1990

Nobel Prize in Physics

A Reef Beneath the Water

Jerome I. Friedman · Henry W. Kendall · Richard E. Taylor

Through most of the 1960s, the proton was understood as a smooth, fundamental blob of charge — theorists had proposed quarks, but the word 'proposed' was doing rather a lot of work. At SLAC, Stanford's two-mile linear accelerator, Friedman, Kendall, and Taylor fired high-energy electrons at protons and watched where the electrons went, including, crucially, the ones that bounced backward at wide angles, which a smooth object simply would not do. The pattern they saw matched almost exactly what James Bjorken had predicted if protons contained small, hard, point-like scattering centres inside them. The quarks had revealed themselves not by appearing in a detector but by the way they deflected everything else, the way a hidden reef announces itself through the behaviour of the water above it. Quantum chromodynamics — the full theory of the strong force binding quarks together — was built on these experiments. Without that confirmation, the Standard Model of particle physics would have remained a collection of elegant guesses rather than the most precisely tested physical theory in history.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Working Backward From the Molecule

Elias James Corey

Organic synthesis, before Corey, had a heroic quality that made it difficult to teach: you needed Robert Burns Woodward's intuition, a nose for which reaction might work three steps hence, and an enormous tolerance for years of effort that ended in a flask of nothing. Corey, starting in the 1950s and publishing the formal framework in 1965, turned the process around. Instead of asking 'what can I make from what I have,' retrosynthetic analysis asks 'what simpler molecule, if I had it, would I turn into this one' — and then recursively asks the same question until you reach something available on a shelf. The approach sounds deceptively obvious once stated, which is the usual hallmark of a genuinely good idea. Corey then spent decades demonstrating that it worked, completing over a hundred total syntheses of natural products, many of them biologically active compounds that would otherwise have been impossible to make in useful quantities. The pharmaceutical industry runs, in large part, on his framework.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Borrowed Marrow, Lasting Life

Joseph E. Murray · E. Donnall Thomas

In December 1954, Joseph Murray transplanted a kidney from one identical twin into another at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston, and the organ worked — not briefly, but permanently. It worked because identical twins share an immune system's definition of 'self', which meant no rejection, which meant the proof of concept was both complete and, for almost everyone who needed a transplant, useless. E. Donnall Thomas spent the following decades on the harder problem: crossing the immune barrier between unrelated people. Working with bone marrow transplantation for leukaemia patients, he developed the protocols of immunosuppression that allowed a recipient's body to tolerate foreign tissue without simply shutting down from the drugs meant to stop it from fighting back. Between them, Murray and Thomas turned transplantation from a curiosity performed on twins into a routine intervention that has given millions of people functioning organs, new immune systems, and continued lives. There are roughly a quarter of a million organ transplants performed worldwide each year now.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Masks a Culture Wears Alone

Octavio Paz

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City in 1914, grew up in a house whose library contained his grandfather's novels alongside the ruins of a pre-Columbian past that was never quite past, and spent his long life writing with a clarity that made the boundaries between poetry, essay, and criticism seem like bureaucratic inconveniences. Piedra de Sol, a long poem structured on the Aztec calendar cycle, placed him among the major voices of the Spanish-speaking world; El laberinto de la soledad, published in 1950, examined Mexican identity as a sequence of masks — the colonial wound, the revolutionary myth, the fiesta as a rupture in ordinary time — with the cool precision of an anthropologist who happened to be the subject. He served as Mexico's ambassador to India, resigned in protest after the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre, and went on writing. The Nobel committee in 1990 recognised all of it: the verse, the prose, the decades of sustained attention to what a culture says about itself when it thinks no one is listening.

Nobel Peace Prize

The Tanks That Never Came

Mikhail Gorbachev

Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985 intending to save Soviet socialism by making it more honest and more efficient — glasnost, openness; perestroika, restructuring — and found that the two goals were in approximately the same relationship as matches and dry timber. By 1989 Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Bulgaria, and Romania had moved through democratic transitions at a speed that left Western intelligence agencies scrambling to update their assessments weekly; Gorbachev's signal contribution was declining to send in the tanks, which his predecessors had not declined to do in 1956 or 1968. The Nobel committee awarded the prize in October 1990, by which point the Soviet Union itself had perhaps two years left, though no one was publicly saying so. There is a mild irony in giving a peace prize to a man whose restraint was producing exactly the dissolution he had hoped to prevent. The Cold War ended not with a confrontation but with a permission not granted: the permission to suppress. That it was withheld remains the most consequential decision of the second half of the twentieth century.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Diversify, and the Risk Shrinks

Harry M. Markowitz · Merton H. Miller · William F. Sharpe

Harry Markowitz was a twenty-five-year-old doctoral student at Chicago in 1952 when he published a fourteen-page paper demonstrating that the risk of a portfolio is not simply the average of its parts — that if you combine assets whose prices do not move in lockstep, the combined risk falls below the weighted average, sometimes considerably below. This was the mathematics of diversification, and it was new. William Sharpe extended the framework into the Capital Asset Pricing Model in the 1960s, deriving the relationship between an asset's expected return and its exposure to market-wide risk — the beta that every finance student now memorises in the second week. Merton Miller, with Franco Modigliani, contributed theorems about capital structure that reframed corporate finance as a set of problems with solvable mathematical forms. Between them they built the conceptual architecture on which quantitative finance, index funds, options pricing, and the entire modern investment industry rest. One may find the edifice occasionally alarming in practice without doubting that it is, as intellectual infrastructure goes, rather solidly built.

ACM A.M. Turing Award

One Machine, Many Users, No Waiting

Turing Award

Fernando J. Corbató

Before time-sharing, using a computer meant booking it — submitting a deck of punch cards, waiting hours or sometimes overnight for your job to run, and receiving your output with no opportunity to interact, correct, or adjust. Fernando Corbató, at MIT in the early 1960s, led the team that built CTSS, the Compatible Time-Sharing System, which allowed multiple users to share a single machine simultaneously, each experiencing it as if they had it to themselves. The illusion was achieved by switching between users rapidly enough that no one noticed the gaps, a trick of scheduling that turned one expensive machine into many affordable ones. Corbató then led Multics, a more ambitious project that aimed at a fully general time-sharing operating system, which proved sufficiently influential that Bell Labs engineers who left the project took its ideas with them and built Unix instead — which became Linux, macOS, Android, and most of the operating systems currently running the world. Corbató got the Turing Award in 1990, for work done thirty years earlier, which is roughly how long it takes for an infrastructure idea to become so universal that everyone has forgotten it was ever an idea at all.

Fields Medal 1990

Four Strangers, One Kyoto Stage

Fields Medal

Vladimir Drinfeld · Vaughan F. R. Jones · Shigefumi Mori · Edward Witten

The 1990 International Congress in Kyoto assembled one of the more eclectic sets of medallists in the award's history. Vladimir Drinfeld, working in Kharkov under considerable difficulty, had constructed quantum groups — deformations of symmetry structures that turned out to connect representation theory, number theory, and quantum mechanics in ways that were not supposed to be connected. Vaughan Jones had discovered a new polynomial invariant for knots in 1984 while studying a completely different problem in operator algebras, and the invariant promptly turned up in statistical mechanics, where no one had invited it. Shigefumi Mori received the medal for the minimal model program, which brought rigorous classification to three-dimensional algebraic varieties after two-dimensional surfaces had been classified a century earlier, doing it by proving the existence of extremal rays in ways that required new tools. And then there was Edward Witten — a physicist, and the first physicist to win the Fields Medal — who had used ideas from quantum field theory and string theory to prove results in topology that the mathematicians had not managed, which some mathematicians found inspiring and others found faintly unsettling. The committee, presumably, had mixed feelings and gave him the medal anyway.

Hubble Space Telescope launched

A Blurry Eye Above the Clouds

The idea was elegant and decades old: put a telescope above the atmosphere and the atmosphere can no longer smear your images with its turbulence, absorb your ultraviolet, or do any of the other things that make ground-based astronomy an exercise in patience. On 24 April 1990 the Space Shuttle Discovery carried Hubble into low Earth orbit, and the astronomical community waited. The first images arrived blurry. The 2.4-metre primary mirror had been polished to extraordinary precision — to a prescription that was, unfortunately, slightly wrong, a spherical aberration of 2.2 micrometres introduced by a flaw in the testing equipment used during fabrication. The resulting embarrassment was comprehensive, the congressional hearings pointed, and the jokes about NASA's $1.5 billion myopic telescope had a long run. Astronauts installed corrective optics in December 1993, and what followed — the Hubble Deep Field, the accelerating expansion of the universe, the atmospheres of exoplanets, the age of the cosmos pinned to within a few percent — more than redeemed it. The mirror's flaw was correctable; the decades of science that followed were not something you could have planned.

Human Genome Project formally launched

Three Billion Letters, Committed To

On 1 October 1990 the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy signed the joint memorandum that formally launched the Human Genome Project: a fifteen-year, $3 billion international collaboration to read, in order, all three billion base pairs of the human genome. Whether it was technically possible remained genuinely uncertain; the sequencing methods of 1990 were slow and expensive enough that extrapolating to three billion letters was an act of faith in technologies not yet invented. Whether it would be useful was argued more vigorously still — critics pointed out that the genome alone would tell you nothing about how genes were expressed, regulated, or translated into the biology of an actual human being. Both objections were reasonable and both were overtaken by events. The project finished in April 2003, two years ahead of schedule, and it did not explain everything; it built the map that made it possible to begin asking the questions that the next fifty years of biology will spend answering.

Magellan spacecraft begins radar mapping of Venus

Portrait of a Planet Under Its Veil

Venus presents a problem to the curious: its surface has never been seen, hidden beneath a permanent cloud deck of sulphuric acid some sixty kilometres thick and thoroughly opaque to visible light. Magellan, launched in 1989 and arriving at Venus on 10 August 1990, solved this by not looking in visible light at all. Its synthetic-aperture radar sent pulses through the clouds, measured the return, and reconstructed the surface topography with a resolution of seventy-five to one hundred metres — good enough to see features the size of a small city. Over four years in orbit it mapped more than 98 percent of the surface and returned a portrait of extraordinary geological violence: volcanic plains covering most of the planet, continent-sized highland regions, lava channels thousands of kilometres long that would dwarf anything on Earth, and a near-total absence of the impact craters that should have accumulated over billions of years, suggesting the entire surface was resurfaced by volcanic activity perhaps 500 million years ago and has been geologically quiet — by Venusian standards — since. The planet next door turned out to be stranger than most models had predicted.