1989

Nobel Prize in Physics

A Single Ion, Held Still for Days

Norman F. Ramsey · Hans G. Dehmelt · Wolfgang Paul

For most of scientific history, measuring time precisely enough to expose the actual behaviour of atoms was simply impossible — the instruments were sloppier than the phenomena. Norman Ramsey changed that in the late 1940s by splitting the interaction between an oscillating field and a beam of atoms into two brief separated pulses, so that the atoms precess in the quiet gap between them and produce a far sharper interference pattern than any single long exposure could achieve. The Ramsey method became the heartbeat of atomic clocks, which now lose perhaps one second in three hundred million years. Hans Dehmelt and Wolfgang Paul, meanwhile, built the complementary tool: electromagnetic and radio-frequency traps — Paul's quadrupole, Dehmelt's Penning — that could hold a single charged particle suspended in space for days, long enough to measure its properties with an intimacy that had previously been the stuff of thought experiments. Dehmelt photographed a single barium ion with the naked eye; he called it 'Astrid.' The practical consequences are not trivial: GPS, which runs on relativistic corrections to atomic clocks, fails by miles without the precision these three men made routine.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

RNA Turns Out to Be an Enzyme Too

Sidney Altman · Thomas R. Cech

The central dogma of molecular biology, as Francis Crick articulated it in 1958, divided the molecular labour cleanly: DNA stores information, RNA carries it, and proteins do the work — including all the catalysis. The protein-as-exclusive-catalyst part seemed airtight. Then, in 1982, Thomas Cech was studying how an intron in the ribosomal RNA of Tetrahymena thermophila — a single-celled creature found in ponds — spliced itself out of the precursor RNA, and found it did so without any protein present at all. The RNA was the enzyme. Sidney Altman, working independently at Yale, showed that the catalytic heart of ribonuclease P, a bacterial enzyme that trims transfer RNAs, was its RNA component, not its protein scaffold. Both men, separately and somewhat reluctantly, had broken the same dogma. The RNA world hypothesis — the idea that RNA was both the original information carrier and the original catalyst in prebiotic chemistry, before DNA and proteins divided those roles — suddenly had its first real experimental support. Every origin-of-life discussion since has had to pass through their findings.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Cancer's Genes Were Already Ours

J. Michael Bishop · Harold E. Varmus

When Peyton Rous showed in 1911 that a filterable virus could cause tumours in chickens, he inadvertently launched a decades-long hunt for the viral genes responsible — oncogenes, as they came to be called. The implicit assumption was that these were foreign invaders, genes that retroviruses had evolved to disrupt their hosts. J. Michael Bishop and Harold Varmus, working together at the University of California San Francisco in the 1970s, traced the oncogene of the Rous sarcoma virus — src — to its origin and found it not in the virus's own lineage but in normal vertebrate cells, where it had presumably been sitting since long before viruses learned to borrow it. Every healthy vertebrate carries proto-oncogenes: genes whose ordinary job is to regulate cell growth, and which become dangerous only when mutated or overexpressed. Cancer, in the view that their work made inescapable, is not an alien siege but a civil war — the cell's own machinery turned against its host. This reframing quietly reorganised everything from how oncologists classify tumours to how pharmaceutical companies design targeted therapies.

Nobel Prize in Literature

A Cold Voice for a Bricked-Up Country

Camilo José Cela

Spain in 1939 had just finished three years of civil war and was settling into four decades of Franco, and its literature had to decide what to do with that. Camilo José Cela, who had fought on the Nationalist side and somehow survived to write about it with equal-opportunity bleakness, published La familia de Pascual Duarte in 1942 — a novel narrated by a condemned man with a talent for violence and an eerily flat prose voice that made the brutality worse, not better, for being reported without apparent feeling. The mode became known as tremendismo and it was the perfect register for a country that could not openly mourn what it had done to itself. La colmena, published in Buenos Aires in 1951 because it was banned at home, stretched that cold patience across hundreds of characters moving through Madrid in three days of the lean years after the war, the city itself functioning as the protagonist. Cela remained a difficult figure — collaborator, censor, survivor — but as a record of what it felt like to live inside a national catastrophe with the exits bricked up, his best work has not aged.

Nobel Peace Prize

Twenty-Three and Walking Over the Himalayas

The 14th Dalai Lama (Tenzin Gyatso)

Tenzin Gyatso was two years old when he was identified, by the traditional tests, as the reincarnation of his predecessor; he was fifteen when the People's Republic of China moved into Tibet; and he was twenty-three when, following the failed 1959 uprising and a Chinese crackdown whose casualties have been disputed ever since, he slipped over the Himalayas in disguise and arrived in India, never to return home. He established a government-in-exile at Dharamsala, navigated the hopeless geometry of Tibetan politics, and developed a position — the Middle Way, as it came to be called — that asked for genuine autonomy rather than full independence, on the grounds that this was the most likely to achieve anything. Beijing was not convinced. A significant portion of the Tibetan diaspora was not convinced either. The Norwegian Nobel Committee was, and awarded him the Peace Prize in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall came down and optimism about peaceful transitions of power was briefly fashionable. His insistence on nonviolence in circumstances where it had produced very little for a very long time is either admirable consistency or maddening passivity, depending on whom you ask — which is itself part of what makes the legacy worth arguing about.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Economics Learns to Admit Its Own Noise

Trygve Haavelmo

Economics in the early twentieth century had a statistics problem: its practitioners would fit curves to data, observe correlations, and report conclusions — without troubling themselves too much about what it meant to claim that one variable caused another, or whether the equations they were estimating bore any principled relationship to the probability structure of the world generating the data. Trygve Haavelmo, a Norwegian economist working during the Second World War in the United States while his country was occupied, wrote a monograph in 1944 — his doctoral thesis, published as a supplement to Econometrica — arguing that economic relationships must be treated as stochastic from the start, that observed data are a single draw from a probability distribution, and that hypothesis testing in economics therefore required a fully specified statistical model. This seems obvious now. At the time it was a substantial intellectual imposition on a field that liked its determinism. The discipline of econometrics, with its instrumentation strategies and structural identification, grew directly from the framework Haavelmo laid down, and virtually every empirical paper in economics published since the 1950s has operated within the methodological space he cleared.

ACM A.M. Turing Award

One Arithmetic for Every Machine

Turing Award

William Kahan

In the decades before 1985, floating-point arithmetic on computers was a kind of local dialect: each manufacturer implemented it differently, rounding and overflow behaviours varied by machine, and the same calculation performed on a Cray and a DEC VAX might produce results that disagreed in ways subtle enough to be invisible and serious enough to matter. For numerical analysts this was less an inconvenience than an epistemological problem — you could not know whether a discrepancy between two computations reflected the physics or the hardware. William Kahan, a Canadian mathematician at Berkeley who had been thinking about numerical stability since the 1960s, was the principal architect of IEEE Standard 754, adopted in 1985, which specified floating-point formats, rounding modes, and the handling of infinities, not-a-numbers, and signed zeros with an exactness that left manufacturers no room for improvisation. The standard did not make floating-point arithmetic easy — it remains rich with traps for the unwary — but it made it the same everywhere. The Turing Award in 1989 recognised what was, quietly, one of the most consequential standardisation efforts in the history of computing.

Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)

Mapping How a Hormone Gets Inside

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Michael J. Berridge · Alfred G. Gilman · Edwin G. Krebs · Yasutomi Nishizuka

Hormones arrive at a cell's surface and need to change what the cell does on the inside — but most of them cannot cross the membrane. The cell therefore needs a translation system, a way of converting 'hormone present outside' into 'action taken inside,' using molecules that can. By the 1980s this problem had attracted enough talent to become a field of its own, and the 1989 Lasker went to four scientists who had mapped its major relay stations. Alfred Gilman and his collaborators worked out how G-proteins couple receptors to their downstream targets; Edwin Krebs had already shared in the discovery of protein phosphorylation as a regulatory switch; Yasutomi Nishizuka characterised protein kinase C and showed how the lipid diacylglycerol activates it; and Michael Berridge, working in Cambridge, identified inositol trisphosphate — IP3 — as the messenger that mobilises calcium from inside the cell, linking the outer signal to the inner stores that govern everything from muscle contraction to secretion. The language of cellular signalling — the idiom in which half of modern pharmacology is written — is largely the language these four men helped decode.

Cold fusion claim by Pons and Fleischmann

Fusion in a Jar, Announced Too Soon

On 23 March 1989 Martin Fleischmann, one of the most respected electrochemists of his generation, and his University of Utah colleague Stanley Pons stood before a press conference — convened ahead of peer review, ahead of independent replication, and with the full encouragement of a university that had already filed patents — and announced they had achieved nuclear fusion at room temperature in a palladium electrode immersed in heavy water. The claim was almost exactly what the world had always wanted: limitless clean energy from a tabletop apparatus, no plasma, no magnetic confinement, no forty-year wait. Laboratories on three continents attempted to reproduce the excess heat they had reported. Most found nothing. A few reported partial successes that dissolved under scrutiny. By autumn the consensus had settled, the patents were worthless, and Fleischmann and Pons had relocated to a French laboratory funded by Toyota, where they continued their experiments quietly for years, certain they were right. The episode is not quite a fraud — both men appear to have believed themselves — but it is a detailed case study in what happens when urgency, institutional pride, and wish-fulfilment combine to bypass the ordinary patience that science requires.

Voyager 2 flyby of Neptune

Geysers on the Coldest Moon We'd Found

Voyager 2 was launched in August 1977 on a trajectory calculated to exploit a rare alignment of the outer planets that occurs roughly every 175 years — a gravitational slingshot from Jupiter to Saturn to Uranus to Neptune, each giant lending the spacecraft a little of its own orbital energy. Twelve years and nearly seven billion kilometres later, on 25 August 1989, it passed within 4,800 kilometres of Neptune's cloud tops: the closest approach of the entire grand tour. It discovered six new moons, rings no one had quite believed in, and a storm system — the Great Dark Spot — as wide as the Earth, which had apparently dissipated by the time Hubble looked for it in 1994, Neptune being unconcerned with human schedules. More striking still was Triton, Neptune's large moon, which at around -235 degrees Celsius was the coldest measured surface in the solar system, and yet was actively venting nitrogen geysers from its frozen southern polar cap, streaking dark material kilometres downwind. Voyager 2 has since left the heliosphere and is transmitting from interstellar space. No mission has revisited the ice giants, and none is currently scheduled to do so this century.

Tim Berners-Lee proposes the World Wide Web at CERN

Vague but Exciting, a Supervisor Wrote

CERN in the 1980s employed thousands of scientists who came and went on rotating contracts, and one of its persistent headaches was institutional memory: documents, software, systems manuals, and the knowledge of how things worked kept evaporating with the people who knew them. Tim Berners-Lee, a British software engineer on contract there, sat with this problem and proposed in March 1989 a system of linked documents stored on networked computers — each document containing references to others, navigable by clicking — that required no central repository and no single point of authority. His supervisor Mike Sendall wrote 'vague but exciting' on the cover page and told him to proceed. By the end of 1990, Berners-Lee had written the first web browser, the first web server, and the first web page, all running on a NeXT workstation in his office. He called the system the World Wide Web, did not patent it, and asked CERN to release it into the public domain, which it did in 1993. The problem he was solving was information management at one physics laboratory. The thing he built was something else entirely.

Magellan spacecraft launched toward Venus

A Planet Repaved Within Its Own Recent Past

Venus had been mapped from Earth-based radar and by the Soviet Venera orbiters, but resolution was coarse and coverage uneven — a frustrating state of affairs for Earth's nearest planetary neighbour. On 4 May 1989, NASA launched Magellan from the payload bay of Space Shuttle Atlantis, making it the first interplanetary spacecraft to be carried to orbit by the shuttle before being released and boosted toward Venus by an upper stage. It reached Venus in August 1990 and spent the following four years sweeping synthetic-aperture radar across the surface through clouds that block every optical telescope, ultimately mapping more than 98 percent of the planet at resolutions between 100 and 300 metres. What the maps revealed was a Venus recently, in geological terms, resurfaced: volcanic plains, enormous shield volcanoes, peculiar circular features called coronae formed by rising plumes of hot mantle, and a near-total absence of the ancient impact craters that crowd the surfaces of Mars and the Moon. The planet appears to have been more or less entirely repaved by volcanic activity within the last few hundred million years — a reminder that 'Earth-like' can mean more than one thing.

COBE satellite launched to map the cosmic microwave background

The Most Perfect Blackbody Ever Measured

The cosmic microwave background — the afterglow radiation of the early universe, predicted by Big Bang cosmology and first detected accidentally by Penzias and Wilson in 1965 — had been measured, but only roughly. What theorists needed to know was whether it was truly a perfect blackbody spectrum, and whether it had any variation across the sky: tiny temperature differences that would be the fossil imprints of the density fluctuations from which galaxies eventually condensed. NASA launched the Cosmic Background Explorer on 18 November 1989 to answer both questions with the precision that balloon-borne and ground-based instruments couldn't manage. Its FIRAS instrument returned a blackbody spectrum so smooth and exact that one team member said it was 'the most perfect blackbody spectrum ever measured in nature' — a remark that does not quite convey how precisely the data agreed with theory, which was essentially perfectly. The detection of the predicted temperature anisotropies followed in 1992. Two of the mission's principal scientists, John Mather and George Smoot, shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2006 for these results — the longest lag between a discovery and its prize that the committee's patience allowed.

Death of Andrei Sakharov

He Built the Bomb, Then Argued Against It

Andrei Sakharov

Andrei Sakharov spent the first half of his career building the most destructive weapons his country had ever possessed — he was a principal designer of the Soviet thermonuclear bomb and was awarded three Hero of Socialist Labour medals for it — and the second half trying to persuade everyone, including his own government, to step back from the consequences. His 1968 essay 'Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom' was circulated in samizdat and published in the Western press, calling for nuclear disarmament and democratic reform; the KGB removed his security clearances the following year. Internal exile to Gorky, a city closed to foreigners, followed the 1980 invasion of Afghanistan. Mikhail Gorbachev permitted him to return to Moscow in 1986. He was elected to the Congress of People's Deputies in 1989 and was still arguing on its floor for a multi-party system and constitutional limits on executive power on 14 December, the day before he died of heart failure at his desk, aged 68. He had once helped give his country the bomb. He spent the rest of his life being largely unsuccessful at persuading it to reconsider its implications. The gap between those two facts is where his importance lives.