2003

Nobel Prize in Physics

A Second Kind of Superconductor

Alexei Abrikosov · Vitaly L. Ginzburg · Anthony J. Leggett

Superconductivity — the phenomenon in which certain materials, chilled low enough, conduct electricity with zero resistance — had been known since 1911, and for decades it had been treated as a single well-understood thing. Abrikosov and Ginzburg, working in the Soviet Union in the 1950s, proved it was not: they constructed the theoretical framework that predicted a second type of superconductor, one in which magnetic field does not simply bounce off the material but threads through it in discrete, quantised filaments. That insight was not just elegant; it was the reason high-field superconducting magnets became possible, which is to say it was the prerequisite for every MRI machine ever built. Leggett then supplied the complementary theory for superfluid helium-3, a state of matter so alien that ordinary intuition collapses entirely and quantum mechanics has to be imported wholesale to explain the viscosity of a liquid. The Nobel Committee waited nearly half a century to hand over the prize — long enough that Ginzburg collected it at ninety.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Water Crosses the Membrane in Single File

Peter Agre · Roderick MacKinnon

Physiologists had understood for generations that water moves across cell membranes in quantities far too large to be explained by simple diffusion, and for generations they had not known quite how. Peter Agre resolved the mystery in the early 1990s when he isolated aquaporin-1, the protein channel that allows water molecules to cross in single file — present in every red blood cell and kidney tubule, and in the lens of the eye, and in numerous places the body absolutely cannot do without. Roderick MacKinnon attacked a different question with equal precision: how ion channels select potassium over sodium with an accuracy of ten thousand to one, even though the two ions differ in radius by less than a tenth of a nanometre. The crystal structures he published revealed a selectivity filter whose geometry is so exquisitely tuned that the right ion fits and the wrong one, being slightly smaller, does not — the atomic-scale basis of how every neuron fires. Two problems, posed decades apart, answered by structural biology in the same year, rewarded by the same prize.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

A Gradient Field Learns to Draw the Body

Paul C. Lauterbur · Sir Peter Mansfield

Nuclear magnetic resonance had been a physicist's tool since the 1940s, exquisitely sensitive to the quantum behaviour of atomic nuclei in a magnetic field — and essentially useless for imaging, because it gave you a single undifferentiated signal from everything in the sample at once. Paul Lauterbur changed that in 1973 by showing that if the magnetic field is varied across the sample in a deliberate gradient, each point in space resonates at a slightly different frequency and can be located precisely — spatial encoding through a shifting field, a trick so simple in retrospect that it is almost embarrassing. Peter Mansfield then provided the mathematical machinery to acquire and reconstruct those signals fast enough to be clinically useful, including the echo-planar technique that makes real-time imaging possible. From that pair of ideas grew a machine that now performs roughly a hundred million scans a year worldwide, distinguishing soft tissues from one another without a single X-ray, a millilitre of contrast dye, or any particular discomfort beyond lying very still. A world without Lauterbur's gradient is one where soft tissue can only be seen by opening the body up.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Where Decency Runs Out

J. M. Coetzee

John Maxwell Coetzee has always written at the places where decency runs out — where the liberal conscience discovers it is less solid than it supposed, and where history continues to make demands that no amount of private virtue can satisfy. The Swedish Academy cited him for portraying "the surprising involvement of the outsider," a phrase precise enough to be left alone. In Waiting for the Barbarians, an imperial magistrate gradually understands the nature of the empire he serves, then finds that understanding insufficient to save him from it. In Disgrace, a disgraced Cape Town academic retreats to the countryside and finds history waiting there too, indifferent to his particular narrative of collapse. The novels are airless in the best sense: there is no padding, no consolation, and the prose offers no softness the situation does not earn. Coetzee is the rare novelist who makes the absence of comfort feel like a form of respect.

Nobel Peace Prize

A Judge Demoted, Then Undeterred

Shirin Ebadi

Shirin Ebadi had been a judge — the first woman to serve as a judge in Iran — until the Islamic Revolution of 1979 decided that women could not hold such office and demoted her to a clerical post in the very court she had presided over. She became a lawyer instead, and spent the following decades defending political prisoners, journalists, and the families of dissidents killed by the state in what became known as the Chain Murders of the late 1990s — a series of deaths for which the Ministry of Intelligence eventually acknowledged partial responsibility. When the Nobel Committee awarded her the Peace Prize in 2003, she was in Paris; the Iranian government did not acknowledge the award. She accepted the medal in Oslo, became the first Muslim woman to receive the prize, and returned to Tehran. That she continued practising law there at all was a statement. That she kept winning cases occasionally was another.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Markets Have Moods That Persist

Robert F. Engle III · Clive W. J. Granger

Anyone who has watched financial markets for more than a week will have noticed that volatility does not arrive smoothly: quiet spells cluster with quiet spells, and turbulent days tend to follow turbulent days, as though the market has moods that persist. Robert Engle formalised this observation in 1982 with his autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity model — ARCH, mercifully — which gave statisticians a way to estimate current risk as a function of recent disturbances rather than treating variance as fixed. The improvement in financial risk assessment that followed was substantial; the institutions that ignored it in 2008 were also substantial, which is a separate matter. Clive Granger, meanwhile, had been addressing a subtler problem: how to detect genuine long-run relationships between economic variables that each drift randomly over time, as opposed to the spurious correlations that drift-plus-coincidence produces. His cointegration methods became standard equipment in empirical macroeconomics. Two men, two tools for describing the way time-series data actually behaves — which is messily, and with memory.

Ig Nobel Prize in Biology

Seventy-Five Minutes, Notebook in Hand

C. W. Moeliker

Kees Moeliker was working at the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam on the afternoon of 5 June 1995 when a mallard duck struck the museum's newly installed glass facade and fell to the ground dead. A second mallard, male, landed beside it and proceeded to copulate with the corpse for a period of seventy-five minutes, during which Moeliker, a man of scientific conscience, retrieved his notebook and began recording. The resulting paper — "The First Case of Homosexual Necrophilia in the Mallard Anas platyrhynchos" — was published in Deinsea, a peer-reviewed Dutch natural history journal, and is written throughout with a composure that is itself a minor achievement of prose style. Moeliker accepted the Ig Nobel Prize in person, which required travelling to Harvard; he has since established an annual commemoration at the museum on the anniversary of the incident, which is perhaps the most fitting possible tribute to a duck.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine

The Knowledge Grows a Bigger Hippocampus

Eleanor Maguire · David Gadian · Ingrid Johnsrude · Catriona Good · John Ashburner · Richard Frackowiak · Christopher Frith

To obtain a London taxi licence, a driver must pass the Knowledge — a test requiring the memorisation of approximately 25,000 streets within a six-mile radius of Charing Cross, together with thousands of points of interest, all held in the head without assistance. It takes most candidates between two and four years to prepare. Eleanor Maguire and colleagues at University College London scanned the brains of licensed London taxi drivers and compared them with ordinary Londoners, and found that the drivers had measurably larger posterior hippocampi — the region associated with spatial navigation — and that the enlargement correlated with years of experience on the road. The adult human brain, the study implied, is substantially more plastic than neuroscience had been comfortable admitting. The finding also raises the question of what Knowledge examiners make of being, effectively, the gatekeepers to a programme of mandatory neurological renovation — though they have not, so far, been asked.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physics

Dragging a Sheep, Rigorously

Jack Harvey · John Culvenor · Warren Payne · Steve Cowley · Michael Lawrance · David Stuart · Robyn Williams

Australian wool harvesting is a large industry, and the process of moving a shorn sheep across the shearing shed floor is a surprisingly non-trivial mechanical problem — the animal is not cooperative, the surfaces vary, and the workers' backs are finite. Harvey, Culvenor, and colleagues brought the considerable precision of biomechanical engineering to bear on the question, measuring with commendable rigour the forces required to drag a freshly shorn sheep across carpet, concrete, and grass, and modelling the associated postural loads on the shearer's spine. The work was funded as an occupational health study and is entirely serious in its methods. It is merely the subject that creates a certain tonal difficulty, and the team accepted the Ig Nobel in the spirit in which it was offered — which is to say, the one where the absurdity of the premise does not actually undermine the legitimacy of the inquiry.

Ig Nobel Prize in Interdisciplinary Research

Chickens Judge Faces Like We Do

Stefano Ghirlanda · Liselotte Jansson · Magnus Enquist

Ghirlanda, Jansson, and Enquist trained chickens to peck at images of human faces, rewarding them for faces people had previously rated as attractive and withholding reward for faces rated unattractive. The chickens acquired the discrimination with no particular difficulty and generalised it to new images in a pattern that closely tracked human aesthetic judgements. The finding is uncomfortable in a specific way: if the preferences that humans describe as beauty, symmetry, and sexual attractiveness can be acquired by a bird with a brain the size of a walnut, the cultural and psychological scaffolding usually erected around those preferences looks rather more rickety than it did before. The team were careful not to claim that chickens have opinions about human beauty, only that whatever chickens are doing turns out to resemble it closely — which is either reassuring or not, depending entirely on your prior commitments.

Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry

A Statue Too Toxic to Perch On

Yukio Hirose

Yukio Hirose of Kanazawa University investigated why one particular bronze statue in his city was conspicuously free of the pigeon droppings that plague public sculpture everywhere else. The answer lay in the alloy: the statue contained an unusually high proportion of arsenic, and the trace poison in the metal was apparently enough to persuade the local pigeons to roost somewhere less toxic. Hirose worked out the chemistry with care, identifying the compound responsible and confirming that the birds simply declined to land on it. It is, in its way, a small triumph of environmental observation — a piece of civic statuary doubling as an accidental repellent — though the prospect of deliberately casting arsenic monuments across the city to keep the pigeons moving is one that the planners appear, wisely, to have left unexplored.

Ig Nobel Prize in Economics

A Country, Available for Hire

Karl Schwärzler · Liechtenstein

Karl Schwärzler and the Principality of Liechtenstein arranged what may be the most literal expression of the market economy yet devised: the entire country, available for hire. Through a scheme run with a tourism company, corporations could rent the whole of Liechtenstein for a conference, a wedding, or a bar mitzvah — the villages, the vineyards, the mountain backdrop, and a rubber stamp allowing guests to imprint their own logo on the nation for the duration. Clients could have the local signage and welcome banners customised to taste, at a rate running to some tens of thousands of dollars a night. It is capitalism pursued to its logical terminus, the point at which a sovereign state becomes a venue with a postcode. The committee recognised a genuine innovation in the leasing of nation-states; the mountains, being included in the package, were not consulted.

Ig Nobel Prize in Engineering

Whatever Can Go Wrong, Will

John Paul Stapp · Edward A. Murphy, Jr. · George Nichols

The prize honoured the three men present at the birth, in 1949, of Murphy's Law — the principle that whatever can go wrong, will. Edward Murphy was an aerospace engineer working on Air Force rocket-sled experiments run by Colonel John Paul Stapp to test human tolerance of violent deceleration; George Nichols was the project manager. The exact wording is disputed, as perhaps the origin of a law about things going wrong ought to be, but the version that stuck emerged when a bank of sensors was found to have been wired incorrectly, every single one of them, and Murphy remarked on the reliability with which the wrong option gets chosen. Stapp repeated the maxim at a press conference, credited it to the team's safety-conscious pessimism, and it entered the language. The committee awarded the prize more than half a century later, to Stapp and Murphy posthumously and to Nichols — an outcome the law itself might have predicted.

Ig Nobel Prize in Literature

Eighty Papers on Petty Annoyance

John Trinkaus

John Trinkaus was a management professor with a gift for noticing, and cataloguing, the small daily irritations that most people merely endure. Over some four decades he published more than eighty short papers recording, with deadpan statistical rigour, such phenomena as the proportion of people who wear their baseball caps backwards, the percentage of pedestrians who cross against the light, the number of shoppers who carry more than the permitted items into the express checkout lane, and the fraction of drivers who fail to come to a complete halt at a stop sign. The reports are entirely serious in method and quietly comic in accumulation, a life's work assembled from the friction of ordinary existence. The committee honoured a body of research that treats petty annoyance as a legitimate object of study — which, for anyone who has ever stood behind the wrong person in an express lane, it manifestly is.

Ig Nobel Prize in Peace

Proving He Wasn't Dead

Lal Bihari

Lal Bihari, a farmer from Uttar Pradesh, discovered in 1976 that he had been officially declared dead — a relative had bribed a clerk to register his death and seize the family land, a fraud common enough in rural India to have a name. Being legally deceased, Bihari could not vote, own property, or contest the theft through ordinary channels, so he spent nearly two decades campaigning to prove his own existence: he added the word mritak, meaning dead, to his name, founded the Association of Dead People to advocate for others in the same bureaucratic limbo, staged his own funeral, ran for office, and demanded a widow's pension for his still-married wife. He was finally restored to the register of the living in 1994. The committee honoured a man who had waged, and eventually won, a posthumous campaign against paperwork.

Ig Nobel Prize in Psychology

Voters Reduce Leaders to Two Traits

Gian Vittorio Caprara · Claudio Barbaranelli · Philip Zimbardo

Gian Vittorio Caprara, Claudio Barbaranelli, and Philip Zimbardo — the last best known for the Stanford prison experiment — turned their attention to the personalities that voters project onto politicians. Analysing survey data from Italian elections, they found that while ordinary people describe themselves and one another using five broad dimensions of personality, the images voters form of political candidates collapse into just two: energy and honesty. The electorate, in other words, simplifies its leaders into a cartoon of vigour and trustworthiness, discarding the finer distinctions it applies to everyone else. The finding is either reassuring or dispiriting depending on one's faith in democratic deliberation, and the paper delivered it with straight-faced composure. The committee recognised a study whose title — "Politicians' Uniquely Simple Personalities" — is itself a small masterpiece of scientific tact.

Turing Award

A Computer Imagined for Children

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Alan Kay

In the early 1970s, Alan Kay was at Xerox PARC doing something unusual for a computer scientist: thinking seriously about children. His Dynabook concept — a personal, portable computer a child could carry and program — was a vision assembled from educational theory, developmental psychology, and a deep conviction that computing should be a medium of expression rather than a tool for calculation. The language he developed to realise it, Smalltalk, was the first to fully integrate objects, messages, and dynamic binding into a coherent system — not as features bolted onto an existing paradigm but as the paradigm itself. The graphical desktop environment that emerged from PARC, borrowed enthusiastically by Apple and then by everyone else, descended directly from these ideas. Kay was somewhat sardonic about the borrowing, having wanted a richer, more educational vision of personal computing than the world eventually chose. The Turing Award arrived three decades after the work, by which point the personal computer he had imagined was in a billion pockets, doing rather less than he had hoped.

Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)

Three Enzymes Read the Gene

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Robert G. Roeder

The central dogma of molecular biology — DNA to RNA to protein — had been established by the early 1960s, but the middle step, transcription, was initially described as though a single enzyme simply read the gene and produced the messenger. Robert Roeder began dismantling that simplification in 1969 when he discovered that higher organisms use three distinct RNA polymerases, each responsible for a different class of gene: ribosomal RNA, messenger RNA, and transfer RNA. He then spent the next four decades identifying the additional protein factors that assemble around each polymerase to tell it which genes to transcribe, in which cells, and under what conditions — work that ultimately required characterising hundreds of components and their interactions. Every laboratory that studies gene regulation, which is to say a very large fraction of biomedical research, works within the conceptual framework Roeder constructed. He built the stage; nearly everyone else in the field is performing on it.

Lasker Award (Clinical Medical Research)

Silencing the Signal Behind the Swelling

Albert Lasker Clinical Medical Research Award

Marc Feldmann · Ravinder N. Maini

Rheumatoid arthritis had been managed for decades with drugs that reduced inflammation without addressing its cause — aspirin, steroids, methotrexate — each effective to a degree and each carrying costs. Marc Feldmann and Ravinder Maini, working at the Kennedy Institute in London, identified in the late 1980s that tumour necrosis factor alpha was a master regulator of the inflammatory cascade that destroys joints in rheumatoid disease. The hypothesis was contentious, and the path from concept to clinical trial was not smooth; TNF is also necessary for immune defence, which gave sceptics reasonable grounds for concern. The antibody therapy they developed nonetheless worked, dramatically and measurably, in patients who had failed every other treatment. Anti-TNF therapy became the first biological treatment approved for autoimmune disease and subsequently spawned an entire pharmacological family — drugs now used for psoriasis, Crohn's disease, and ankylosing spondylitis among others. The joints that continue to function in millions of people who would otherwise have been immobilised are Feldmann and Maini's most eloquent citation.

WMAP first-year results establish age and composition of the universe

The Universe's Age, to Two Percent

The cosmic microwave background — the faint, nearly uniform glow of radiation left when the universe cooled enough, about 380,000 years after the Big Bang, for atoms to form and light to travel freely — had been detected in 1965 and mapped with increasing precision since. The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, launched in 2001, was designed to read its fine structure with more sensitivity than any instrument before it, and in February 2003 returned its first detailed full-sky map. From the pattern of temperature fluctuations, each smaller than a hundred-thousandth of a degree, cosmologists derived an age for the universe of 13.7 billion years with an uncertainty of about two percent — an answer so precise it felt almost impolite to ask. The composition came out at roughly 4 percent ordinary matter, 23 percent dark matter, and 73 percent dark energy — the last term coined partly because "the thing that is making the universe's expansion accelerate and that no one understands" does not fit on a pie chart. The data confirmed inflation, constrained the geometry of space to be nearly flat, and raised as many questions as it settled, which is the best a measurement can do.

SARS coronavirus identified

A New Coronavirus, Named by April

In late 2002, hospitals in Guangdong province began reporting an unusual pneumonia — severe, spreading among healthcare workers, and resistant to the standard treatments for bacterial infection. By March 2003 it had a name, SARS, and the WHO had issued a global alert; by April, laboratories in Hong Kong, Germany, and Atlanta had identified the cause almost simultaneously as a previously unknown coronavirus, working at a speed that owed much to the genomic tools assembled in the two decades since HIV. The outbreak spread to 30 countries and killed 916 people before aggressive isolation measures — quarantine enforced with a rigour that disrupted entire cities — brought transmission to a halt by July. The episode demonstrated that a novel respiratory pathogen could circle the globe via a single airport within weeks, a fact that public health authorities absorbed and that everyone else largely put aside until a structurally similar virus appeared in 2019 and found the world no better prepared.

Space Shuttle Columbia disaster

Foam, a Breach, Seventeen Years Later

Columbia lifted off on 16 January 2003 for a sixteen-day science mission. At launch, a piece of foam insulation — the same material that had shed from external tanks on dozens of previous flights without consequence, or at least without noticed consequence — struck the leading edge of the left wing and punched a hole. For the next fortnight, seven astronauts conducted experiments in orbit: Rick Husband, William McCool, Michael Anderson, Kalpana Chawla, David Brown, Laurel Clark, and Ilan Ramon. On the morning of 1 February, during reentry, superheated gas entered through the breach and the shuttle broke apart over Texas and Louisiana. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board found not just a foam problem but the same organisational pathology that had destroyed Challenger in 1986 — a culture in which evidence of risk was normalised rather than acted on, and in which the question of whether the damage was survivable was not answered partly because asking it loudly enough felt like poor form. Two shuttles, fourteen people, the same failure mode, seventeen years apart.

China launches its first crewed spacecraft

Fourteen Orbits, Then Inner Mongolia

Yang Liwei, a 38-year-old fighter pilot selected from an initial pool of 1,500 candidates, launched aboard Shenzhou 5 from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre on 15 October 2003 and spent 21 hours and 23 minutes in orbit, completing fourteen circuits of the Earth before landing under parachute in Inner Mongolia the following morning. China thus became the third nation in history — after the Soviet Union in 1961 and the United States later that same year — to place a human in space using entirely domestic technology, ending a development programme that had been running, mostly in secrecy, since the late 1990s. Yang emerged from the capsule looking composed, which was considered appropriate. The mission was carefully bounded — no spacewalk, no docking — but the point was made with quiet clarity: the era in which human spaceflight was a two-country affair was over.

Concorde makes its final commercial flight

The Sky's Deeper Blue, Retired

Concorde entered service in January 1976, flying between London and Bahrain and between Paris and Rio, and eventually settling into the transatlantic route — New York to London in three and a half hours — that it would operate for most of its commercial life. For nearly three decades it was the fastest passenger aircraft in service, cruising at Mach 2 and 60,000 feet, where the curvature of the Earth is visible and the sky above is a deeper shade of blue. The economics had never been comfortable — the planes carried 100 passengers where a 747 carried 400, the fuel consumption was formidable, and the sonic boom restricted it to oceanic routes — but they had been manageable. The crash of an Air France Concorde at Paris in July 2000, which killed all 109 on board, grounded the fleet for fourteen months, and the post-September 2001 collapse in premium transatlantic travel did the rest. British Airways flew its last Concorde from New York on 24 October 2003; Air France had already retired its aircraft in May. The supersonic age in commercial aviation did not end with a technical failure but with an accounting one — which is either more or less dignified, depending on your view of accountants.