1993

Nobel Prize in Physics

Two Stars, Spiraling Exactly on Schedule

Russell A. Hulse · Joseph H. Taylor Jr.

In 1974, Russell Hulse — then a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts — was working through a systematic radio-telescope survey when he noticed a pulsar behaving oddly: its timing signal drifted in a regular, periodic way that could only mean it was orbiting something. That something turned out to be another neutron star, and the pair — designated PSR B1913+16 — became the first known binary pulsar. Taylor and Hulse then did something requiring unusual patience: they watched. For years. As the two stars wheeled around each other in an ever-tightening spiral, the rate of orbital decay matched Einstein's general-relativistic prediction for energy carried away by gravitational waves to within a fraction of a percent. Einstein, who had himself doubted gravitational waves were real, would have been both gratified and unsurprised. The prize arrived nineteen years after the discovery, and forty-three years before LIGO would finally hear what Hulse and Taylor had only inferred — because sometimes the most rigorous evidence is the indirect kind.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

A Billion Copies From One Late-Night Drive

Kary B. Mullis · Michael Smith

Kary Mullis conceived the polymerase chain reaction during a late-night drive through the California mountains in 1983, an origin story that suits a technique so simple in principle that colleagues initially refused to believe no one had thought of it before. PCR works by repeatedly heating and cooling DNA in the presence of short primer sequences and a heat-stable polymerase, doubling the target sequence with each cycle until a vanishingly small fragment becomes a billion copies available for analysis. It is, as a practical matter, why forensic science became possible, why ancient DNA can be read from bones, and why a global pandemic in 2020 could be tested for on the same day symptoms appeared. Michael Smith's contribution, site-directed mutagenesis, was quieter but equally consequential: he showed how to introduce a specific mutation at any chosen position in a gene, giving researchers something close to a word-processor for DNA. Between them, the two laureates handed molecular biology the tools it had been trying to improvise around for a decade.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Genes Interrupted, Then Spliced Back Together

Richard J. Roberts · Phillip A. Sharp

When molecular biologists first worked out the structure of genes in bacteria, they found what they expected: a continuous sequence of DNA encoding a continuous sequence of protein. It was tidy, logical, and, as Richard Roberts and Phillip Sharp independently discovered in 1977, substantially wrong — at least for more complex organisms. Working with adenovirus, both groups found that the RNA transcribed from a gene was longer than the RNA that ultimately reached the ribosome; stretches were being clipped out and discarded before translation. These non-coding interruptions, promptly named introns, are spliced away with considerable precision by a molecular machine called the spliceosome, leaving the coding exons joined seamlessly. The discovery upended textbook accounts of how genetic information flows through cells, and it ultimately explained alternative splicing — the mechanism by which a single gene can produce multiple distinct proteins depending on which exons are kept. The tidy picture of one gene, one protein had not been wrong so much as it had been a special case, and special cases are where biology hides its most interesting furniture.

Nobel Prize in Literature

A Vernacular the Establishment Finally Heard

Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison published her first novel, The Bluest Eye, in 1970, and the establishment took some years to catch up with what she was doing. By the time Beloved appeared in 1987 — a novel that excavates the psychic wreckage of slavery through the story of a woman who kills her infant daughter rather than see her returned to bondage — it was no longer possible to argue that American literature had reckoned seriously with its own history. Morrison worked in a vernacular tradition, dense with African-American oral culture, that was entirely her own and yet utterly unregional: the voices in her books carry moral weight without ever becoming allegory. The Nobel Committee, awarding the prize in 1993, called her work a 'visionary force and poetic import' — slightly elevated language for prose that does not need elevation. She was the first African-American woman to receive the prize, and the fact that this had taken so long was itself something of a remark on the literary establishment she had spent decades quietly exposing.

Nobel Peace Prize

Two Men Who Decided What Came Next Mattered More

Nelson Mandela · F.W. de Klerk

F.W. de Klerk had not, in his earlier career, given much reason to expect what he did on 2 February 1990: unbanning the African National Congress, releasing political prisoners, and announcing that Nelson Mandela — who had been in prison for 27 years — would go free. Mandela walked out of Victor Verster Prison nine days later, at the age of 71, and the negotiations that followed were not the work of men with nothing to lose. They were the work of men who had decided, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, that what came next mattered more than who won. The transition to the first democratic elections in South Africa's history, held in April 1994, was neither smooth nor inevitable — there were massacres, walkouts, and credible threats of civil war — but it happened. The Nobel Committee gave the prize to both men, which required a certain generosity of interpretation toward de Klerk, and a certain steel-spined magnanimity from Mandela, who provided it.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

History Was Data, If You Counted It

Robert W. Fogel · Douglass C. North

Economic history had long been the slightly embarrassing cousin of economic theory — full of narrative, short on rigour, and suspicious of mathematics. Robert Fogel and Douglass North spent their careers making that embarrassment mutual. Fogel brought quantitative methods to questions historians had settled by intuition: his cliometric analysis of American railroads suggested that, had they never been built, the US economy by 1890 would have been almost exactly the same size, since canals would have expanded to compensate — a finding that outraged everyone who had written reverently about the Iron Horse. His work on slavery demonstrated, with uncomfortable precision, that it had been economically profitable, stripping away the comforting belief that the Civil War had simply finished off a failing system. North's contribution was more institutional: he argued that the formal and informal rules structuring a society — property rights, contracts, conventions, cultural norms — explain long-run economic divergence better than geography or resource endowment alone. History, it emerged, was not just anecdote; it was data, provided you were willing to count.

Ig Nobel Prize in Biology

Stressed Pigs Shed More Salmonella

Paul Williams Jr. · Kenneth Newell

The study in question examined Salmonella excretion in pigs subjected to transport — joy-riding, as the paper's immortal title had it — and found that the stress of long-distance haulage caused the animals to shed significantly more bacteria than their sedentary counterparts, with implications for contamination risk at abattoirs. It is the sort of paper whose title arrives like a gift and whose methodology, on inspection, turns out to be perfectly sound: the pigs really do excrete more Salmonella when stressed, the margin was statistically meaningful, and the food safety implications were and remain genuine. The Ig Nobel exists partly to celebrate this territory — science that strikes the uninitiated as absurd and the initiated as obvious, with the gap between those two reactions being exactly where useful knowledge tends to live.

Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry

A Magazine That Ambushes You With Perfume

James Campbell · Gaines Campbell

The perfume-impregnated magazine insert is a device of some ingenuity: a microcapsule layer, applied to a strip of paper, releases fragrance when the reader rubs it, converting a passive advertisement into a sensory experience the reader has not necessarily consented to. The Campbells patented the concept, advertisers adopted it with enthusiasm, and the glossy magazine became a delivery vehicle for clouds of floral aldehydes that waft out unprompted in waiting rooms across the developed world. The chemistry is legitimate; the application is, depending on one's tolerance for unrequested cologne, a contribution to civilisation or a minor assault. That an entire industry of olfactory ambush followed, suggesting that headaches are not commercially speaking a deterrent, is perhaps the most useful finding to emerge from the whole enterprise.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine

A Clinical Protocol for a Zipper Mishap

James F. Nolan · Thomas J. Stillwell · John P. Sands Jr.

Zipper-related injuries to the male anatomy are, statistically, more common than one might hope, and had been turning up in emergency departments with a regularity that suggested the medical literature owed them a systematic treatment. Nolan, Stillwell, and Sands provided exactly that: a clinical paper establishing a methodical approach to what is described, with commendable professional neutrality, as penile entrapment in zipper mechanisms. The committee honoured it because it deserved honouring — not every paper that earns laughter from a general audience is trivial, and a contribution to the dignity and comfort of a recurrent class of patients is a contribution regardless of how awkward it is to discuss at conferences. The Ig Nobel citation is best read as a reminder that medicine is, in part, the business of attending seriously to the indignities the body inflicts on itself.

Ig Nobel Prize in Mathematics

Seventeen Digits of Confidence About the Antichrist

Robert Faid

Robert Faid, author of the book Gorbachev! Has the Real Antichrist Come?, applied what he described as scientific probability analysis to a question theologians had been arguing about without quantitative rigour for centuries. His conclusion: the odds that Mikhail Gorbachev is the Antichrist stand at exactly 710,609,175,188,282,000 to 1. The methodology by which one arrives at a number of this specificity was not fully disclosed, which is perhaps the most troubling part of the exercise — not because the thesis is implausible, but because if the working were ever revealed, it might seem reasonable. The committee awarded the prize with the observation that it takes a particular kind of confidence to publish a number with seventeen significant figures in support of a claim that is, at best, difficult to verify.

Ig Nobel Prize in Peace

One Wrong Number United a Nation's Fury

Pepsi-Cola Philippines

In 1992, Pepsi-Cola Philippines ran a number-matching lottery to compete with Coca-Cola's dominant market position, promising one million pesos — a life-changing sum for most Filipino households — to whoever held the winning bottle cap. Somewhere in the process, the number 349 was announced as the winner, and approximately 800,000 people discovered they held it. The error, attributed to a computer malfunction or data-entry mistake depending on which account one believes, transformed an ordinary promotional exercise into a nationwide grievance: riots followed, Pepsi offices were firebombed, and the company faced lawsuits numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Pepsi offered token compensation; the courts took years to settle the matter. The Ig Nobel committee awarded the Peace Prize on the dry grounds that Pepsi had, for one remarkable moment, united the Filipino populace around a single shared emotion — which is, technically, a form of solidarity.

Ig Nobel Prize in Consumer Engineering

But Wait, There's More

Ron Popeil

Ron Popeil was the inventor and, more importantly, the televangelist of the small kitchen appliance — the Veg-O-Matic, the Pocket Fisherman, the Inside-the-Shell Egg Scrambler, each sold through infomercials whose rhythms ('But wait — there's more') he did as much as anyone to codify. The Ig Nobel committee honoured him for redefining the industrial revolution, which is generous but not entirely wrong: Popeil's genius was less the gadgets than the demonstration, the patter that could make a device for slicing vegetables feel like a small liberation. His products worked, more or less, and sold in the millions. That a man who spent his life persuading insomniacs to buy food dehydrators should be honoured within earshot of James Watt is exactly the sort of category error the Ig Nobel exists to celebrate.

Ig Nobel Prize in Economics

The Depression That Never Showed Up

Ravi Batra

Ravi Batra, an economist at Southern Methodist University, had published a book in 1987 titled The Great Depression of 1990, which forecast, with some confidence and considerable detail, an economic collapse that then declined to occur. The Ig Nobel committee awarded him the Economics prize on the reasoning that he had sold enough copies of his prophecy to single-handedly avert the very depression it predicted — the royalties, presumably, providing the stimulus the economy needed. It is a joke with a genuine barb inside it: the market for confident economic doom is reliably robust, the accuracy of the forecasts rather less so, and the two facts have never seemed to interfere with one another. Batra continued to write bestsellers. The depression continued not to arrive on schedule.

Ig Nobel Prize in Literature

A Hundred Times More Authors Than Pages

E. Topol · R. Califf · F. Van de Werf · P.W. Armstrong · and 972 co-authors

The Ig Nobel committee awarded the 1993 Literature prize to the authors of a single medical research paper — the report of a large international trial comparing treatments for heart attack, which had accumulated so many contributing investigators that it managed the remarkable feat of having roughly one hundred times as many authors as pages. Large clinical trials genuinely do require armies of collaborators, and the science was entirely sound; the committee's target was not the research but the arithmetic of credit, the way modern authorship can swell until a name on a paper signifies participation so diffuse as to be nearly homeopathic. Somewhere in that roster of nearly a thousand names is a real and useful finding about saving lives. It is simply outnumbered.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physics

Hens Do Not Transmute Potassium Into Calcium

Corentin Louis Kervran

Corentin Louis Kervran was honoured, posthumously, for a lifetime devoted to the doctrine of biological transmutation — the belief that living organisms can convert one chemical element into another, and specifically that hens manufacture the calcium in their eggshells from potassium by a kind of cold nuclear alchemy occurring quietly inside the bird. This would, if true, overturn essentially all of nuclear physics, which holds transmutation to require energies unavailable in a henhouse. The likelier explanation — that hens obtain calcium by eating it, as farmers have understood for a very long time — Kervran found insufficiently interesting. The committee honoured the theory for its ambition. It is a useful reminder that the distance between a revolutionary insight and a basic failure to check what the chicken has been eating can, from a certain angle, look deceptively small.

Ig Nobel Prize in Psychology

A Harvard Professor Bet on Alien Hybrids

John E. Mack · David M. Jacobs

John E. Mack, a Harvard psychiatrist of considerable standing, and David M. Jacobs, a historian, were jointly honoured for their conclusion that people who believe they have been abducted by aliens probably have been — and, more specifically, for their shared thesis that the purpose of these abductions is the production of human-alien hybrid children. Mack had come to the subject through clinical interviews and had been struck by the sincerity and consistency of the accounts; that the experiences felt overwhelmingly real to those who reported them was, to him, a datum requiring explanation rather than dismissal. The committee did not adjudicate the underlying question. It merely noted that a Harvard professor had staked his reputation on the reproductive intentions of visitors from elsewhere, which is a sentence that mostly writes its own punchline.

Ig Nobel Prize in Visionary Technology

A Television Aimed Straight at the Windshield

Jay Schiffman · The Michigan State Legislature

Jay Schiffman was honoured, along with the Michigan State Legislature, for inventing and championing AutoVision — a device that projected a television image into the driver's field of view, making it possible, its promoters enthused, to watch television and drive a car at the same time. The engineering was real; the projection worked. It was only the underlying premise — that the chief unmet need of the American motorist was the opportunity to divide his attention between the road and a broadcast — that gave observers pause. The committee awarded the Visionary Technology prize with, one imagines, a certain dread. Some inventions solve a problem; others reveal, on inspection, that the problem they solve is one nobody should wish to have. AutoVision belonged firmly to the second category.

Turing Award

A Vocabulary for How Hard a Problem Is

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Juris Hartmanis · Richard E. Stearns

Before Hartmanis and Stearns published 'On the Computational Complexity of Algorithms' in 1965, computer science had a rough intuition that some problems were harder than others but no formal language for saying so. Their paper introduced time complexity classes — the now-familiar framework of asking not just whether an algorithm solves a problem but how its running time grows as the input scales — and in doing so founded computational complexity theory as a discipline. The consequences radiate in every direction: complexity theory is why cryptographers can be confident that certain codes are practically unbreakable (cracking them would require solving a problem believed to require exponential time), why the question P versus NP remains the most consequential unsolved problem in theoretical computer science, and why the concept of computational hardness is now as fundamental to the field as energy conservation is to physics. The Turing Award arrived in 1993, twenty-eight years after the paper, which is itself evidence that sometimes the field takes a while to appreciate what it has been handed.

Andrew Wiles announces proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

The Margin Finally Ran Out of Excuses

Pierre de Fermat scribbled his famous note in the margin of his copy of Diophantus's Arithmetica around 1637: no three positive integers satisfy a^n + b^n = c^n for any integer n greater than 2, and 'I have discovered a truly marvellous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain.' The margin has been blamed for a great deal of subsequent suffering. Andrew Wiles had been obsessed with the problem since childhood, and spent seven years in near-total secrecy at Princeton working on a proof via the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture — a connection between elliptic curves and modular forms that had itself only been conjectured in the 1950s. He announced the result across three lectures at Cambridge in June 1993 to an audience that understood, by the final session, that something historic was unfolding. A gap was found that autumn, and Wiles spent a year trying to fix it before, on the verge of giving up, he noticed that two failed approaches could be combined to rescue the argument. The complete proof ran to 129 pages and required mathematical machinery Fermat could not conceivably have possessed, which suggests the margin note was, at minimum, optimistic.

Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission

Spectacles for the Universe's Blurriest Eye

Hubble launched in April 1990 with a mirror ground to an error of 2.2 micrometres — less than a fiftieth the width of a human hair — but ground incorrectly enough that all its early images were blurred, a humiliation that became a public joke and a genuine crisis for NASA. The cause, traced to a faulty null corrector used during polishing, was elegant in its awfulness: the instrument used to verify the mirror's shape was itself miscalibrated. In December 1993, astronauts on Space Shuttle Endeavour's STS-61 mission performed five spacewalks over eleven days to install corrective optics — essentially a package of small mirrors that compensated for the original flaw — along with new gyroscopes, solar arrays, and a replacement camera. The first post-servicing images, released in January 1994, were crisp enough to draw audible reactions at press conferences. In the three decades since, Hubble has produced imagery of galaxy formation, confirmed the expansion rate of the universe, and supplied the observational backbone of cosmology at a level that would have been inconceivable from the ground. Few repair jobs in the history of science have returned so much per hour of skilled labour.

Mosaic web browser released

The Web Learns to Show a Picture

Tim Berners-Lee had proposed the World Wide Web in 1989 and implemented the first browser and server by 1991, but the early web was a text-only environment navigated largely by people who already knew what they were looking for and how to find it. Marc Andreessen, an undergraduate working at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in Illinois, wrote Mosaic with colleague Eric Bina over the winter of 1992–93; it was released on 22 April 1993 and was, by any reasonable measure, a different kind of object. Mosaic displayed images inline with text, supported multiple internet protocols from a single interface, ran on Windows and Mac as well as Unix, and was free. Within months, download counts ran into the hundreds of thousands. The browser did not add content to the web; it made the content that was there legible to people who were not computer scientists, which turned out to be the crucial missing ingredient. Andreessen would go on to found Netscape, Mosaic would be superseded within two years, and the web would become something that 1993 could barely imagine — which is, of course, exactly what happened.