1991

Nobel Prize in Physics

Pierre-Gilles de Gennes

De Gennes noticed that the mathematics describing order in magnets and superconductors could be aimed, with modest adjustment, at the strange half-ordered world of liquid crystals and polymers. The concepts fit surprisingly well, which said something interesting about the unity of physics.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Richard R. Ernst

Ernst's innovations in pulse sequences and Fourier-transform NMR turned what had been a laborious technique into one fast and precise enough to reveal the three-dimensional shape of molecules in solution. Without that work, modern structural biology would be operating largely in the dark.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Erwin Neher · Bert Sakmann

Neher and Sakmann pressed a fire-polished glass pipette against a cell membrane and listened to the electrical whisper of a single protein pore opening and closing. The patch-clamp technique they developed made it possible, for the first time, to watch cellular signalling at the level of individual molecules.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Nadine Gordimer

A South African novelist who spent more than fifty years writing about apartheid and its costs with unflinching precision, Gordimer made fiction do the work that official silence would not. Her books were banned; she stayed.

Nobel Peace Prize

Aung San Suu Kyi

She had been under house arrest since 1989, leading the National League for Democracy by reputation alone. The committee gave the prize to her while she could not come and collect it.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Ronald H. Coase

Coase asked why firms exist at all, given that markets are supposedly efficient — and answered that transaction costs make internal organisation cheaper than constant negotiation. His 1937 and 1960 papers, written with minimal mathematics, became cornerstones of law and economics.

Ig Nobel Prize in Biology

Robert Klark Graham

Graham founded the Repository for Germinal Choice, a sperm bank that accepted donations exclusively from Nobel laureates and Olympic medalists, on the theory that genius and athletic excellence could be reliably bottled and distributed. The inaugural Ig Nobel Prizes were held at MIT in 1991, and the committee felt this was exactly the kind of research to inaugurate them.

Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Jacques Benveniste

Benveniste published in Nature the claim that water retains a memory of antibodies diluted far beyond the point where any molecule remains — a finding that would, if true, have overturned most of chemistry. Independent replication did not confirm it, though Benveniste was not yet finished with water.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine

Alan Kligerman

Kligerman developed Beano, a supplement containing the enzyme alpha-galactosidase that breaks down complex sugars in beans before intestinal bacteria can ferment them into gas. It works. This is the rare Ig Nobel where the research delivered unambiguously on its promise.

Ig Nobel Prize in Peace

Edward Teller

The prize went to the physicist known as the father of the hydrogen bomb for his lifelong efforts to change the meaning of peace as we know it — through advocacy for nuclear weapons and the Strategic Defense Initiative. Teller did not attend the ceremony.

Turing Award

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Robin Milner

Milner made three complete and separate contributions to computer science: the LCF proof assistant, the ML type-inference system, and CCS for reasoning about concurrent processes. Three awards' worth of work, delivered in one career.

World Wide Web goes public

On 6 August, Tim Berners-Lee posted a summary of the World Wide Web project to the alt.hypertext newsgroup, making it available outside CERN for anyone to read and use. The first website, at info.cern.ch, explained how to create web pages and run a browser — a modest beginning for something that would shortly be inescapable.

Carbon nanotubes discovered

Sumio Iijima at NEC found, in the soot left by an arc-discharge experiment, concentric cylinders of graphite only nanometres across. Multi-walled carbon nanotubes were stronger than steel for their weight and conducted electricity in ways that depended on their geometry — a combination that suggested they might be useful for almost everything.

Chicxulub impact crater identified

Alan Hildebrand and colleagues identified a buried, 180-kilometre-wide structure beneath Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula as the scar of the impact that ended the Cretaceous, 66 million years ago. The crater had been there all along in petroleum-exploration data; it simply needed someone to ask the right question of it.

Linux kernel announced

On 25 August, a 21-year-old Finnish student named Linus Torvalds posted to comp.os.minix that he was working on a free operating system for his 386, as a hobby, nothing big. The kernel he released under the GPL in 1992 became the foundation of the dominant open-source operating system.

Galileo spacecraft flies by asteroid Gaspra

On 29 October, the Galileo probe passed within 1,600 kilometres of 951 Gaspra, the first close look any spacecraft had taken at an asteroid. The images showed an irregular, heavily cratered body roughly 18 kilometres long — more pockmarked, and more interesting, than a smooth lump of rock had any business being.

Death of John Bardeen

John Bardeen

Bardeen is the only person to have won the Nobel Prize in Physics twice: once in 1956 for the transistor, and again in 1972 for the BCS theory of superconductivity. He died on 30 January in Boston, aged 82, without apparent need to win a third.