1986

Nobel Prize in Physics

Ernst Ruska · Gerd Binnig · Heinrich Rohrer

Ruska built the first electron microscope in 1933, demonstrating that electrons — with their shorter wavelength — could resolve detail far beyond what light allows; he received his Nobel fifty-three years later. Binnig and Rohrer's scanning tunnelling microscope was more recent and stranger: a fine metal tip held so close to a surface that electrons quantum-tunnel across the gap, and the resulting current maps individual atoms.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

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

By crossing beams of molecules in a vacuum and measuring the angles and energies at which products scattered, Herschbach and Lee mapped how energy distributes itself after individual reactive collisions — reaction dynamics observed one molecule at a time. Polanyi used infrared chemiluminescence to reach similar conclusions, and the field they built together turned chemical reactions from ensemble statistics into something that could be watched.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Stanley Cohen · Rita Levi-Montalcini

Levi-Montalcini identified nerve growth factor in the 1950s — a protein secreted by a tissue that draws growing nerve fibres toward it — working in part in a small laboratory she had set up in her bedroom in wartime Italy. Cohen later isolated epidermal growth factor and described how it binds a receptor to trigger cell division, establishing that the body navigates development through a molecular postal service of growth signals.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Wole Soyinka

The Nigerian playwright, poet, and novelist became the first African writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, recognised for drama that fused Yoruba mythology and theatrical tradition with a fierce engagement with contemporary politics. He had been imprisoned by the Nigerian government for two years for a broadcast appealing for a ceasefire in the Biafra war.

Nobel Peace Prize

Elie Wiesel

Wiesel survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald, lost most of his family, and then spent his life arguing that indifference to human suffering is not neutrality but its own form of complicity. Night, his memoir of the camps, was initially rejected by publishers; by 1986 it had become one of the most widely read books of the century.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

James M. Buchanan Jr.

Buchanan applied the assumption of self-interest — standard equipment in economics — to politicians and bureaucrats rather than just consumers and firms, and found that government agencies behave much as private ones do: they pursue their own interests, which do not always align with the public's. The observation was not universally welcomed.

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Turing Award

John Hopcroft · Robert Tarjan

Hopcroft and Tarjan worked out algorithms for graph problems that were faster by an order of magnitude than anything previously known — depth-first search done properly, efficient planarity testing, the union-find data structure. The results were theoretical; the applications, in compilers, network routing, and database systems, were immediate and lasting.

High-temperature superconductivity discovered in ceramic materials

J. Georg Bednorz and K. Alex Müller at IBM Zurich published in April 1986 their discovery of superconductivity at 35 K in a barium-lanthanum-copper-oxide ceramic — far above any previous record, and in a class of material no one had thought to look. The paper triggered a global scramble to push the transition temperature higher, a scramble that continues today. They received the Nobel the following year.

Space Shuttle Challenger disaster

On 28 January 1986, 73 seconds after launch, Challenger broke apart when an O-ring seal in a solid rocket booster failed in overnight temperatures well below its tested range. All seven crew members were killed, among them Christa McAuliffe, a schoolteacher who had been selected to be the first civilian in space. The shuttle fleet was grounded for nearly three years while the investigation ran its course.

Voyager 2 flyby of Uranus

On 24 January 1986 Voyager 2 swept past Uranus at 81,500 kilometres, becoming the only spacecraft to visit the planet. It discovered ten new moons, confirmed two new rings, and measured the planet's magnetic field tilted at 60 degrees from its rotation axis — an arrangement that still lacks a fully satisfying explanation.

Chernobyl nuclear disaster

On 26 April 1986 a safety test at Reactor No. 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Soviet Ukraine went wrong in a cascade of operator decisions and design flaws, causing a power surge and explosion that blew the reactor's roof off and scattered radioactive material across Europe. Thirty workers and emergency responders died of acute radiation in the immediate aftermath; approximately 350,000 people were evacuated from the surrounding region. The long-term effects remain contested, and the scale of the public health consequences remains a matter of ongoing study.

Halley's Comet perihelion and spacecraft encounters

Halley's Comet reached perihelion on 9 February 1986 and was met by five spacecraft — European, Soviet, and Japanese — none of which were American, Congress having declined to fund a mission. ESA's Giotto flew within 596 kilometres of the nucleus on 14 March and returned the first close-up images of a comet's dark, irregular core, confirming it was a loose body of ice and dust roughly the size of a small mountain.