1994

Nobel Prize in Physics

Bertram N. Brockhouse · Clifford G. Shull

Shull developed neutron diffraction to reveal where atoms sit inside a material; Brockhouse developed neutron spectroscopy to reveal how they move. The two methods are complementary and together gave materials scientists a way to see inside solids that X-rays alone could not provide.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

George A. Olah

Olah found ways to prepare and stabilise carbocations — positively charged carbon ions that appear briefly during chemical reactions and are gone before anyone can study them properly. By coaxing them into solution and examining them at leisure, he opened up the chemistry of these reactive intermediates and improved the industrial processes used in oil refining.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Alfred G. Gilman · Martin Rodbell

Rodbell showed that a GTP-binding protein sits between a cell-surface receptor and the machinery inside the cell, acting as a kind of relay; Gilman identified and purified these G-proteins and explained precisely how they work. Between them they mapped the wiring that lets hormones and neurotransmitters tell the interior of a cell what is happening outside.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Kenzaburo Oe

Oe's novels drew on raising a brain-damaged son and on the shadow of Hiroshima to map suffering and the effort to go on living anyway. The committee found in his imagined worlds a picture of the human predicament that was disconcerting in a necessary and illuminating way.

Nobel Peace Prize

Yasser Arafat · Shimon Peres · Yitzhak Rabin

The Oslo Accords of 1993 had given the PLO and Israel a framework for Palestinian self-governance — something that had seemed, not long before, impossible. The prize went to all three architects of that agreement; Rabin was assassinated the following year.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

John C. Harsanyi · John F. Nash Jr. · Reinhard Selten

Nash's 1950 equilibrium concept showed that every finite game has at least one stable outcome — a point from which no player has reason to defect. The idea had been everybody's analytical tool for forty years by the time the prize arrived. Nash received it at Princeton with quiet dignity, not long recovered from the decades of schizophrenia that had taken most of those years from him.

Ig Nobel Prize in Biology

W. Brian Sweeney · Brian Krafte-Jacobs · Jeffrey W. Britton · Wayne Hansen

For their carefully compiled survey of the annual number of bowel movements per day for each member of the U.S. military in different theaters of operation during the Gulf War. The data have significant implications for field sanitation logistics; the project also required a certain commitment to a research question that most investigators would have let pass.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine

Patient X · C. Bhimji Bhatt · J.J. Bhatt

Patient X treated a rattlesnake bite with electroshock therapy; the physicians documented this case in a published report and added it to the medical literature on snakebite management. Whether the outcome was positive is not recorded, but the unconventional approach warranted recognition.

Ig Nobel Prize in Entomology

Robert A. Lopez

Lopez transferred ear mites from a cat into his own ear canal and then described his experience — the itching, the scratching, the dark discharge — in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association. Science has a long tradition of self-experimentation. This sits at the more unusual end of it.

Ig Nobel Prize in Mathematics

Southern Baptist Church of Alabama

For publishing a mathematical estimate of how many Alabama citizens would go to Heaven and how many to Hell, presumably in order to concentrate conversion efforts on the larger group. The model's assumptions were not disclosed.

Ig Nobel Prize in Peace

John Hagelin

Hagelin organised 4,000 practitioners of Transcendental Meditation in Washington, D.C. in the summer of 1994 and reported that violent crime had fallen by 24 percent as a result. He presented data. The committee awarded the prize.

Turing Award

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Edward Feigenbaum · Raj Reddy

Feigenbaum built expert systems — DENDRAL, MYCIN — that encoded human expertise in a form computers could apply; Reddy made foundational contributions to speech recognition. Between them they demonstrated that AI could be practically useful decades before the term 'practical AI' became fashionable.

Fields Medal

Fields Medal

Jean Bourgain · Pierre-Louis Lions · Jean-Christophe Yoccoz · Efim Zelmanov

Awarded in Zürich: Bourgain for functional analysis and combinatorics, Lions for partial differential equations, Yoccoz for dynamical systems, and Zelmanov for solving the restricted Burnside problem — a group-theory question that had been open since the 1940s. Four medals; four quite different corners of mathematics.

Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 impacts Jupiter

From 16 to 22 July, twenty-one fragments of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 struck Jupiter in sequence — the first collision between solar-system bodies ever directly observed. The impacts left dark scars in Jupiter's atmosphere each larger than Earth, visible through amateur telescopes. The event was a vivid reminder that the solar system is not finished rearranging itself.

Wollemi Pine discovered in Australia

Parks officer David Noble abseiled into a canyon in Wollemi National Park, New South Wales, and found a stand of trees that turned out to belong to a genus known only from fossil records 200 million years old. The living Wollemi Pine had been in that canyon, in all likelihood, for a very long time; it was simply waiting for someone to come down and look.

Flavr Savr genetically modified tomato approved

The FDA approved Calgene's Flavr Savr tomato for commercial sale, making it the first genetically modified whole food licensed for human consumption. An antisense gene slowed the softening of the fruit after harvest, allowing it to ripen longer on the vine. The tomato sold, briefly, and then didn't.

Hubble Space Telescope images Pluto and Charon

The repaired Hubble captured the first photograph that clearly showed Pluto and its moon Charon as two separate objects, along with albedo variations on Pluto's surface. It was the most detailed view of the distant dwarf planet achievable from Earth orbit — which is to say, not very detailed, but more than anyone had managed before.

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) founded

Tim Berners-Lee founded the W3C at MIT in October to develop open web standards, ensuring that the web would remain interoperable and independent of any single company's decisions. The consortium has spent thirty years since then in the unglamorous work of making sure the thing he invented continues to be usable by everyone.