1991

Nobel Prize in Physics

Liquids and Crystals Share a Grammar

Pierre-Gilles de Gennes

For most of the twentieth century, condensed-matter physics had two proud separate territories: the perfectly ordered world of crystals and superconductors on one side, and the featureless disorder of liquids on the other. De Gennes, working in Paris from the 1960s onward, noticed that the mathematical machinery built to describe order in magnets — how spins align, how order propagates, where it breaks down — could be transplanted, with only modest surgery, into the strange middle kingdom of liquid crystals and long-chain polymers, materials that are neither fish nor fowl. The equations, once aimed at these new targets, continued to work alarmingly well. What struck him was not that the technique transferred, but what the transfer implied: that very different physical systems, at the right level of abstraction, were obeying the same underlying rules. This family of insights, which de Gennes called the 'soft matter' programme, meant that a liquid crystal display and a polymer melt were, at some depth, cousins of a ferromagnet. The practical debts run everywhere — from the flat screen you are reading this on to the rational design of plastics — and the intellectual debt is subtler but equally real: the suspicion, now well founded, that nature has far fewer truly distinct tricks than it appears to.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Pulses, Not Sweeps, Read the Molecule

Richard R. Ernst

Nuclear magnetic resonance had been understood in principle since the 1940s, when Felix Bloch and Edward Purcell showed that atomic nuclei in a magnetic field would absorb radio waves at characteristic frequencies — a party trick that could, in theory, fingerprint molecules. In practice, the early instruments were brutally slow: they swept through frequencies one at a time, like tuning a radio across a static-filled spectrum, and complex molecules could take many hours to characterise. Ernst, working at ETH Zürich through the 1960s and into the 1970s, replaced this laborious sweep with short pulses that excited all frequencies simultaneously, then applied Fourier-transform mathematics to decode the response — compressing hours of work into minutes and sharpening the signal along the way. He later extended the technique into two-dimensional NMR, which allowed the three-dimensional structure of proteins and other large molecules to be read out in solution, without the need for a crystal. The consequences were not modest. Modern drug discovery, structural biology, and metabolomics all depend on the machine that Ernst's mathematics built; every protein structure solved in solution, every metabolite mapped in a blood sample, passes through his equations on the way to the answer.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

A Glass Pipette Hears One Channel Open

Erwin Neher · Bert Sakmann

Biologists had long suspected that ions crossing cell membranes did so through specific protein channels, but the evidence was statistical — averages over populations of millions of channels, the individual signal buried in noise. Neher and Sakmann, working at the Max Planck Institute in Göttingen in the 1970s, solved this by pressing a fire-polished glass pipette tip, with an opening barely a micrometre across, gently against a cell membrane until a seal of gigaohm resistance formed between glass and lipid. In that enforced quiet, the electrical whisper of a single ion channel opening — a current of a few picoamperes lasting a millisecond — became audible. The patch-clamp technique they developed was not just a clever measurement; it was a new sensory organ for the nervous system. For the first time, the actual gating behaviour of individual proteins could be observed, timed, and manipulated. The technique proved applicable to virtually every excitable cell in biology, and the physiology of muscle, heart, nerve, and pancreas has been substantially rewritten in its light. Without patch-clamp, pharmacology's ambition to design drugs targeting specific channel subtypes would be guesswork; with it, it is merely difficult.

Nobel Prize in Literature

She Stayed and Kept Writing the Banned Books

Nadine Gordimer

Gordimer was born in the East Rand mining town of Springs in 1923, the daughter of a Jewish watchmaker, and she began publishing short fiction in her teens with a clarity of eye that South African literary culture had not quite been ready for. What followed was more than fifty years of novels and stories that anatomised the social machinery of apartheid — not through polemic, but through the grain of ordinary lives, the accommodations and self-deceptions and occasional small resistances that a system of enforced injustice requires of almost everyone who lives under it. Several of her books were banned by the South African government; she stayed in the country and continued to write them. The committee in Stockholm, awarding her the prize in 1991 — two years before apartheid's formal end — cited an 'epic writing' that had 'been of very great benefit to humanity.' She outlived apartheid by more than two decades, dying in 2014, and the work endures not as a historical document but as a study in what it costs a person — any person, in any arranged order — to look honestly at what surrounds them.

Nobel Peace Prize

Confined at Home, Still Winning the Vote

Aung San Suu Kyi

Suu Kyi had gone to Rangoon in 1988 to care for her ailing mother and found herself, almost without intending it, at the centre of a mass uprising against military rule. Her father was Aung San, the architect of Burmese independence, who was assassinated before she was three; the authority his name carried among the Burmese people was not something she had sought, but she used it with deliberate care. The National League for Democracy, which she led, won a landslide election in 1990 that the military simply refused to recognise. She had already been placed under house arrest in 1989 — the generals apparently calculating that removing her from public life would dissolve the movement around her, which was, as calculations go, poorly calibrated. The Nobel Committee awarded her the prize in 1991 while she remained confined to her Rangoon home; her husband, Michael Aris, accepted on her behalf, and her sons read the lecture she had written. She was released in 1995 and awarded it again, in a sense, by the simple fact of still being there.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Why Firms Exist Instead of Markets

Ronald H. Coase

In 1937, a young economist named Ronald Coase posed what turned out to be an embarrassingly simple question: if markets are so efficient at allocating resources, why do firms exist at all? Why don't workers and suppliers simply transact with each other on the open market for every task, rather than submitting to the hierarchy of an organisation? The answer he offered — that market transactions carry costs: the costs of finding information, negotiating contracts, and enforcing terms — explained not only why firms exist but, roughly, how large they should be. In 1960 he published a second paper, equally plain in its prose and equally profound in its reach, arguing that the assignment of legal rights matters less than economists had assumed, because parties will bargain to an efficient outcome regardless — provided transaction costs are low enough. Both papers were written with almost no mathematics, which may explain why his colleagues were slow to grasp that they were reading something that would eventually reorganise large portions of law, economics, and management theory. The prize, arriving in 1991 when Coase was eighty, was overdue by any reasonable measure, and he accepted it with the quiet satisfaction of a man who had always known he was right.

Ig Nobel Prize in Biology

A Genius Sperm Bank, Statistically Ordinary

Robert Klark Graham

Graham, a California optometrist who had made a fortune manufacturing shatterproof spectacle lenses, turned in his later years to a project of more ambitious scope: the selective breeding of the human intellect. In 1980 he opened the Repository for Germinal Choice, a sperm bank that solicited donations exclusively from Nobel laureates and, when laureates proved difficult to recruit, from Olympic medalists — operating on the confident assumption that exceptional ability is straightforwardly heritable and reliably locatable in a test tube. The inaugural Ig Nobel Prizes were held at MIT in 1991, and the committee felt, with some justice, that this was precisely the spirit they had been assembled to honour. Graham's programme produced approximately 200 children before his death in 1997; their attainments have proved, at the level of statistical significance, indistinguishable from those of the general population, which says something interesting about either the heritability of genius, the nature of genius itself, or the difficulty of running controlled experiments when you insist on using Nobel laureates.

Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Water Remembers Nothing

Jacques Benveniste

In 1988, Jacques Benveniste — a distinguished French immunologist — published a paper in Nature claiming that a solution of antibodies, diluted so many times that not a single molecule of the original substance could statistically remain, still triggered an immune response, as though the water remembered what had once been dissolved in it. The editors, who were clearly uneasy, appended a note announcing that the paper would be subjected to independent investigation, then published it anyway, a decision they may have come to regret. A team that included a professional magician flew to Paris and attempted to replicate the experiments under blinded conditions; they could not. Benveniste maintained his position with vigour, and indeed spent the remainder of his career attempting to transmit the 'memory of water' over telephone lines and the internet, which at least demonstrated a willingness to keep up with new technology. The Ig Nobel committee, recognising a man who had introduced the concept of homeopathy to the pages of one of the world's most prestigious journals, felt he had earned an award that was in every sense appropriate.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine

A Truce With Beans

Alan Kligerman

The problem Kligerman addressed is ancient, widespread, and almost universally regarded as beneath serious scientific attention: the fermentation of indigestible complex sugars — raffinose, stachyose, verbascose — by intestinal bacteria in the aftermath of a bean-heavy meal, producing hydrogen and carbon dioxide in quantities that the human body feels compelled to evacuate with some immediacy. Kligerman's contribution was Beano, a supplement containing the enzyme alpha-galactosidase, which breaks these sugars down in the gut before the bacteria can reach them, rendering the whole fermentative enterprise moot. It works. This is, in the history of the Ig Nobel Prize, something of an outlier: a legitimately functional product addressing a genuinely common complaint, honoured by a committee that was briefly at a loss for irony and settled instead for cheerful acknowledgement. The prize was accepted, which is more than can be said for most of the evening's honourees, and Beano remains available in pharmacies to this day, doing quietly what it was designed to do.

Ig Nobel Prize in Peace

Redefining Peace, One Bomb at a Time

Edward Teller

Edward Teller arrived in the United States from Hungary in the 1930s and spent the early part of his career being an irritant to Robert Oppenheimer, which requires a certain baseline of self-assurance. He went on to become the primary scientific architect of the hydrogen bomb, contributed to the loyalty-hearing testimony that stripped Oppenheimer of his security clearance, and in the 1980s emerged as the most energetic advocate for the Strategic Defense Initiative — a scheme to place missile-intercepting weapons in orbit that critics described as scientifically unsound and that Teller described as the future of American safety. The Ig Nobel Committee awarded him the Peace Prize in 1991 for his lifelong efforts to redefine the concept; the citation was pointed enough that it required no elaboration. Teller did not attend the ceremony, which under the circumstances was probably wise.

Ig Nobel Prize in Economics

The Outer Limits of Financial Innovation

Michael Milken

Michael Milken had spent the 1980s as the presiding genius of the high-yield bond — the 'junk bond,' in the vernacular of people less enamoured of it — building Drexel Burnham Lambert's Beverly Hills operation into a machine that financed leveraged buyouts and reshaped corporate America faster than regulators could follow. In 1989 he was indicted on ninety-eight counts of racketeering and securities fraud; he pleaded guilty to six, paid penalties of some six hundred million dollars, and went to prison. The inaugural Ig Nobel committee, convening at MIT in the autumn of 1991, honoured him as the father of the junk bond and a man who had demonstrated, at considerable public expense, the outer limits of financial innovation. He was, at the time of the award, otherwise engaged. He received a presidential pardon nearly three decades later, which the committee did not feel obliged to reconsider.

Ig Nobel Prize in Education

A Consumer of Time, Occupier of Space

Dan Quayle

Dan Quayle, then Vice President of the United States, was honoured by the first Ig Nobel committee as a 'consumer of time and occupier of space' who had done more than anyone to demonstrate the pressing national need for science education. The citation was, by the standards of the evening, unusually direct. Quayle had by then accumulated a reputation for public remarks that strayed some distance from both grammar and geography, and the committee — never shy about aiming upward — decided that the office of the vice presidency was not so exalted as to lie beyond the reach of a frying-pan-shaped medal. He did not attend. The prize is best understood less as a comment on any single gaffe than as an early statement of the Ig Nobel's founding principle: that eminence and absurdity are not mutually exclusive, and are frequently found sharing a podium.

Ig Nobel Prize in Literature

Ancient Wonders, Attributed to Visitors

Erich von Däniken

Erich von Däniken, a Swiss hotelier with a taste for the prehistoric, had by 1991 sold tens of millions of copies of Chariots of the Gods? and its many successors, all advancing the thesis that the great works of the ancient world — the pyramids, the Nazca lines, the statues of Easter Island — were beyond the capacities of the people who plainly built them, and must therefore be the work of visiting extraterrestrials. The archaeological profession regarded this with a weariness bordering on the theological. The Ig Nobel committee gave him the first prize in literature for what it described as raising public interest in science through his research, a formulation that repays close reading. Von Däniken had, in fairness, got a great many people thinking about archaeology, which is more than most archaeologists manage — even if what they were thinking was not quite what the discipline had in mind.

Ig Nobel Prize in Chance

A Lifetime Spent Surrendering to Chance

John Cage

John Cage had spent his career persuading the world that silence, chance, and the ambient noise of a concert hall were legitimate compositional materials — most famously in 4'33", a work in three movements during which the performer plays nothing at all, leaving the audience to supply the music from its own coughing and shifting. He used the I Ching to determine notes, durations, and dynamics, ceding authorial control to the fall of the coins on the principle that the composer's own taste was itself a kind of tyranny. The first Ig Nobel committee awarded him the prize for Chance in recognition of a lifetime spent surrendering to it. Whether a prize can meaningfully be given for embracing randomness, or whether it ought instead to have been awarded by lottery, is the sort of question Cage would probably have enjoyed and then declined to answer.

Turing Award

Three Careers, Proved in One

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Robin Milner

Most Turing laureates are honoured for one substantial contribution; the committee occasionally stretches to two. Robin Milner presented them with three complete, largely separate bodies of work, each of which would have been a plausible career in itself. The first was LCF, an early proof-assistant system developed at Edinburgh that established the architecture — a small, trusted logical core, with everything else built on top — that subsequent proof assistants have followed ever since. The second was the ML programming language, which introduced type inference: the ability of a compiler to deduce the types of values in a program without requiring the programmer to state them explicitly, a feature that has propagated through decades of successors including Haskell, OCaml, and Rust. The third was CCS, the Calculus of Communicating Systems, a formal theory for reasoning about processes that run concurrently and interact — a problem that becomes more urgent with every additional processor in a machine. Three awards' worth of ideas, delivered in one career, by a man who was also, by most accounts, exceptionally kind.

World Wide Web goes public

Vague but Exciting, It Turned Out

Tim Berners-Lee had written his original proposal for an information management system at CERN in 1989, and his supervisor had annotated it 'vague but exciting' — a response that, in retrospect, errs significantly on the side of understatement. By 1991 the system had a working implementation: a browser, a server, and a markup language, all running on a NeXT workstation in Geneva. On 6 August, Berners-Lee posted a summary of the World Wide Web project to the alt.hypertext newsgroup, making the software and the idea freely available to anyone outside CERN who cared to use them. The first website, at info.cern.ch, explained how to set up a web server and create pages — a document that was, without intending to be, one of the more consequential pieces of technical writing in recent history. What distinguished the web from earlier hypertext systems was its deliberate openness: no central control, no required registration, no permission needed to link to another page. That architectural choice, which looked at the time like simply the most practical option, turned out to be the whole point.

Carbon nanotubes discovered

Cylinders Hiding in Arc-Discharge Soot

Sumio Iijima was examining soot produced by an arc-discharge experiment at the NEC Fundamental Research Laboratory in Tsukuba when, under a high-resolution transmission electron microscope, he found something that had no business being there: concentric cylinders of graphite, seamlessly closed at both ends, ranging from a few to several tens of nanometres in diameter. The structure he had found — multi-walled carbon nanotubes — was at one level simply a natural consequence of how carbon atoms arrange themselves under extreme conditions, but the properties that followed from the geometry were startling: tensile strength exceeding that of steel at a fraction of the weight, and electrical conductivity that could be tuned between metallic and semiconducting by adjusting the angle at which the graphite sheet was rolled. These were not obviously useful facts in 1991, and the road from Iijima's electron micrographs to commercial applications has proved longer and harder than early enthusiasm anticipated. But the structural picture he provided opened a domain of nanotube-based materials research that has steadily, if stubbornly, been redeeming its early promises.

Chicxulub impact crater identified

The Scar Was in the Oil Survey Data

The hypothesis that a large asteroid struck the Earth 66 million years ago and ended the Cretaceous had been proposed by Luis and Walter Alvarez in 1980, and its evidence — a thin global layer of iridium at the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary — was persuasive but incomplete. The impact had to have left a crater, and no crater of the right size and age had been found. Alan Hildebrand, a graduate student at the University of Arizona, and his colleagues recognised in 1991 that the evidence had been sitting in petroleum-exploration data for decades: a buried, ring-shaped anomaly beneath the Yucatán Peninsula, roughly 180 kilometres in diameter, with a pattern of gravitational and magnetic readings consistent with a deeply eroded impact structure. The crater had been partly identified by Mexican geologists in the 1970s and given the name Chicxulub, from the nearest village, but its nature and significance had gone unappreciated. Once identified, it closed the major outstanding gap in the impact-extinction theory with satisfying finality — the scar, 66 million years old and impeccably placed, matched the hypothesis so precisely that the debate about what killed the non-avian dinosaurs has, at this level of mechanism, been largely settled.

Linux kernel announced

A Kernel, Posted as a Hobby

On 25 August 1991, Linus Torvalds posted a message to the comp.os.minix newsgroup that may be the most consequentially modest self-introduction in the history of computing: he was, he wrote, making a free operating system for his 386 computer, as a hobby, and it probably would not be portable and was not designed to be professional in the way GNU was. He was twenty-one years old and studying at the University of Helsinki. The kernel he released later that year under the GNU General Public Licence attracted collaborators across the emerging internet who found, in its modesty and openness, an invitation that proprietary Unix vendors had never extended. Within a few years it had become a serious operating system; within a decade it was running a substantial proportion of the world's web servers; today it runs most of the internet's infrastructure, every Android device, and the International Space Station. Torvalds did eventually make it portable. The hobby got a little out of hand.

Galileo spacecraft flies by asteroid Gaspra

An Asteroid, Angular and Grooved

The Galileo spacecraft, launched in 1989 on a long, slingshot-assisted route to Jupiter, passed within 1,600 kilometres of the asteroid 951 Gaspra on 29 October 1991 — the first time any spacecraft had made a close approach to an asteroid. Scientists had reasonable expectations about what asteroids should look like: ancient, undifferentiated rock, worn smooth by eons of micrometeorite sandpaper. What Galileo's cameras returned was more interesting than that. Gaspra, roughly 18 kilometres at its longest, was irregular and angular in profile, marked by scores of impact craters and grooved by what appeared to be surface fractures, its spectrum suggesting a composition more varied than a simple primitive body ought to have. There was also a hint of a magnetic field, unexpected in something so small. The encounter lasted less than thirty minutes, which was long enough to establish that asteroids were considerably more complex objects than the textbooks had quite admitted — and to raise questions about their interiors that would take another three decades and several more missions to begin answering.

Death of John Bardeen

Twice a Laureate, Never a Third Try

John Bardeen

John Bardeen was, by any measure, the most decorated physicist of the twentieth century, which is a competition he would have found slightly embarrassing and therefore never entered. Born in Madison, Wisconsin in 1908, he joined Bell Labs after the war and there, with Walter Brattain and William Shockley, invented the point-contact transistor in December 1947 — a device small enough to rest on your fingertip that could amplify an electrical signal without the fragility and heat of a vacuum tube. That alone would have secured his place in history and did, in 1956, secure his first Nobel Prize. He then went to the University of Illinois, thought quietly and carefully about superconductivity for several years, and in 1957 published the BCS theory with Leon Cooper and John Robert Schrieffer, explaining at last why certain materials lose all electrical resistance below a critical temperature — work that earned him his second Nobel Prize in Physics in 1972. He remains the only person to have won the prize twice in the same category. He died in Boston on 30 January 1991, aged 82, having declined, with characteristic restraint, to pursue a third.