1992

Nobel Prize in Physics

Georges Charpak

Charpak's multiwire proportional chamber, invented in 1968, could track the paths of charged particles at rates thousands of times faster than anything before it, with the kind of spatial precision that particle physics experiments require. Nearly every major particle detector built in the decades that followed owes something to his design.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Rudolph A. Marcus

Marcus worked out the mathematics of how electrons jump between molecules — an event so brief and subtle that it had resisted quantitative treatment. The equations he arrived at, now called Marcus theory, apply across chemistry, biology, and materials science, quietly underpinning a good deal of what the other fields then try to explain.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Edmond H. Fischer · Edwin G. Krebs

Fischer and Krebs showed that enzymes can be switched on and off simply by adding or removing a phosphate group — a mechanism so universally convenient that almost every eukaryotic cell uses it for almost everything. The discovery of reversible protein phosphorylation turned out to be less a single finding than an entire language.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Derek Walcott

The Saint Lucian poet drew from Caribbean oral tradition and the Western canon simultaneously and found that they had more to say to each other than either had managed alone. His work explored a post-colonial world with a luminosity that the committee described as historical vision.

Nobel Peace Prize

Rigoberta Menchú Tum

A K'iche' Maya activist from Guatemala, Menchú brought international attention to what was happening to indigenous communities during her country's civil war. The prize acknowledged a struggle for social justice and ethno-cultural reconciliation that official channels had found it convenient to ignore.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Gary Becker

Becker applied the tools of microeconomics to things economists had previously thought beneath their attention — crime, family formation, addiction, racial discrimination — and found that people, however inconveniently, tend to respond to incentives even in the parts of life they consider personal. Not everyone was pleased.

Ig Nobel Prize in Biology

Cecil Jacobson

A fertility doctor awarded for single-handed efforts at quality control: he had allegedly fathered as many as 75 children by using his own sperm to inseminate patients without their knowledge or consent. The Ig Nobel committee noted the achievement without quite endorsing the method.

Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Ivette Bassa

For the synthesis of bright blue Jell-O — part of a project exploring how unnaturally coloured foods influence perception and palatability. It turns out that people are more suspicious of food the colour of a swimming pool than food the colour of anything found in nature.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physics

David Chorley · Doug Bower

Chorley and Bower had been making crop circles in English fields since 1978 using a plank, a rope, and a baseball cap, and revealed the fact in 1991 after investigators spent more than a decade attributing the patterns to plasma vortices, ball lightning, and visiting spacecraft. The Ig Nobel committee appreciated the quality of the experimental design.

Ig Nobel Prize in Literature

Yuri Struchkov

The Russian crystallographer published 948 scientific papers over nine years — roughly one every three and a half days — earning recognition for what the committee diplomatically called extraordinary productivity. Volume and quality are, of course, different measures.

Turing Award

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Butler W. Lampson

At Xerox PARC and later Digital Equipment Corporation, Lampson contributed foundational work on workstations, networks, operating systems, security, and document publishing — an unusually wide range of problems for one person to have shaped. Many things you interact with daily trace back to ideas he worked out in the 1970s.

First confirmed exoplanets discovered around a pulsar

Aleksander Wolszczan and Dale Frail detected two planets orbiting pulsar PSR B1257+12 by watching the pulsar's radio timing wobble as the planets tugged on the neutron star below. The host star was a dead remnant of a supernova — not the kind of address where anyone expected planets to survive, let alone form.

Saola discovered in Vietnam

A survey team in Vietnam's Vũ Quang Nature Reserve found skulls and horns that belonged to no known bovid. The saola — Pseudoryx nghetinhensis, formally described in 1993 — was the first large land mammal new to science since the kouprey in 1937, hidden in a forest that people had been walking through for generations.

First SMS text message sent

On 3 December, engineer Neil Papworth sent the words 'Merry Christmas' from a PC to a Vodafone mobile handset in the United Kingdom, inaugurating the Short Message Service. Nobody involved suspected they had just launched a medium that would eventually handle trillions of messages per year.

Death of Grace Hopper

Grace Murray Hopper

Rear Admiral Grace Hopper devised the first compiler and was the driving force behind COBOL, making programming accessible to people who were not mathematicians. She died on 1 January in Arlington, Virginia, aged 85, having spent most of her career patiently explaining to admirals what computers could do.

Death of Isaac Asimov

Isaac Asimov

Asimov wrote or edited more than 500 books across science, history, and fiction — a rate of output that made Struchkov look slow. His three laws of robotics, drafted as a plot convenience, became a framework that people who build actual robots still argue about. He died on 6 April in New York, aged 72.