2003

Nobel Prize in Physics

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

Abrikosov and Ginzburg built the theoretical framework for superconductivity and predicted a second type in which magnetic field threads into the material as discrete filaments — an insight that made high-field superconducting magnets possible. Leggett contributed the complementary theory for superfluid helium-3, matter in a state so strange that quantum mechanics must be consulted to explain it.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Peter Agre · Roderick MacKinnon

Agre found the protein that lets water cross a cell membrane in quantity — the aquaporin, present in every kidney tubule and red blood cell — solving a mystery that physiologists had puzzled over for decades. MacKinnon worked out how ion channels select for one ion over another with almost perfect fidelity, revealing the atomic geometry of selectivity itself.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Paul C. Lauterbur · Sir Peter Mansfield

Lauterbur showed that by varying the magnetic field across a sample, an NMR signal could be spatially encoded — the principle of MRI. Mansfield worked out the mathematics to do it fast enough to be clinically useful. Today about a hundred million MRI scans are performed each year, none of which would exist without these two ideas.

Nobel Prize in Literature

J. M. Coetzee

The South African novelist who wrote Disgrace and Waiting for the Barbarians was cited for portraying "the surprising involvement of the outsider" — a phrase that fits his work precisely. Coetzee's characters inhabit histories they cannot escape and moral positions they cannot defend, and the novels offer no comfortable exit.

Nobel Peace Prize

Shirin Ebadi

Ebadi, an Iranian lawyer and the country's first female judge before the revolution stripped her of the title, had spent years defending political prisoners, journalists, and the families of dissidents who had been murdered by the state. She was the first Muslim woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

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

Financial markets are volatile in clusters — calm periods and turbulent periods each tend to persist. Engle developed ARCH models to capture that structure and improve estimates of risk. Granger found tools for detecting long-run relationships between variables that drift together over time, work that became essential to empirical macroeconomics.

Ig Nobel Prize in Biology

C. W. Moeliker

Moeliker documented the first scientifically recorded case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck, an event he had witnessed from his office window when a duck struck the glass and was immediately attended to by another male. The paper, published in a peer-reviewed natural history journal, is written with commendable composure throughout.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine

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

London taxi drivers, who must memorise 25,000 streets before they can be licensed, have measurably larger hippocampi than other Londoners — and the longer they have driven, the larger the hippocampus. The adult human brain, it turns out, is more plastic than neuroscience had comfortably admitted.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physics

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

The team measured, with rigorous experimental care, the force required to drag sheep across various surfaces — carpet, concrete, grass, and so forth. Wool harvesting, it emerges, has a physics that repays investigation, even if the sheep involved were not consulted.

Ig Nobel Prize in Interdisciplinary Research

Stefano Ghirlanda · Liselotte Jansson · Magnus Enquist

Chickens trained to peck at images of human faces turned out to share human aesthetic preferences — favouring the same face shapes that people rate as attractive. The finding was uncomfortable for those who prefer to believe that beauty is culturally constructed, and reassuring to no one in particular.

Turing Award

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Alan Kay

Kay led the team at Xerox PARC that created Smalltalk, the language that fully realised what objects, messages, and dynamic binding could do together. The personal computer you are probably reading this on descends more or less directly from the ideas Kay assembled in the early 1970s.

Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Robert G. Roeder

Roeder discovered that higher organisms use three distinct RNA polymerases for different classes of gene, then spent decades identifying the additional factors that tell each polymerase which genes to transcribe and when. Every study of gene expression since has worked within the framework he built.

Lasker Award (Clinical Medical Research)

Albert Lasker Clinical Medical Research Award

Marc Feldmann · Ravinder N. Maini

Rheumatoid arthritis was a disease managed but not mastered until Feldmann and Maini identified tumour necrosis factor as a key driver and developed antibodies to block it. Anti-TNF therapy — the first biological treatment for autoimmune disease — transformed millions of patients' lives and spawned a whole family of drugs.

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

In February, the WMAP satellite released its first detailed map of the cosmic microwave background — the faint glow left by the universe's first light — and from its fine structure derived an age of 13.7 billion years, plus or minus 200 million. The composition came out at roughly 4 percent ordinary matter, 23 percent dark matter, and 73 percent the thing labelled dark energy because no one knows what it is.

SARS coronavirus identified

A previously unknown coronavirus was traced as the cause of severe acute respiratory syndrome in March — work done nearly simultaneously by laboratories in Hong Kong, Germany, and Atlanta. The outbreak spread to 30 countries and killed 916 people before containment measures, applied with considerable speed and some good fortune, brought it to a halt by July.

Space Shuttle Columbia disaster

On 1 February, Space Shuttle Columbia broke apart during reentry over Texas, killing all seven crew members: Rick Husband, William McCool, Michael Anderson, Kalpana Chawla, David Brown, Laurel Clark, and Ilan Ramon. A piece of foam insulation had struck the leading edge of the left wing during launch; superheated gas entered through the breach on reentry. It was, investigators found, the same class of decision-making failure that had destroyed Challenger seventeen years before.

China launches its first crewed spacecraft

Yang Liwei launched aboard Shenzhou 5 on 15 October and orbited the Earth fourteen times in 21 hours before returning safely, making China the third country in history — after the Soviet Union and the United States — to send a human to space under its own power.

Concorde makes its final commercial flight

On 24 October, British Airways flew its last Concorde service from New York to London, closing 27 years of transatlantic crossings at twice the speed of sound. Air France had retired its fleet in May. The combination of high operating costs, a Paris crash in 2000, and a post-September 11 slump in premium travel made the mathematics, at last, impossible to argue with.