1998

Nobel Prize in Physics

A Third of a Charge, Democratically Produced

Robert B. Laughlin · Horst L. Störmer · Daniel C. Tsui

Among the things physicists had been reasonably certain of was this: an electron cannot carry a fraction of an electron's charge. Charge comes in whole units; that is simply the rule. In 1982, Störmer and Tsui cooled a thin semiconductor sandwich to temperatures within a whisker of absolute zero and subjected it to magnetic fields of extraordinary intensity, and the electrons inside began misbehaving collectively in a way that made it appear as though each carried exactly one-third of the standard charge. Laughlin, rather than dismissing this as experimental error, produced a mathematical explanation: what looks like a fractional charge is a collective excitation of the entire electron sea — an emergent particle, a sort of democratic hallucination of the system as a whole. The quantum Hall effect, in its fractional guise, revealed that quantum mechanics at extreme conditions can produce entities with no classical analogue whatsoever. Modern proposals for topological quantum computing lean on precisely these quasiparticles.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

The Molecule Solved by Its Own Density

Walter Kohn · John Pople

For most of the twentieth century, the quantum mechanics of molecules was theoretically exact and computationally hopeless. To solve Schrödinger's equation for a many-electron system in full was to drown in a wavefunction whose complexity grew exponentially with each atom added; even modest molecules were, in practice, out of reach. In 1964 and 1965, Walter Kohn and his collaborators showed that the total energy of a system can be determined entirely from the electron density — a function of three spatial coordinates rather than three-times-N — which reduced an impossible problem to a tractable one without discarding the physics. John Pople then spent decades translating these ideas into usable computational tools, culminating in the Gaussian program, which became something like the word processor of theoretical chemistry. Between them, Kohn and Pople made quantum chemistry routine: today every pharmaceutical company, every materials lab, every attempt to design a catalyst before synthesising it depends on machinery they built.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

A Smog Gas Turns Out to Be a Messenger

Robert F. Furchgott · Louis J. Ignarro · Ferid Murad

Nitroglycerin had been relieving angina since the 1870s, and nobody was entirely certain why. By the late 1970s, working independently and with instruments nowhere near sensitive enough for the task, Robert Furchgott, Louis Ignarro, and Ferid Murad pieced together the answer: the cardiovascular system uses nitric oxide — a gas better known for its role in smog and in the acid rain that eats limestone cathedrals — as a signalling molecule, instructing blood vessels to relax and widen. That a simple diatomic gas could function as a messenger inside a living body was, to put it gently, not the prevailing assumption; the prevailing assumption had been that signalling molecules were large, complex, and durable, not small, reactive, and gone in seconds. The practical consequences arrived quickly: the discovery of the nitric oxide pathway was the mechanism by which Viagra was eventually developed, and the research has since pointed toward treatments for septic shock, pulmonary hypertension, and heart disease. Alfred Nobel, who made his fortune from nitroglycerin, took the compound daily for his own heart condition. He did not live to know why it worked.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Names Become a Luxury When Darkness Is Epidemic

José Saramago

José Saramago was already seventy-five when the committee reached him, which perhaps explains why the citation's phrase — 'with parables sustained by imagination, compassion, and irony' — carried the particular density of something long overdue. He had spent the earlier decades of his life as a communist in Salazar's Portugal, translating and editing and writing novels that the regime's cultural atmosphere made publishing somewhat theoretical. When he was finally free to work, he wrote in a style as singular as his situation: long sentences that uncoiled across whole paragraphs, dialogue unpunctuated and woven into the prose, characters named only by their condition — the Doctor's Wife, the First Blind Man — as though individual names were a luxury that epidemic darkness had revoked. Blindness, published in 1995, imagined an entire society struck suddenly sightless; it is the kind of book that reads as parable and feels uncomfortably like reportage. He was a communist and an atheist, which lent the prize, when it arrived, a welcome edge of complication.

Nobel Peace Prize

Two Men Who Bet on the Unfinished Agreement

John Hume · David Trimble

The Troubles had run for roughly thirty years by the time the Good Friday Agreement was signed on 10 April 1998, leaving more than 3,500 people dead and a geography — Northern Ireland, the Irish border, the British state — that had become synonymous, in the world's imagination, with intractable sectarian hatred. John Hume of the Social Democratic and Labour Party had spent decades insisting that political means could work where bombs had failed, absorbing considerable pressure from within his own community for doing so; David Trimble of the Ulster Unionist Party had led his party into negotiations that many of its members regarded as a concession too far, and would spend years afterward defending that choice. The agreement they helped produce established power-sharing institutions, changed the constitutional status of Northern Ireland from a disputed birthright to a matter of popular consent, and included the Republic of Ireland in governance structures for the first time. The Nobel committee gave them the prize in the same year, before the institutions had fully taken hold, which was either optimism or a bet that recognition would shore up the architecture. On balance, it was not wrong.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Famine Is a Failure to Claim, Not to Grow

Amartya Sen

The great famines of the twentieth century — Bengal in 1943, Ethiopia in 1984, Bangladesh in 1974 — happened not because food had simply run out but because certain people had lost the legal and economic means to claim it. Amartya Sen made this argument carefully and at length in Poverty and Famines in 1981, demonstrating that famine is a failure of entitlements, not just of harvests, and that in every major famine of the modern period food was still being exported from the affected region. His broader contribution was to insist that welfare economics measure what people can actually do and be — their capabilities and substantive freedoms — rather than their incomes alone, a reframing that made the field both more honest and considerably less comfortable for those who preferred to think in aggregates. The Human Development Index, which the United Nations now publishes annually, is substantially his intellectual progeny. The picture he drew of poverty was more accurate than the one it replaced; it was also harder to look away from.

Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Water's Memory, Now with an Email Address

Jacques Benveniste

Jacques Benveniste had already claimed one Ig Nobel in 1991 for the original proposition that water retains a memory of substances once dissolved in it — a finding that would have required tearing up the better part of chemistry but which the broader scientific community declined to accept. By 1998 he had progressed. The water's memory, it now emerged, could be digitised, transmitted over telephone lines, and reconstituted at the receiving end, allowing homeopathic signals to arrive via modem. This represented a significant expansion of scope: water had not just a memory but, apparently, an email address. The committee awarded him a second prize in recognition of the consistency of the enterprise, if not its conclusions.

Ig Nobel Prize in Biology

Prozac Makes Clams Spawn, Apparently Happily

Peter Fong

Peter Fong administered fluoxetine — Prozac — to freshwater clams and observed that the drug reliably induced spawning behaviour in the molluscs, apparently by elevating serotonin levels and triggering the reproductive system. Clams, it turns out, use serotonin to coordinate the release of eggs and sperm, making them unexpectedly amenable to the same class of compounds prescribed for human depression. Fong described his results in Pharmaceutical News with the observation that the clams appeared 'happy,' which may be the most contested adverb in the history of malacology. The committee noted his contribution to our understanding of bivalve wellbeing and left the deeper philosophical questions — whether a clam that spawns under pharmaceutical influence is happier, or merely busier — to future researchers.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physics

Quantum Terms, Loosely Related to Quantum Mechanics

Deepak Chopra

Deepak Chopra, author of some two dozen books by 1998, had developed a theoretical framework in which quantum mechanics underpinned consciousness, ageing, healing, and the general organisation of a flourishing life. Quantum uncertainty, in this framework, licensed a great deal. The Ig Nobel committee awarded him the Physics prize for this unique interpretation of quantum mechanics as applied to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — specifically for 'the use of quantum mechanical terms in ways that bear only the most tenuous relationship to actual quantum mechanics.' The physicists on the committee presumably handled their feelings with appropriate superposition.

Ig Nobel Prize in Literature

Flatulence as a Defence Against Dread

Mara Sidoli

The psychoanalytic literature is, by any measure, a capacious and ambitious body of work, and Mara Sidoli's 1996 paper 'Farting as a Defence Against Unspeakable Dread' takes its place within it without obvious embarrassment. Sidoli, a Jungian analyst, argued through careful clinical case material that a patient had deployed flatulence as a psychic defence mechanism — a way of expelling not gas but anxiety, maintaining somatic control at moments when psychic integration threatened to fail. The paper is, as these things go, entirely serious. The Ig Nobel committee recognised it for bringing genuine academic apparatus to a subject the rest of the field had, perhaps wisely, left alone.

Ig Nobel Prize in Safety Engineering

Built by a Man, Tested by Trucks

Troy Hurtubise

Troy Hurtubise, a prospector from North Bay, Ontario, had an encounter with a grizzly bear in the late 1980s that left him sufficiently impressed to spend the following years and a substantial portion of his personal finances building a suit of armour capable of surviving a repeat engagement. The resulting device — several hundred pounds of steel, titanium, chain mail, and high-density plastic — was tested by Hurtubise himself, who submitted to being struck with logs, run over by trucks, and hurled down hillsides, all on camera. The documentary was called Project Grizzly. It screened at film festivals. The grizzly bear's perspective on the entire enterprise was not recorded, though its contribution to the initial design brief was, in a sense, foundational.

Ig Nobel Prize in Economics

An Economic Stimulus Built on Human Cloning

Richard Seed

Richard Seed, a physicist by training rather than a biologist, announced to the world in 1998 that he intended to clone a human being — not eventually, not in principle, but soon, and that no regulatory or ethical objection would deter him. He had no laboratory equal to the task, no track record in reproductive medicine, and no evident grasp of the technical distance between Dolly the sheep and a cloned person, but he had conviction and a gift for the alarming soundbite, and the announcement duly circled the globe. The Ig Nobel committee honoured his proposal to stimulate the economy through the mass production of human beings — an economic stimulus package of unusual ambition, resting on a technology he did not possess.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine

Putrid for Five Years, After One Prick

Caroline Mills · Meirion Llewelyn · David Kelly · Peter Holt

The case report bore the title 'A Man Who Pricked His Finger and Smelled Putrid for 5 Years,' which is very nearly the whole story. Caroline Mills, Meirion Llewelyn, David Kelly, and Peter Holt of the Royal Gwent Hospital in Newport documented a patient who, after a minor puncture wound, developed a chronic infection that left him emitting an odour so persistent and so unpleasant that it came to define half a decade of his life. The medicine was real, the offending organism eventually identified, and the paper a legitimate contribution to the literature on unusual chronic infection. The Ig Nobel committee recognised it partly for the science and partly, one suspects, for the title, which achieves in eleven words what most case reports cannot manage in a full abstract.

Ig Nobel Prize in Peace

Aggressively Peaceful Nuclear Explosions

Atal Bihari Vajpayee · Nawaz Sharif

In May 1998, India conducted a series of underground nuclear tests at Pokhran; within weeks Pakistan answered with its own detonations in the Chagai hills, and the subcontinent acquired two openly nuclear-armed neighbours where before it had possessed a studied ambiguity. Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Nawaz Sharif, the prime ministers who authorised the respective programmes, each presented the tests to their populations as a contribution to regional stability — the logic of deterrence holding that the surest route to peace runs through the credible capacity for mutual annihilation. The Ig Nobel committee awarded them the Peace Prize jointly, for aggressively peaceful nuclear explosions, and left the paradox to speak, as it tends to, for itself.

Ig Nobel Prize in Science Education

A Fourth-Grader Tests the Energy Field

Dolores Krieger

Dolores Krieger, a professor of nursing at New York University, developed and tirelessly promoted Therapeutic Touch — a practice in which a practitioner heals by manipulating the patient's energy field with the hands, generally without touching the patient at all. It was taught in nursing schools, practised in hospitals, and defended as a legitimate clinical intervention for decades. In 1998, a nine-year-old named Emily Rosa tested twenty-one practitioners under simple controlled conditions and found they could not, better than chance, detect which of their own hands her energy field was hovering over; the result was published in a major medical journal. The Ig Nobel committee honoured Krieger's contribution to science education — the field having been educated, in the end, by a fourth-grader.

Ig Nobel Prize in Statistics

Locker-Room Wisdom, Measured and Found Wanting

Jerald Bain · Kerry Siminoski

Jerald Bain of Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto and Kerry Siminoski of the University of Alberta undertook to settle, with actual measurement, one of folklore's more persistent claims: that a man's height, foot size, and penile length are reliably related. They measured, they correlated, and they reported their findings in a peer-reviewed journal, concluding that height and foot size bore only a weak statistical association with the third variable — too weak to support any prediction one might be tempted to make from a shoe. The study was rigorous and its conclusion deflationary. The Ig Nobel committee recognised the achievement of subjecting a piece of locker-room wisdom to the discipline of statistics, which found it wanting.

Turing Award

A Transaction That Cannot Half-Happen

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Jim Gray

The question of how to make a database reliable — truly reliable, in the sense that a power failure mid-transaction would leave the data either fully updated or fully not, and never in some corrupt in-between state — occupied Jim Gray for most of his career at IBM, Tandem, and later Microsoft Research. His answers became the ACID properties: Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability. Along with two-phase commit protocols and his work on transaction theory more broadly, these ideas formed the conceptual bedrock on which every major database system built afterward was designed. The practical consequence is that the banking transaction you make today will either go through completely or not at all, which is the sort of guarantee that sounds obvious until you consider how many moving parts must be coordinated to provide it. Gray received the Turing Award in 1998. In January 2007, he sailed his boat out of San Francisco Bay alone and was never seen again; the search was among the largest in Coast Guard history, and found nothing.

Fields Medal (1998 — awarded every four years)

A Silver Plaque That Outweighed the Medal

Fields Medal

Richard Borcherds · Timothy Gowers · Maxim Kontsevich · Curtis McMullen

The 1998 International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin produced one of the stranger medal ceremonies in the award's history, in part because Andrew Wiles — who had proved Fermat's Last Theorem in 1995 — was forty-five, five years past the age limit, and could only receive a special silver plaque from the IMU rather than the medal itself, which made the occasion feel both celebratory and slightly awkward. The medals went to four others: Richard Borcherds, for the proof of the moonshine conjecture, an improbable and still somewhat mysterious connection between the Monster group and modular forms that had baffled mathematicians since the 1970s; Timothy Gowers, for deep work in functional analysis and combinatorics; Maxim Kontsevich, for contributions to knot invariants and deformation quantisation that have since proved central to mathematical physics; and Curtis McMullen, for his work in complex dynamics and the geometry of three-manifolds. Four fields, four laureates, and one silver plaque that meant more than the medal it was not.

Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)

The Clock That Tells a Cell When to Divide

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Leland H. Hartwell · Yoshio Masui · Paul Nurse

Every one of the roughly thirty-seven trillion cells in a human body carries a copy of the genome, and every time one of them divides, the entire library must be accurately duplicated and the division delayed until the copying is finished and checked. How this coordination happens — what molecular machinery acts as the timekeeper and the gatekeeper — was the question that Leland Hartwell, Yoshio Masui, and Paul Nurse answered, working in yeast and frog eggs through the 1970s and 1980s. Hartwell identified the cell-cycle checkpoint genes; Masui discovered the maturation-promoting factor that drives cells into division; Nurse found the cyclin-dependent kinase at the heart of the whole mechanism. Together they described the molecular clock that governs when a cell divides and the quality-control system that makes sure it does not do so prematurely. Because the loss of that control is essentially what cancer is, the Lasker committee recognised the work in 1998; the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, three years later, confirmed the judgment.

Accelerating universe discovered via Type Ia supernovae

The Universe Is Speeding Up, Not Slowing Down

The expectation, going into the 1990s, was that measuring distant supernovae would settle a straightforward question: how much is gravity slowing the expansion of the universe? The answer would determine whether the cosmos would coast forever, slow to a halt, or eventually collapse. Two competing teams — Saul Perlmutter's Supernova Cosmology Project, based at Berkeley, and the High-Z Supernova Search Team led by Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess — were each measuring Type Ia supernovae, which have a known intrinsic brightness and can therefore serve as standard candles for cosmic distances. What both teams found, independently and to their own considerable alarm, was that the distant supernovae were fainter than they should be — not because the universe's expansion was slowing, but because it was speeding up. Something was pushing the cosmos apart faster with every passing billion years. The name 'dark energy' was coined the following year by cosmologist Michael Turner, partly because it was evocative and partly because nobody had anything better. It remains the placeholder for a quantity that makes up approximately sixty-eight percent of the universe and is completely unexplained.

Super-Kamiokande establishes neutrino oscillation and mass

A Particle Caught Changing Its Identity Underground

The Standard Model of particle physics, as it had stood for two decades, assumed that neutrinos were massless — not as a measured fact, exactly, but as a working assumption that kept the model tidy. Neutrinos had been extraordinarily difficult to detect at all; whether they had mass was a separate, harder question. The Super-Kamiokande detector, a fifty-thousand-tonne tank of ultra-pure water buried a kilometre beneath a Japanese mountain and lined with eleven thousand photomultiplier tubes, was built to address questions like this one. In June 1998, the collaboration announced that atmospheric muon-neutrinos — produced when cosmic rays strike the atmosphere — were disappearing in transit, transforming into tau-neutrinos as they passed through the Earth. A particle that oscillates between identities must, by the quantum mechanics of the situation, have mass. The Standard Model had been wrong on this point. The discovery was a genuine crack in what had been the most precisely tested theory in physics, and it opened the question of how much mass neutrinos actually have — a question that remains, two decades later, not fully resolved.

Caenorhabditis elegans genome published — first multicellular organism

A Millimetre of Transparency, Fully Mapped

The nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans is about a millimetre long, lives for roughly three weeks, and exists in a state of what biologists call elegant simplicity: precisely 959 somatic cells in every adult hermaphrodite, with the complete lineage of each cell — from fertilised egg to adult — mapped and documented by the early 1980s. It was, in other words, exactly the kind of organism one would choose if one wanted to understand, in full, what a genome does. On 11 December 1998, the sequence of its 97-million-base-pair genome was published in Science, the culmination of a thirteen-year effort by the Sanger Centre and the Genome Institute at Washington University. First multicellular animal to be fully sequenced, it contained roughly 19,000 protein-coding genes — a count that surprised researchers by its density, and that has remained unexpectedly close to the human number. C. elegans became the reference against which gene function, ageing, and development in more complex animals could be measured, a millimetre of transparency doing work that larger, more opaque organisms could not.

Zarya — first ISS module — launches

An Unmanned Box Waiting for Something to Join It

The International Space Station began as a single module: Zarya, a Russian-built Functional Cargo Block about the size of a city bus, which lifted from Baikonur on a Proton rocket on 20 November 1998. It was, in its first weeks, an unmanned box in orbit — a power source and propulsion system waiting for something to connect to. The American Unity node followed seventeen days later aboard Space Shuttle Endeavour, and on 10 December astronauts floated between the two joined modules for the first time, activating hatches in what was, by any reasonable measure, the most expensive piece of plumbing in history. The station that grew from these two modules — involving sixteen nations, more than forty assembly flights, and a continuous human presence since November 2000 — became the longest inhabited artificial structure ever built, an achievement in logistics and political tolerance that its Cold War precursors could not have imagined. Zarya itself, still attached somewhere in the middle of the structure, continues to orbit.

Google founded

A Link Counted as a Vote

Larry Page and Sergey Brin met at Stanford in 1995 and spent the following years developing a thesis that the structure of the web — specifically, which pages linked to which — encoded something about quality that keyword frequency alone could not capture. PageRank, as they called it, treated each link to a page as a vote, weighted by the authority of the page casting it, producing a ranking of results that was, in practice, markedly better than what the existing search engines offered. Google was incorporated on 4 September 1998 in a garage in Menlo Park, with an initial investment of $100,000 from Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim, who wrote the cheque before the company formally existed. Within a few years it was handling the majority of the world's search queries; within a decade it had become an advertising platform, an email provider, a mobile operating system, a map, and a geopolitical concern. The original insight — that what other people point to tells you something true — was simple enough to fit on a whiteboard, and consequential enough to restructure the information economy.