1997

Nobel Prize in Physics

Trapping Atoms With Nothing but Light

Steven Chu · Claude Cohen-Tannoudji · William D. Phillips

At room temperature, the atoms in the air around you are careening at hundreds of metres per second, too fast and too restless to observe with any precision — which makes building clocks, measuring fundamental constants, or testing quantum predictions rather difficult. Steven Chu, Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, and William Phillips, working independently through the 1980s, found that carefully tuned laser beams could act as optical molasses: photons kicking atoms from every direction, gradually sapping their momentum until temperatures fell to within millionths of a degree of absolute zero. At those temperatures, atoms slow to a crawl and quantum effects that are ordinarily smeared out by thermal noise become legible. Chu famously realised that six intersecting beams could trap atoms in three dimensions, Phillips watched rubidium atoms settle into a luminous cloud he hadn't quite expected, and Cohen-Tannoudji developed the theoretical machinery to explain what all three were observing. The practical payoff has been immense and still accumulating: atomic clocks accurate enough to lose less than a second in the age of the universe, GPS systems that depend on precisely that accuracy, and a generation of quantum sensors still being invented. A world without laser cooling is one where our best clocks are merely very good, and good is never quite good enough when you are navigating by satellite.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

A Molecular Shaft That Spins to Make Fuel

Paul D. Boyer · John E. Walker · Jens C. Skou

Every sustained muscular effort, every thought, every heartbeat runs on ATP — adenosine triphosphate, the cell's universal energy currency — and for decades the question of how living things manufacture it in such staggering quantities was one of biochemistry's more embarrassing gaps. Paul Boyer spent years developing a binding-change mechanism hypothesis, proposing that ATP synthase, the enzyme responsible, worked not through conventional chemistry but through physical rotation: a shaft literally spins inside a molecular stator, and the mechanical motion drives the synthesis of ATP. John Walker's crystallography of the enzyme in the mid-1990s revealed the structure that confirmed Boyer's model, showing the subunits arranged in a manner only explicable if the machine turned. The prize committee, in a burst of lateral generosity, included Jens Skou for the entirely separate discovery of the sodium-potassium pump — the first ion-transporting enzyme ever identified, found in 1957 in crab nerve tissue, and responsible for maintaining the electrical gradients that make nerve signalling possible. Two molecular machines, one prize, and between them an account of how the body keeps the lights on at the level of individual proteins.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

A Protein That Infects Without Genes

Stanley B. Prusiner

The central dogma of molecular biology — DNA makes RNA, RNA makes protein, information flows in one direction only — had by the 1970s become so well established that it was less a hypothesis than a piece of furniture. Stanley Prusiner, working at UCSF through the late 1970s and 1980s on the cause of scrapie in sheep and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, arrived at a conclusion the furniture did not accommodate: these diseases were caused by proteins alone, with no nucleic acid involved, and those proteins propagated by inducing misfolding in their normal neighbours. He named the agents prions, from 'proteinaceous infectious particles,' and was treated by a significant fraction of the scientific community as though he had proposed that the Earth was carried on the back of a turtle. The scepticism was not entirely unreasonable — the idea violated everything biologists thought they knew about how infectious agents worked — but it proved, in the end, entirely wrong. Subsequent research confirmed the prion mechanism, linked it to bovine spongiform encephalopathy and its human variant, and opened a field now investigating whether similar protein-propagation mechanisms underlie Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. Prusiner received the prize in 1997 alone, which was fitting: the idea had been lonely for long enough.

Nobel Prize in Literature

The Jester Who Upheld the Downtrodden

Dario Fo

Dario Fo learned his craft partly from the fishermen and storytellers of Lake Maggiore, partly from the traditions of commedia dell'arte with its stock characters and improvised mischief, and partly from a lifelong, gleefully adversarial relationship with every institution that ever tried to silence him — which was many. Accidental Death of an Anarchist, written in 1970 in response to the suspicious death of a railway worker in police custody, became one of the most performed plays of the twentieth century, spreading from Milan to São Paulo to London's West End in a matter of years. We Can't Pay? We Won't Pay!, which followed shoppers who walked out of a supermarket without paying because the prices were intolerable, was performed in factories by workers on lunch breaks. The Swedish Academy called him an emulator of the medieval jesters who upholds the dignity of the downtrodden, language that managed to be both accurate and slightly insufficient. The Italian establishment, which had spent decades regarding Fo as a nuisance, received the announcement with the particular quiet that descends when someone you have underestimated wins something you cannot take away.

Nobel Peace Prize

Organised From a Farmhouse, by Email

International Campaign to Ban Landmines · Jody Williams

Anti-personnel landmines had the peculiar military logic of weapons designed to maim rather than kill — a wounded soldier requiring evacuation and medical care is a greater logistical burden than a dead one — and by the mid-1990s somewhere between sixty and one hundred million of them lay dormant in the soil of more than sixty countries, waiting. Jody Williams, a Vermont activist who had previously worked on Central American solidarity issues, began coordinating the International Campaign to Ban Landmines in 1992 from her farmhouse using email at a time when that was still an eccentric way to organise an international movement. What followed was fast by any standard and implausible by the standards of multilateral arms diplomacy: 122 countries signed the Ottawa Treaty in December 1997, committing to ban use, production, stockpiling, and transfer of the weapons. No superpower signed — the United States, Russia, and China all declined — but the treaty created a moral baseline that has constrained even non-signatories. Williams heard about the prize via email, while she was feeding her cats. She remarked that she was not Mother Teresa.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

An Equation Printed on Every Trader's Calculator

Robert C. Merton · Myron S. Scholes

An option is a contract that gives you the right, but not the obligation, to buy or sell something at an agreed price on a future date, and pricing one correctly — accounting for volatility, time, interest rates, and the unknowable future direction of the underlying asset — had long resisted rigorous analysis. Fischer Black and Myron Scholes, working together in the early 1970s, derived a partial differential equation that described how an option's price should evolve; Robert Merton, simultaneously and independently, arrived at the same result by a different mathematical route and extended the framework considerably. The Black-Scholes-Merton formula was published in 1973, the same year the Chicago Board Options Exchange opened for business, and the two events were not unrelated. The formula was printed on handheld calculators distributed to traders; within years it had become the common language of derivatives markets worldwide. Black died in 1995, just before the prize; Merton and Scholes were alive to receive it. They were also, at the time, partners in Long-Term Capital Management, a hedge fund that had deployed their framework at extraordinary leverage and would require a Federal Reserve-coordinated bailout the following year — a detail the Nobel committee, one imagines, noted with some ambivalence.

Ig Nobel Prize in Astronomy

A Face on Mars, Seen Only in Blur

Richard C. Hoagland

In 1976, the Viking 1 orbiter photographed a region of Mars called Cydonia and returned an image that, at a resolution of around fifty metres per pixel, showed a landform that bore a passing resemblance to a humanoid face. Nasa described it as a trick of light and shadow; Richard Hoagland described it as evidence of a lost Martian civilisation and spent subsequent decades elaborating the theory, identifying pyramids, city grids, and monuments at every resolution the cameras could offer. The Mars Global Surveyor, equipped with a camera roughly ten times sharper than Viking's, photographed Cydonia in 1998 and returned an image of an entirely ordinary eroded mesa. Hoagland was unpersuaded. The Ig Nobel committee recognised his achievement in the field of imaginative pattern recognition — specifically, the skill of finding exactly what you were looking for in data too blurry to contradict you.

Ig Nobel Prize in Biology

Brainwaves, Measured Against Chewing Gum

T. Yagyu · colleagues

Yagyu and colleagues wired up subjects with EEG electrodes and asked them to chew gum of varying flavours, then measured the brainwave patterns that resulted and correlated them with the flavour in question. The methodology was rigorous; the experimental apparatus was standard; the findings were published in a respectable journal. That the brain processes the taste of peppermint differently from the taste of fruit is, on reflection, exactly what you would expect from an organ that evolved partly to distinguish edible from inedible — and yet here was a research team, doing science at it. The Ig Nobel exists partly to honour work that causes this precise reaction: not fraud, not nonsense, just a sincere and methodical investigation of something that perhaps did not urgently require investigating. The committee accepted the results at face value.

Ig Nobel Prize in Economics

Caring for a Creature That Never Existed

Akihiro Yokoi · Aki Maita

The Tamagotchi was a keyring-sized plastic egg with a small screen inside it, launched by Bandai in Japan in November 1996 and in the rest of the world shortly after, which displayed a digital creature that needed to be fed, entertained, cleaned up after, and put to bed on a schedule indifferent to the owner's other commitments. If neglected, it died. By 1997 it had sold tens of millions of units and was being confiscated in classrooms from Tokyo to Toronto because students were interrupting lessons to tend to creatures that did not exist. Some employers reported staff slipping out of meetings to attend to their digital dependents. The Ig Nobel committee recognised Yokoi and Maita for demonstrating, at global scale, that the human appetite for responsibility and attachment is not meaningfully diminished by the complete absence of the thing being cared for. As economic discoveries go, this one turned out to have a long tail.

Ig Nobel Prize in Literature

Moby-Dick Predicts Assassinations Too

Doron Witztum · Eliyahu Rips · Yoav Rosenberg · Michael Drosnin

Witztum, Rips, and Rosenberg published a paper in the journal Statistical Science in 1994 claiming that the Hebrew text of Genesis contained encoded references to famous rabbis — found by searching for equidistant letter sequences, a technique involving reading every nth letter in a long text to see what words emerge. Drosnin popularised the method in his 1997 bestseller The Bible Code, which identified prophecies of assassination, war, and catastrophe in every direction the reader cared to look. The mathematics was not entirely unsound; the conclusions were extravagant. Brendan McKay and colleagues demonstrated, with some relish, that equally striking encoded messages appeared in Moby-Dick — including apparent predictions of the assassinations of Indira Gandhi, Leon Trotsky, and Abraham Lincoln — and in the Hebrew translation of War and Peace. The method, it emerged, did not so much decode hidden messages as prove that long texts contain a great many letters, and that people are remarkably good at finding what they are looking for.

Ig Nobel Prize in Meteorology

Plucked Feathers as a Wind Gauge

Bernard Vonnegut

Bernard Vonnegut — brother of Kurt, atmospheric chemist, and co-inventor of silver iodide cloud seeding — published a paper titled 'Chicken Plucking as Measure of Tornado Wind Speed,' which reasoned, from physical first principles and observed evidence, that the stripping of feathers from chickens caught in tornadoes could serve as a practical estimator of wind velocity. The underlying observation was real: tornado survivors and investigators had long noted the phenomenon, and Vonnegut treated it with exactly the seriousness a serious atmospheric scientist brings to atmospheric questions. The paper was not a joke; it was a calibration exercise in an unorthodox register. The Ig Nobel was awarded posthumously in 1997, Vonnegut having died earlier that year. His brother, one suspects, would have approved of the recognition.

Ig Nobel Prize in Communications

The Spam King Crowns Himself

Sanford Wallace

Sanford Wallace ran a Philadelphia firm called Cyber Promotions and had, by 1997, made himself one of the most detested men on the young internet by sending unsolicited commercial email in volumes that individual mail servers were not built to withstand. He styled himself the Spam King, embraced the title, and litigated cheerfully against the providers who tried to block him, arguing that his right to advertise into other people's inboxes was a matter of free commerce. The technology of the day offered no real defence: filters were primitive, and the cost of sending a million messages had fallen to essentially nothing, which is precisely the economic condition under which spam flourishes. The Ig Nobel committee recognised his contribution to the pollution of a shared resource — the demonstration that any communication channel cheap enough to be useful is also cheap enough to be ruined.

Ig Nobel Prize in Entomology

Reading a Windscreen Like a Field Guide

Mark Hostetler

Mark Hostetler, an ecologist at the University of Florida, wrote a field guide called That Gunk on Your Car, which allows the motorist to identify, from the smear left on a windscreen, precisely which insect met its end there. The premise is less frivolous than it sounds: the splatter pattern, colour, and residue of a squashed insect carry genuine diagnostic information, and the distribution of species across a landscape can, in principle, be read from the front of a car that has driven through it. Hostetler treated roadside entomology as the legitimate observational science it arguably is. The Ig Nobel committee honoured the book for turning an ordinary nuisance into a taxonomy — and for making the daily commute, however briefly, a transect survey.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine

Elevator Music Boosts Your Antibodies

Carl J. Charnetski · Francis X. Brennan Jr. · James F. Harrison

Carl Charnetski and Francis Brennan of Wilkes University, working with James Harrison of the Muzak corporation, set out to measure whether the background music piped into lifts and waiting rooms did anything detectable to the people subjected to it. They found that it did: subjects exposed to Muzak showed elevated levels of immunoglobulin A, an antibody involved in the body's first line of defence against infection. The effect was real, if modest, and consistent with a broader literature on the physiological consequences of mood. That the vindicated stimulus was elevator music — the most maligned genre in the history of sound — lent the result a certain awkwardness. The committee recognised the discovery that the music everyone claims to hate may, at the cellular level, be quietly looking after them.

Ig Nobel Prize in Peace

Ranking How Executions Actually Feel

Harold Hillman

Harold Hillman, a physiologist at the University of Surrey, undertook a study that most people prefer not to think about and that almost no one had examined with any rigour: how much pain a person is likely to experience during execution by each of the methods states have devised for the purpose. He worked through hanging, shooting, electrocution, gassing, and lethal injection from a physiologist's understanding of what happens to nerves and tissue, and concluded that several methods widely presumed to be humane were probably nothing of the sort. The work was grim, careful, and entirely serious. The Ig Nobel committee awarded it the Peace Prize — a category assignment that, on reflection, contains its own quiet argument.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physics

Gold, Fusion, and Garbage, All Unsolved

John O'M. Bockris

John Bockris, an electrochemist at Texas A&M University, pursued across the late 1980s and 1990s a trio of ambitions that would each, individually, have rewritten physics: cold fusion, the transmutation of base elements into gold, and the electrochemical incineration of household waste. The first had been announced by Fleischmann and Pons in 1989 and had largely collapsed under failed replication; Bockris persisted regardless, and added the medieval dream of alchemy for good measure, reporting that he had turned base elements into precious ones. His colleagues at the university were sufficiently alarmed to petition for an investigation. The Ig Nobel committee recognised the sheer breadth of the programme — a determination to solve energy, waste, and the transmutation of matter that was undimmed by the inconvenient absence of results.

Turing Award

Ninety Minutes That Invented Everyday Computing

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Douglas Engelbart

On 9 December 1968, Douglas Engelbart took the stage at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco and, in ninety minutes, demonstrated the computer mouse, hypertext linking, collaborative real-time document editing, and videoconferencing — technologies so far ahead of their time that many in the audience weren't certain what they were watching. The demonstration has since been called the Mother of All Demos, a title Engelbart didn't bestow on it himself; he spent the following decades watching other people commercialise the ideas while his own lab at SRI was slowly defunded and dispersed. By the time the Turing Award arrived in 1997, nearly three decades after the demo, so much of what he had shown had been so thoroughly absorbed into daily computing that the debt had become invisible. That is a particular kind of success, and a particular kind of indignity — to have imagined the future so accurately that it stopped looking like imagination. Engelbart himself always maintained that the point had never been the mouse; it was augmenting human intellect, a goal he considered very much unfinished.

Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)

Proteins That Grip DNA to Flip a Switch

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Mark S. Ptashne

By the 1960s, Jacob and Monod's work on the lac operon had established that genes could be switched on and off, but the molecular machinery doing the switching remained poorly understood. Mark Ptashne, working at Harvard from the mid-1960s onward with bacteriophage lambda — the virus that can either kill its bacterial host or lie dormant inside it for generations — identified and isolated the repressor proteins responsible for that choice, and showed precisely how they bound specific DNA sequences to silence or activate transcription. The work established a paradigm: gene regulation is carried out by proteins that recognise and physically contact specific nucleotide sequences, and the logic of a cell's behaviour emerges from which of those proteins is present and active. That insight is now so foundational to molecular biology that it appears in introductory textbooks before students have learned most of the other things the insight explains. Without it, the rational design of drugs that target transcription factors — a significant portion of modern oncology — would have taken rather longer to begin.

Dolly the cloned sheep announced

One Lamb, Chosen From 277 Attempts

Ian Wilmut and colleagues at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh had been working quietly on nuclear transfer techniques when, in the summer of 1996, a lamb was born that would become the most famous sheep in history. The technique — somatic cell nuclear transfer — involved taking the nucleus from a mammary gland cell of a six-year-old Finn Dorset ewe, fusing it with an enucleated egg cell using an electric pulse, and implanting the resulting embryo in a surrogate mother; Dolly was the one viable lamb from 277 attempts. The announcement came on 22 February 1997, and the world's response was immediate and anxious: newspapers ran human cloning headlines before anyone had proposed attempting it, governments convened emergency bioethics committees, and presidents issued moratoriums. The science itself was more precise and more interesting than the panic allowed for — it demonstrated, for the first time conclusively, that the nucleus of a fully differentiated adult cell retains the complete genetic programme needed to build an entire organism, overturning a long-standing assumption about developmental irreversibility. Science named Dolly its Breakthrough of the Year. She developed arthritis and a lung disease associated with older sheep, was euthanised at six, and is currently on display in the National Museum of Scotland.

Mars Pathfinder and Sojourner rover land on Mars

A Spacecraft That Landed by Bouncing

The conventional way to land a spacecraft on Mars was to fire retrorockets and lower the craft on cables, a procedure that required the rockets to work, the cables to hold, and several other things not to go wrong simultaneously. NASA's Mars Pathfinder tried something different on 4 July 1997: the lander plummeted into the Martian atmosphere at over 26,000 kilometres per hour, deployed a parachute, fired braking rockets, and then inflated a cocoon of airbags around itself and simply bounced across the ancient floodplain of Ares Vallis until it stopped. The 10.6-kilogram Sojourner rover — about the size of a microwave oven — rolled down a ramp and spent the following months trundling between rocks with names like Barnacle Bill and Yogi, analysing their composition with an alpha proton X-ray spectrometer. The mission returned more than 17,000 images and conducted fifteen chemical analyses before contact was lost in September. The entire project cost $280 million and was delivered on budget; the airbag landing system it tested became the template for the larger Spirit and Opportunity rovers that followed seven years later. It also, briefly, made the Jet Propulsion Laboratory website the most visited on the internet, a distinction nobody had anticipated needing to plan for.

Deep Blue defeats Garry Kasparov

Chess Was No Longer Ours Alone

Garry Kasparov had beaten Deep Blue in a six-game match in February 1996 without too much apparent difficulty, and the IBM engineers had spent the intervening year upgrading the machine considerably — doubling its speed to around 200 million positions per second, refining its evaluation functions, and consulting with grandmasters on positional heuristics. The rematch in May 1997 was held in New York and watched around the world; when Deep Blue won the decisive sixth game, and the match 3.5 to 2.5, it was the first time a computer had defeated a reigning world champion under standard tournament conditions. Kasparov alleged that the machine's second game had contained a move of such subtlety and creativity that it could only have been the result of human intervention, and demanded the logs; IBM declined to provide them promptly and did not agree to a third match. Whether the move in question was genius, luck, or a bug that happened to produce a good result remains a point of mild controversy. What is not controversial is the symbolic weight of the result, which arrived at the precise moment when artificial intelligence was shifting from a research curiosity to something that required explaining to the public. Chess, which humans had long taken as a measure of their own intelligence, was no longer theirs alone.

Comet Hale-Bopp reaches perihelion

Two Strangers Spotted the Same Light

Alan Hale spotted an unfamiliar fuzzy object from his driveway in New Mexico on 23 July 1995; Thomas Bopp, at roughly the same moment, saw the same thing through a borrowed telescope in the Arizona desert. Both reported the find within hours of each other, and the comet was named for both in the order the letters arrived. What they had found was a large, bright, and obligingly predictable object that would put on the best naked-eye comet display in decades — visible from the Northern Hemisphere for a record eighteen months as it swung through the inner solar system and reached perihelion on 1 April 1997. Its twin tails, a conventional dust tail and a blue ion tail, were among the finest photographed. Astronomers detected phosphorus compounds in its coma for the first time in any comet. And on 26 March 1997, days before perihelion, thirty-nine members of the Heaven's Gate religious group in San Diego were found dead, having concluded that a spacecraft was travelling in Hale-Bopp's wake and that suicide offered passage aboard. The comet itself, indifferent to all of this, completed its passage and departed for the outer solar system; it is not expected to return for roughly four thousand years.