy, after Mussolini's race laws stripped her of her university position and later of permission to exist in the cities at all. Working with chick embryos and a Zeiss microscope, she noticed in the early 1950s that a mouse tumour implanted near a chick's nervous system caused nerve fibres to grow toward it with improbable energy, drawn by something the tumour was secreting. That something turned out to be nerve growth factor, the first of what would eventually be understood as a large family of proteins that tell the developing nervous system where to go and what to become. Stanley Cohen, working with her at Washington University under Viktor Hamburger, isolated NGF and then discovered a second signalling molecule — epidermal growth factor — and characterised the receptor through which it triggers cell division. The implication was staggering and is now almost too familiar to notice: the body's development is not a clock unwinding according to a fixed programme but a postal conversation, cells writing letters to each other in chemical ink, and the body we end up with depends on every letter arriving correctly. Cancer, it followed, often begins with a letter that never stops being sent.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Poetry Smuggled Out of a Cell

Wole Soyinka

When Wole Soyinka was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986, becoming the first African writer to receive it, the Swedish Academy cited his work as giving 'voice to the human adventure in drama of wide cultural perspectives.' The phrase is accurate but also slightly inadequate for a body of work that had included, at one point, Soyinka's arrest by the Nigerian government — who detained him for two years without charge during the Biafra war, in punishment for a radio broadcast urging a ceasefire — so the notion of 'wide cultural perspectives' necessarily includes the experience of a cell. His plays draw deeply on Yoruba mythology and theatrical form — Ogun, the god of iron and creativity, recurs — while confronting colonialism, corruption, and political violence with a directness that never becomes didactic because the Yoruba dramatic tradition Soyinka inhabits is not a tradition that separates tragedy from comedy, or the sacred from the profane. He wrote poetry in prison, on the margins of books with a smuggled pen, which tells you something about the relationship between literature and power that no lecture needs to spell out.

Nobel Peace Prize

The Bystander Is Not Innocent

Elie Wiesel

Elie Wiesel was fifteen when he and his family were deported from Sighetu Marmației to Auschwitz in the spring of 1944; his mother and younger sister were killed on arrival, his father died at Buchenwald the following winter, just weeks before the camp was liberated. Wiesel did not write about it for a decade, and when he did — in Yiddish first, then French, then in the compressed translation that became Night — publishers were slow to see the point. The book eventually found an audience that became an era: it has sold tens of millions of copies and is among the most widely read testimonies of the Holocaust. The Nobel Committee in 1986 did not award Wiesel the Peace Prize for surviving or even for witnessing, but for the argument he spent the rest of his life making: that indifference to the suffering of others is not a neutral position, that the bystander is not innocent, and that memory is not sentiment but moral obligation. The argument was not always comfortable to hear, which is precisely the condition under which it needed to be made.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Politicians Are People Too

James M. Buchanan Jr.

Classical economics had long treated the state as a kind of deus ex machina: when markets failed, government would intervene in the public interest, guided by benevolent technocrats doing their disinterested best. James Buchanan, working with Gordon Tullock at the University of Virginia through the 1960s, suggested this was a touching piece of fiction. If economics was right that people pursue their own interests, then politicians and bureaucrats were people too — and would pursue theirs, which meant winning elections, growing budgets, and securing their own positions, interests that could diverge quite sharply from the public welfare. The resulting framework, public choice theory, was not a cynical attack on government so much as an insistence on analytical consistency: you cannot assume self-interest in the market and altruism in the legislature. The observation did not endear Buchanan to those who preferred the fiction, and the Nobel, when it came, produced the usual complaints about politics masquerading as economics. The complaint was, in a way, his point.

ACM A.M. Turing Award

The Bones Beneath Every Query

Turing Award

John Hopcroft · Robert Tarjan

By the late 1960s, theoretical computer science had accumulated a cluttered attic of graph problems — how do you find the shortest path, detect a cycle, test whether a network can be drawn flat — and the algorithms for solving them were often slow, ad hoc, and poorly understood. John Hopcroft and Robert Tarjan, working sometimes together and sometimes in parallel through the 1970s, tidied the attic considerably. Tarjan's depth-first search, his algorithm for finding strongly connected components, and his union-find data structure each knocked the expected running time down by an order of magnitude or more, replacing brute-force approaches with methods that felt, to those who understood them, almost like cheating. Hopcroft contributed efficient planarity testing and foundational work on automata and formal languages. The practical consequences are buried so deep in modern computing infrastructure that they have become invisible: compilers use these algorithms to analyse code, network routing tables depend on them, and the database engine processing a query is, at some level, running variations on what Hopcroft and Tarjan worked out on paper half a century ago. Algorithms of this kind are the bones of the machine — you don't notice them until they're absent.

High-temperature superconductivity discovered in ceramic materials

Looking Where No One Thought to Look

Superconductivity — the complete vanishing of electrical resistance — had been known since 1911, when Heike Kamerlingh Onnes cooled mercury to 4 degrees above absolute zero and watched its resistance disappear. For seventy years, progress in raising that transition temperature had been glacial, and the theoretical wisdom held that ceramics, being poor conductors at room temperature, were an unpromising place to look. J. Georg Bednorz and K. Alex Müller at IBM Zurich were unconvinced by the wisdom. In early 1986 they published evidence of superconductivity in a barium-lanthanum-copper-oxide ceramic at 35 K — nearly 12 degrees higher than any previous record — a result so surprising that many laboratories initially failed to believe it and ran the experiment themselves just to make sure. They had not imagined they would find what they found; the paper's title was studiously tentative. The scramble that followed was one of the fastest in postwar physics, as groups around the world pushed the transition temperature into the liquid-nitrogen range and beyond; the two IBM researchers received the Nobel the following year, a pace almost without precedent. Room-temperature superconductivity remains unsolved, and the dream of lossless power transmission and floating trains runs on, powered in part by a discovery that began with two scientists looking in a place no one thought to look.

Space Shuttle Challenger disaster

Seventy-Three Seconds Over Florida

The night before the launch of STS-51-L, engineers at Morton Thiokol phoned NASA to argue that the O-ring seals in the solid rocket boosters had not been tested at temperatures as low as those forecast for the Florida morning, and that launching in the cold was a bad idea. NASA managers overruled them. At 11:38 on 28 January 1986, Challenger lifted off; 73 seconds later, a burn-through in the right booster's lower O-ring seal allowed hot gas to impinge on the external fuel tank, which ruptured and tore the vehicle apart at an altitude of about 14 kilometres. All seven crew members died, among them Christa McAuliffe, a high school teacher from New Hampshire who had been selected through a civilian-in-space programme and whose students were watching from the ground. The Rogers Commission, convened to investigate, produced a report notable both for its technical clarity and for physicist Richard Feynman's appendix, in which he demonstrated the O-ring's brittleness by dropping a piece of it into a glass of ice water — a piece of theatre that was also a piece of evidence. The shuttle fleet was grounded for thirty-two months. The lesson, argued over ever since, is not that the technology was wrong, but that an organisation had learned to fly with known risks until the risks stopped seeming extraordinary.

Voyager 2 flyby of Uranus

A Planet Still Recovering From a Fall

Voyager 2 had been in flight for nearly nine years when, on 24 January 1986, it swept past Uranus at a closest approach of about 81,500 kilometres — a distance it had crossed at the speed of a rifle bullet, navigated to within a margin of error that NASA described, with characteristic understatement, as good. It was, and remains, the only spacecraft to have visited Uranus. In the hours around closest approach, the probe discovered ten previously unknown moons and confirmed two rings that had been detected by stellar occultation but never seen directly; it returned the first close images of the planet's five known large moons, revealing geologically tortured surfaces where scientists had expected smooth ice; and it measured a magnetic field tilted at 60 degrees to the rotation axis and offset from the planet's centre by a considerable distance, an arrangement that remains awkward to explain. Uranus itself rolls on its side, its rotation axis tilted at 98 degrees to the ecliptic, a posture thought to be the result of a large impact early in the solar system's history. The whole planet is, in a sense, still recovering. Voyager 2 sent back its data across 2.7 billion kilometres, on a radio signal so faint it required the largest antennas on Earth to detect, and then continued toward Neptune. No mission has gone back.

Chernobyl nuclear disaster

A Test No One Should Have Bet a Reactor On

The safety test scheduled for Reactor No. 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant on the night of 25–26 April 1986 was meant to verify that the plant's turbines, coasting down after a power cut, could generate enough electricity to keep the cooling pumps running until backup diesel generators kicked in — a question with an obvious answer, one might think, if you were about to bet a reactor on it. The test had been delayed for hours by a grid demand elsewhere in Ukraine, during which the night-shift crew — some of whom had not been briefed on the plan — took over, and the reactor was operating in a mode its RBMK design made unstable. When operators attempted a controlled power reduction, a combination of operator decisions and a fundamental design flaw caused the reactor to surge to perhaps a hundred times its rated power in a fraction of a second; two explosions blew the reactor's 1,000-tonne lid off and scattered burning graphite and reactor fuel across the station roof. Thirty-one people died in the immediate aftermath of the accident and the emergency response; approximately 350,000 people were evacuated from the surrounding region in the weeks that followed, many of them permanently. The long-term public health toll remains a contested and painful subject. A concrete sarcophagus was built around the reactor that same year; a larger steel containment structure was completed in 2016, and will need to be replaced again in a century. The town of Pripyat, population 50,000, has been uninhabited since April 1986.

Halley's Comet perihelion and spacecraft encounters

Black as Coal, Older Than the Sun

Halley's Comet has been troubling people at regular intervals for at least 2,000 years of recorded observation, and had been doing so in complete privacy — no one had ever seen its nucleus, only the spectacular tail of gas and dust it trails as the sun heats it. The 1986 perihelion, reached on 9 February, changed that. Five spacecraft from Europe, the Soviet Union, and Japan were sent to meet it — the United States, after some discussion, declined to fund a mission, to the lasting embarrassment of nobody in particular within NASA management. ESA's Giotto probe flew closest, passing within 596 kilometres of the nucleus on 14 March 1986 and returning images of a dark, irregular lump of material roughly 15 kilometres long and 7 to 10 kilometres wide, black as coal, with jets of gas and dust erupting from its sun-facing side. Fred Whipple's 'dirty snowball' hypothesis of 1950 was substantially confirmed: the nucleus was indeed ice and dust, porous and ancient, a relic of the solar system's first few million years. The comet will return in 2061; the people planning its reception have not yet been born.