1992

Nobel Prize in Physics

A Railway Timetable for Particles

Georges Charpak

For most of particle physics's early history, tracking a charged particle meant squinting at a bubble chamber photograph and tracing its path by hand — painstaking, slow, and utterly inadequate to the rates that colliders were beginning to achieve. In 1968, Georges Charpak, working at CERN, introduced the multiwire proportional chamber: a grid of fine wires held at high voltage inside a gas-filled vessel, each wire independently sensing the tiny ionisation trail left by a passing particle. Where bubble chambers might record a few events a second, Charpak's device could handle hundreds of thousands. The improvement was not incremental; it was the difference between counting wagons by hand and installing a railway timetable. Every major detector built after him — at LEP, at the Tevatron, at the LHC — owes something to the geometry he worked out. A world without Charpak's chamber is one where the Standard Model remains, at best, a very well-motivated conjecture.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Thirty Years Ahead of the Proof

Rudolph A. Marcus

Electron transfer — the quiet, instantaneous hop of a single electron from one molecule to another — is so basic to chemistry that photosynthesis, respiration, and corrosion all depend on it, yet for decades nobody could say with any rigour how fast it should happen or why. In the 1950s, Rudolph Marcus, then at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, sat down with the problem and produced a set of equations relating the rate of electron transfer to the reorganisation energy of the surrounding solvent and the free energy of the reaction. The theory predicted, counter-intuitively, that very large driving forces would actually slow the reaction down — an 'inverted region' that struck most chemists as absurd until experiments confirmed it in 1984. Marcus had worked out the equations thirty years before anyone could build the experiment to check them, which is either a sign of extraordinary confidence or a very long attention span. His framework now underpins solar cells, photosynthesis research, and the design of molecular electronic devices, which is a tidy return on a few pages of algebra.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

The Cell's All-Purpose Toggle Switch

Edmond H. Fischer · Edwin G. Krebs

By the early 1950s, biochemists knew that glycogen phosphorylase — the enzyme that breaks down glycogen into usable glucose — existed in active and inactive forms, but the switch between them was a mystery. Edmond Fischer and Edwin Krebs, sharing a laboratory at the University of Washington, worked out that the enzyme was activated by the addition of a phosphate group drawn from ATP, and deactivated by its removal. The mechanism seemed too simple to be universal. It was not. Phosphorylation and dephosphorylation turned out to be the cell's all-purpose toggle switch: the same chemistry, applied to different proteins, governs cell growth, metabolism, gene expression, and the immune response. When the toggle malfunctions, cancer and diabetes are among the consequences. Fischer and Krebs had not discovered a biochemical reaction so much as a grammar — one whose vocabulary the cell had been deploying for billions of years before anyone thought to look for it.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Homer, Recast in the Caribbean

Derek Walcott

Derek Walcott was born in 1930 on Saint Lucia, an island that had changed hands between France and Britain fourteen times before settling reluctantly on the latter, and his imagination was formed by that exact condition: two traditions, two languages, two histories that had no intention of synthesising neatly into one. He read Homer and he listened to calypso, and he found, eventually, that they were not as far apart as the syllabi of either culture suggested. His 1990 epic Omeros transposed the Homeric wanderers to the Caribbean with a seriousness that was also, quietly, a kind of delight in the transplantation. The Nobel committee spoke of 'a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision,' which is accurate if you enjoy understatement. What Walcott had done was refuse the choice his inheritance seemed to demand — between the coloniser's tongue and the colonised's experience — and write instead as though both were entirely his, which of course they were.

Nobel Peace Prize

A Testimony Without Official Channels

Rigoberta Menchú Tum

Guatemala's internal armed conflict, which ran from 1960 to 1996, killed an estimated 200,000 people, the large majority of them Maya civilians killed by state forces — a fact that the Guatemalan government and its international allies spent considerable energy declining to discuss. Rigoberta Menchú Tum, a K'iche' Maya woman who had lost her father, mother, and brother to the violence, left Guatemala in 1981 and spent the following decade making the case, in every forum that would have her, that what was happening constituted a systematic destruction of indigenous peoples. Her 1983 testimony, I, Rigoberta Menchú, brought the situation to an international audience that had managed, until then, to find it unfamiliar. The 1992 Peace Prize — awarded on the five-hundredth anniversary of Columbus's arrival, a timing the committee did not leave unremarked — acknowledged a struggle for justice that had been waged without the benefit of official channels, and in the teeth of official denials.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Incentives, Smuggled Into Impolite Corners

Gary Becker

For much of the twentieth century, economics maintained a polite division of labour: it would handle markets and production, and leave the rest of human behaviour to sociology, psychology, and whatever department handled the family. Gary Becker declined the arrangement. From the 1950s onward, he applied the basic apparatus of microeconomics — rational actors, incentives, opportunity costs — to racial discrimination, crime and punishment, family structure, addiction, and human capital investment in education. His 1968 paper on crime, which treated offenders as people who weigh expected benefits against expected penalties rather than as aberrations from a moral norm, annoyed almost everyone and proved broadly correct. Not all of his conclusions were popular, and some were contested; but the habit of asking 'what incentive does this person face?' had been smuggled into corners of social science that previously regarded the question as impolite. Not everyone was pleased. That was, rather, the point.

Ig Nobel Prize in Biology

A Fertility Clinic's Undisclosed Ingredient

Cecil Jacobson

Cecil Jacobson was a fertility specialist in Virginia with a commendably hands-on approach to quality control: rather than draw sperm from anonymous donors as the clinic's patients believed, he had allegedly used his own, unannounced, for years. Genetic testing eventually suggested he had fathered somewhere between fifteen and seventy-five children in this fashion, depending on the analysis. He was convicted in 1992 on fifty-two counts of fraud and perjury. The Ig Nobel committee, which has a talent for finding the precise angle from which a catastrophe becomes merely surreal, awarded him the Biology prize and noted his singular dedication to the field. The prize did not, quite, endorse the method.

Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Jell-O the Colour of No Fruit

Ivette Bassa

Ivette Bassa received the Chemistry prize for synthesising unusually vivid blue Jell-O — an achievement whose scientific context was the study of how food colour influences the eater's perception of flavour and palatability. The findings were, in their modest way, illuminating: people are considerably more suspicious of food the colour of a municipal swimming pool than they are of food the colour of anything that has ever occurred in nature. The brain, it turns out, maintains a rough mental colour-chart of the edible world, and aquamarine was not on it. Whether this constitutes chemistry or applied psychology is a definitional question the committee wisely left open.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physics

Thirteen Years of Plank, Rope, and Silence

David Chorley · Doug Bower

In 1978, two friends from Southampton — David Chorley and Doug Bower — began making crop circles in Hampshire fields on summer nights using a plank of wood, a length of rope, and a wire loop attached to a cap for sighting straight lines, largely to amuse themselves and possibly to embarrass the credulous. They continued for thirteen years, watching with increasing satisfaction as researchers attributed their handiwork to plasma vortices, piezoelectric energy released by geological faults, and, at the more committed end of the spectrum, visiting spacecraft. In 1991 they revealed themselves to a journalist, demonstrating live that two elderly men with rudimentary equipment could reproduce in an hour what had kept parapsychologists in print for a decade. The Ig Nobel committee awarded them the Physics prize in 1992 and appreciated, with some warmth, the experimental elegance of the design.

Ig Nobel Prize in Literature

One Paper Every Three and a Half Days

Yuri Struchkov

Between 1981 and 1990, the Russian crystallographer Yuri Struchkov published 948 scientific papers — an average of roughly one every three and a half days, including weekends, holidays, and at least the more sedate portions of the night. The Ig Nobel committee recognised this output as a contribution to literature, which is one reading of it. The papers were, by most accounts, genuine crystallography rather than fabrication; the more troubling question was what the volume said about how science measures productivity and what it therefore rewards. Struchkov's example was ahead of its time in this respect: the metrics he had mastered would not become a full academic pathology for another decade or two.

Ig Nobel Prize in Archaeology

Scouts Scrub the Palaeolithic Clean

Les Éclaireurs de France

The Éclaireurs de France — a French scouting association — undertook, with the tidy-minded enthusiasm of the well-intentioned, a campaign to scrub graffiti from the walls of a cave in southern France. The difficulty, which emerged only afterwards, was that some of what they had energetically removed was not graffiti but prehistoric rock art, painted by hands many thousands of years departed and rather harder to replace than modern scribbling. The Ig Nobel committee awarded them the Archaeology prize for their zeal. There is a serious lesson folded inside the farce — that cultural heritage is most endangered not by malice but by helpfulness insufficiently informed — but the image that lingers is of a troop of scouts, sponges in hand, doing their conscientious best to erase the Palaeolithic.

Ig Nobel Prize in Art

A Taxonomically Accurate Scandal

Jim Knowlton

Jim Knowlton produced an anatomical chart titled 'Penises of the Animal Kingdom,' a comparative survey rendered with the sober precision of a medical illustration and the subject matter of a schoolboy dare. The Ig Nobel committee honoured him for the poster and for the deluxe pop-up-book edition he had proposed — a project the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts had conspicuously declined to fund, which the committee evidently regarded as a lapse of nerve worth commemorating. The chart was, taxonomically speaking, entirely accurate: the reproductive anatomy of the animal kingdom is genuinely and instructively various, and a diagram of it need be no more scandalous than a diagram of animal dentition. That it nonetheless is says rather more about the viewer than the animals, which may be the most educational thing the poster manages to demonstrate.

Ig Nobel Prize in Economics

A Silent Asterisk on Unlimited Liability

The investors of Lloyd's of London

Lloyd's of London had for three centuries run on an elegant and slightly terrifying principle: its investors, the 'Names,' pledged their entire personal wealth — unlimited liability, down to the last cufflink — against the risks the market underwrote, in exchange for a share of the profits in the many years when nothing went catastrophically wrong. In the early 1990s a great deal went catastrophically wrong at once, and a body of Names, presented with the losses they had legally guaranteed, discovered a sudden collective reluctance to pay. The Ig Nobel committee awarded the Economics prize for this bold attempt to insure against the one risk the market had never named — that of the Names' own liability — by the simple expedient of declining to honour it. Unlimited liability, it emerged, had always carried a silent asterisk.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine

Naming What a Shoe Leaves Behind

F. Kanda · E. Yagi · M. Fukuda · K. Nakajima · T. Ohta · O. Nakata

A team at the Shiseido Research Center set out to establish, with proper analytical chemistry, precisely which compounds are responsible for the smell of human feet. The answer, isolated and identified, turned out to be a cocktail dominated by isovaleric acid and a supporting cast of short-chain fatty acids — the metabolic by-products of bacteria going quietly about their business in the warm, dark, humid environment that a shoe so obligingly provides. The Ig Nobel committee honoured the work for its determination to name what most people are content merely to avoid. Beneath the comedy it is exactly the sort of study a cosmetics company ought to do: you cannot design a deodorant for a smell you have not chemically identified, and someone has to go first.

Ig Nobel Prize in Nutrition

Half a Century of Dietary Loyalty, Canned

The utilizers of SPAM

The Ig Nobel committee awarded the 1992 Nutrition prize to the utilizers of SPAM, the pressed and canned pork product that Hormel had been selling since 1937 and that a great many people had been eating, with varying degrees of enthusiasm and defensiveness, ever since. The citation honoured more than half a century of steadfast consumption of a foodstuff that inspires strong opinion in roughly equal measure to the difficulty of saying exactly what is in it. SPAM had fed soldiers through the Second World War, colonised the cuisines of the Pacific, and lodged itself in the culture firmly enough that its name would one day be borrowed for unwanted email. The prize was less a criticism than an acknowledgement of endurance: a nation's dietary loyalty, canned and preserved, is a data point worth honouring.

Ig Nobel Prize in Peace

Uniquely Compelling Methods of Bringing People Together

Daryl Gates

Daryl Gates, the chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, had presided over a force whose relationship with the city it policed was, by the early 1990s, strained to the point of rupture — a strain that broke fully open in 1992 after the acquittal of the officers who had beaten Rodney King. The Ig Nobel committee awarded him the Peace prize for what it called his uniquely compelling methods of bringing people together, a citation whose irony required no assistance. Gates had, in a bleak and unintended sense, unified a great many Angelenos around a shared assessment of his department. He resigned that summer. The prize is one of the committee's darker jokes, and it lands precisely because the underlying events were not funny at all.

Turing Award

Designing for Computers That Belong to People

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Butler W. Lampson

In the 1970s, while computing's mainstream was still preoccupied with batch-processing mainframes, Butler Lampson was working at Xerox PARC on the premise that computers would one day belong to individual people and had better behave accordingly. He contributed to the Alto — one of the first personal workstations — and to the architecture of local area networks, laser printing, and the programming language that informed much of what came after. His 1983 paper 'Hints on Computer System Design' remains a document of unusual lucidity about what building complex software actually requires, as distinct from what textbooks suggest. The Turing Award cited contributions across workstations, networks, operating systems, programming languages, and security: a list so long that it reads less like a citation than an inventory. Almost everything you touch on a personal computer was, at some point, a problem that Lampson had thought carefully about and written a memo concerning.

First confirmed exoplanets discovered around a pulsar

Planets Around a Cinder of a Star

The received wisdom, before 1992, was that planets formed from the disc of gas and dust surrounding a young star — a process that a supernova explosion would seem to disrupt fairly thoroughly. Aleksander Wolszczan, using the Arecibo Observatory, was analysing the radio pulses from PSR B1257+12, a millisecond pulsar some 2,300 light-years away, when he noticed that the pulses arrived with tiny, regular variations in timing: the pulsar was being tugged, ever so slightly, by something orbiting it. He and Dale Frail confirmed two planets — later three — around a star that was, by any reasonable measure, a cinder. The host was a neutron star, the compressed remnant of a catastrophic stellar death; these planets had either survived the supernova or formed from the debris after the fact, and neither explanation was supposed to be possible. The discovery did not prove that other solar systems were common — that came later — but it proved, with rather emphatic finality, that we had been thinking far too narrowly about where planets were allowed to exist.

Saola discovered in Vietnam

Horns Nobody Could Name

By the late twentieth century, the working assumption among zoologists was that any large land mammal remaining undescribed was almost certainly extinct, a creature glimpsed once in the wrong light and thereafter assigned to footnote. Then, in May 1992, a joint survey team in Vietnam's Vũ Quang Nature Reserve found, in a hunter's collection, a set of horns unlike those of any known bovid — long, parallel, and belonging to something that weighed perhaps 90 kilograms and had been living, apparently without inconveniencing either party, alongside one of the more densely populated countries in Asia. The saola, Pseudoryx nghetinhensis, was formally described in 1993: the first large terrestrial mammal new to science since the kouprey in 1937. It has been photographed alive only a handful of times since. It is thought to be critically endangered. Science had just long enough to register its existence before the question became whether it would survive the encounter.

First SMS text message sent

Merry Christmas, With No Way to Reply

On 3 December 1992, a twenty-two-year-old software engineer named Neil Papworth, sitting at a computer terminal in Newbury, typed the words 'Merry Christmas' and sent them via the Short Message Service to a Vodafone executive's Nokia handset at a company party in London. The infrastructure that made this possible — a signalling protocol called SS7, a message format squeezed into the spare capacity of the cellular control channel — had been designed by a committee of engineers who primarily imagined it would be used for network alerts and operator messages to handsets. They were not wrong, exactly; they had simply failed to anticipate that people, given a new channel for communication, would use it to talk to each other. The trillions of messages sent annually since, the entire argot of abbreviated syntax, the thumb-formed literature of the emoji: all of it descends from a seasonal greeting sent from one keyboard to one phone, by a man who received no reply because the handset had no way to compose one.

Death of Grace Hopper

A Foot of Wire, One Nanosecond Long

Grace Murray Hopper

Grace Murray Hopper had been told, more than once during her career, that what she was proposing could not be done. In 1952 she wrote what is generally regarded as the first compiler — a program that translated human-readable instructions into machine code — after colleagues expressed scepticism that a computer could be made to do anything so interpretive. She then spent years shepherding COBOL from concept to standard, arguing to a Navy that preferred classified hardware that common programming languages would make computing genuinely useful rather than merely impressive. She was recalled from retirement twice; the second time she served until she was seventy-nine, the oldest serving officer in the United States Navy. She died on 1 January 1992 in Arlington, Virginia, aged 85. She is often remembered for keeping a piece of nanosecond-wire on her desk — a foot of copper wire, the distance light travels in one billionth of a second — to illustrate, with some relish, how much time programmers wasted writing inefficient code.

Death of Isaac Asimov

Three Rules, Written as a Convenience

Isaac Asimov

Isaac Asimov arrived in the United States from Russia at age three, grew up in Brooklyn, and proceeded to write or edit more than 500 books — on biochemistry, the Bible, Shakespeare, ancient history, mathematics, and about 380 other subjects — at a pace that makes Yuri Struchkov look leisurely. His science fiction is remembered most, particularly the Foundation series and the robot stories, the latter of which introduced the Three Laws of Robotics: three rules drafted, by his own account, as a narrative convenience to prevent robots from being simply dangerous, and which have since been cited, adapted, and argued over by everyone from AI ethicists to robotics engineers who feel the matter deserves more rigour than a 1942 short story can provide. He died on 6 April 1992 in New York, aged 72 — from heart and kidney failure, though later reporting established that the underlying cause was HIV, contracted from a blood transfusion during bypass surgery in 1983. He had not told the public. He had, at least, written enough to keep anyone busy for a while.