2005

Nobel Prize in Physics

A Ruler Made of Light

Roy J. Glauber · John L. Hall · Theodor W. Hänsch

For most of the twentieth century, the physics of light was treated as a settled matter — Maxwell had handled the classical side, Einstein the quantum, and that was more or less that. Roy Glauber thought otherwise, and in the early 1960s built a quantum theory of optical coherence that explained why laser light and the warm glow of a candle are profoundly different things despite both being photons: it is not the frequency but the statistical correlations between photons that distinguish coherent from chaotic light. Meanwhile, John Hall and Theodor Hänsch were attacking a different problem — how do you measure the colour of light to the precision needed to test the deepest predictions of quantum electrodynamics? Their answer was the optical frequency comb, a laser that produces a precise ruler of evenly-spaced spectral lines across a wide range of frequencies, allowing a measurement of light's colour to better than one part in ten to the fifteenth. The comb is now the heartbeat of the most accurate clocks ever built, and those clocks are the foundation on which GPS, fibre-optic communications, and tests of general relativity all quietly depend.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Two Pairs of Dancers Swap Partners

Yves Chauvin · Robert H. Grubbs · Richard R. Schrock

Olefin metathesis — the reaction in which carbon-carbon double bonds break apart and reassemble with new partners, like two pairs of dancers who split off and switch — had been observed as a puzzling phenomenon in industrial catalysis since the 1950s, and no one fully understood what was happening at the molecular level. In 1971, Yves Chauvin, working at the Institut Français du Pétrole, supplied the mechanism: a metal carbene complex acts as the matchmaker, forming a four-membered ring intermediate that swaps the partners around. The insight was clean and explanatory, but the catalysts of the day were finicky, moisture-sensitive, and unsuitable for the delicate molecules pharmaceutical chemists care about. Robert Grubbs at Caltech and Richard Schrock at MIT independently designed stable ruthenium and molybdenum catalysts — the Grubbs catalysts in particular became almost embarrassingly easy to use — and metathesis moved from curiosity to indispensable. It is now central to the manufacture of drugs for HIV, cancer, and hypertension, allowing chemists to stitch together ring-shaped molecules that would otherwise require many steps of painful protection and deprotection. The committee called it a great step forward for green chemistry, and for once the description was earned.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

He Drank the Proof Himself

Barry J. Marshall · J. Robin Warren

When Robin Warren, a pathologist in Perth, began noticing the same curved bacteria lurking in stomach-biopsy specimens in 1979, the reaction from colleagues was polite dismissal: the stomach was far too acidic for bacteria to survive, and peptic ulcers were well understood to be the product of stress, spicy food, and the corrosive effects of excess acid. Warren persisted, and enlisted a young gastroenterology registrar named Barry Marshall, who spent years trying to infect animals with the organism — later named Helicobacter pylori — and getting nowhere. In 1984, finding no other option and characteristically untroubled by the stakes, Marshall simply drank a broth of the cultured bacteria himself, developed gastritis within days, and cured it with a short course of antibiotics. The experiment was almost comically direct: here is the cause, here is the cure, here is the investigator's stomach as evidence. Journals remained sceptical for years; the medical orthodoxy has a tendency to protect itself. Eventually, the evidence accumulated to the point where dismissal became untenable, and by the 1990s antibiotic treatment for ulcers had become standard care — sparing millions of patients surgery, a lifetime of antacids, and the quiet misery of an entirely preventable disease.

Nobel Prize in Literature

The Precipice Under Everyday Prattle

Harold Pinter

Harold Pinter spent the 1950s and 1960s writing plays in which people in shabby rooms say almost nothing to each other, and somehow the menace is unbearable. The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, The Homecoming — in these works, ordinary domestic language becomes a site of power, evasion, and barely suppressed violence; what is not said accumulates until it crushes the people on stage. The Swedish Academy, awarding him the 2005 prize, praised his capacity to uncover "the precipice under everyday prattle," which is about as precise a description of what he actually does as any citation manages. Pinter was 75, and had been a controversialist for decades, publicly opposing the Gulf War and the invasion of Iraq with an anger that seemed at once very personal and very principled. His Nobel lecture — delivered on video, ill health preventing his attendance — was less an account of his art than a sustained prosecution of Western foreign policy, an uncompromising act from a writer who considered silence its own form of collaboration. Whether one agreed with him or not, there was something fitting about a playwright whose great subject was the violence concealed in polite speech choosing, at the highest platform his profession offered, not to be polite.

Nobel Peace Prize

Inspectors Who Were Right and Ignored

International Atomic Energy Agency · Mohamed ElBaradei

The IAEA had existed since 1957, founded on the Eisenhower-era hope that the atom's civilian and military applications could be disentangled and the dangerous ones supervised by an international body with actual access to facilities. Mohamed ElBaradei became its Director General in 1997 and found himself, within a few years, at the centre of the most contentious arms-control disputes since the Cold War: North Korea withdrew from the Non-Proliferation Treaty in 2003, Iran's enrichment programme was becoming the subject of escalating demands, and the United States had gone to war in Iraq partly on the basis of weapons assessments that ElBaradei's inspectors had publicly questioned and that turned out to be wrong. The Nobel Committee awarded the prize to both the agency and its director in a year when the case for patient, evidence-based multilateral inspection needed — and was visibly getting — very little support from the world's most powerful governments. ElBaradei accepted with characteristic measured understatement. The award was part recognition, part reminder, and part rebuke, and everyone understood which part was aimed where.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Why Enemies Sometimes Keep Their Word

Robert J. Aumann · Thomas C. Schelling

Thomas Schelling spent the Cold War thinking carefully about an unusual subject: how do you credibly threaten to do something catastrophic? His 1960 book The Strategy of Conflict introduced concepts — focal points, commitment devices, the value of limiting your own options — that felt counterintuitive but kept turning out to be right, and his analysis of nuclear deterrence became foundational to the grim science of avoiding a war no one wanted to fight. Robert Aumann came at the same territory from mathematics, formalising the notion of common knowledge — what it means for all parties to know that everyone else knows something, and to know that everyone else knows that — and developing the theory of repeated games, which explains the otherwise puzzling phenomenon of cooperation among parties with entirely selfish interests: reputation, shadow of the future, the long game. Together, the two men had built the theoretical scaffolding for understanding why conflicts sometimes escalate, why they sometimes don't, and why the same actors who defect in a one-shot game might cooperate indefinitely when they expect to meet again. It is a body of work that belongs equally to economics and to the history of strategic thought.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physics

A Drop Nobody Ever Saw Fall

John Mainstone · Thomas Parnell

In 1927, Professor Thomas Parnell of the University of Queensland heated a sample of pitch — the same viscous tar derivative used to waterproof boats — poured it into a sealed glass funnel, and waited. He waited three years before cutting the seal, and then continued waiting, because pitch, though it shatters like glass when struck with a hammer, is not actually a solid; it flows, just very slowly. When the eighth drop finally fell in 2000, no one saw it; the webcam installed to witness the event was momentarily offline. John Mainstone, who had been custodian of the experiment since 1961, missed every drop in his tenure, occasionally by minutes, and died in 2013 without ever watching one fall in person. The Ig Nobel was awarded, quite properly, to both men: Parnell posthumously, Mainstone very much alive and, one imagines, mildly philosophical about the whole business. The pitch drop is a monument to the proposition that patience is a form of experimental rigour, and that some truths are worth a century's waiting — provided you are not too attached to witnessing them yourself.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine

Dignity, Restored in Silicone

Gregg A. Miller

Gregg Miller, a Missouri entrepreneur, was moved by the sight of his newly neutered basset hound Buck shuffling around the yard in what Miller interpreted as a state of diminished dignity. The solution he arrived at was Neuticles — silicone prosthetic implants that could restore, to all external appearances, the condition that surgical intervention had removed. Miller patented the device in 1995, secured FDA classification, and proceeded to sell them in three sizes and two firmness settings; by the time the Ig Nobel arrived, hundreds of thousands of units had been implanted in dogs, cats, horses, and at least one bull. The medical community maintained a discreet silence on the question of whether the patients benefited, since they were the one party in the transaction who had not been consulted. That the market existed at all — that owners were purchasing these at meaningful cost — says rather more about human psychology than it does about veterinary medicine, which is, presumably, part of why the Ig Nobel committee found it irresistible.

Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Syrup Swims No Slower Than Water

Edward Cussler · Brian Gettelfinger

The question had floated around fluid dynamics seminars since at least the eighteenth century, when Gabriel Stokes and others had pondered whether swimming speed depends on the viscosity of the medium — and if so, whether a sufficiently thick fluid would slow a swimmer down or, counterintuitively, help them. Edward Cussler of the University of Minnesota and his student Brian Gettelfinger resolved the matter in the most direct possible fashion: they dissolved guar gum in a campus swimming pool until the water reached roughly twice its normal viscosity, recruited sixteen swimmers, and timed their lengths in both conditions. The result was a decisive null: the swimmers went no slower in the syrup. The reason is that the extra drag on the swimmer's body is cancelled by the extra thrust generated by each stroke in the thicker fluid. It is a tidy piece of applied fluid mechanics, and it settled a debate that had produced much more heat than experiment, which is the natural habitat of the Ig Nobel Prize.

Ig Nobel Prize in Fluid Dynamics

Pressures Produced When Penguins Pooh

Victor Benno Meyer-Rochow · Jozsef Gal

Victor Meyer-Rochow and Jozsef Gal published their study in Polar Biology in 2003, and it was titled — with a precision of titling rarely achieved in peer-reviewed science — "Pressures Produced When Penguins Pooh: Calculations on Avian Defaecation." The paper applied the Hagen-Poiseuille equation and reasonable anatomical estimates to calculate the pressure generated when a penguin ejects waste while incubating eggs, in order that it land at a safe distance from the nest without requiring the bird to stand up and expose the egg to the Antarctic cold. The pressures came out at around 10 to 60 kilopascals — several times what a human manages — which, as the authors noted with commendable understatement, is "impressive." The real science underneath the absurdist title is perfectly genuine: penguin colony hygiene and the biomechanics of avian defaecation are legitimate topics, the methodology was sound, and the paper has been cited. The joke and the science are not in opposition; they are, here, the same thing.

Ig Nobel Prize in Peace

A Locust Watches the Death Star

Claire Rind · Peter Simmons

Claire Rind and Peter Simmons at the University of Newcastle wanted to understand how the locust visual system detects imminent collision — a problem with genuine relevance to robotics and autonomous vehicle design, since the locust manages it with a handful of neurons rather than the computational apparatus that engineers typically require. To stimulate the relevant neurons, they needed an approaching object that was visually varied and dramatically lit, so they showed their electrode-implanted subjects scenes from the 1977 Star Wars film: the Death Star trench sequence, with its oncoming obstacles and exploding craft, turned out to be nearly ideal. The collision-sensitive neuron they studied fired with satisfying reliability at each threat. The research was published in the Journal of Neuroscience, the methodology was sound, and the neuroscience was illuminating. The Ig Nobel for Peace was presumably awarded on the theory that a locust strapped to an electrode rig watching Star Wars is the kind of thing that deserves some official recognition, and it is difficult to argue against that view.

Ig Nobel Prize in Agricultural History

Trousers That Could Detonate

James Watson

James Watson of Massey University in New Zealand — not the one who found the double helix — published a scholarly account of a curious affliction that beset New Zealand farmers in the 1930s: exploding trousers. Farmers combating the weed ragwort with the herbicide sodium chlorate found that the chemical, absorbed into the fabric of their work clothes, rendered the trousers alarmingly combustible, so that a stray spark, a pipe, or the warmth of a hearth could set the garment smouldering or, on occasion, detonate it outright. Watson's paper, built around the documented case of one Richard Buckley, reconstructs the episode as a genuine piece of agricultural and chemical history, tracing how enthusiasm for a novel weedkiller collided with the flammability of oxidised cloth. The committee honoured a serious historical study of a hazard that no longer troubles the modern farmer, the trousers of the 1930s having long since, one way or another, gone out.

Ig Nobel Prize in Biology

A Frightened Frog Smells of Cashews

Benjamin Smith · Craig Williams · Michael Tyler · Brian Williams · Yoji Hayasaka

This Australian team undertook the systematic cataloguing of the smells produced by 131 species of frog under stress, and established that a frightened frog is a surprisingly aromatic thing. The odours they documented ranged across a menu that reads like a deranged tasting note: some frogs smelled of cashews, others of curry, liquorice, mint, rotting fish, or roasted peanuts, each species reliably producing its own signature scent when alarmed. The compounds are thought to serve in defence or communication, and the survey — published in full chemical detail — is a genuine contribution to the understanding of amphibian secretions. The committee honoured the sheer labour of smelling 131 kinds of anxious frog and writing it all down; whether the frogs found the exercise equally memorable was not recorded.

Ig Nobel Prize in Economics

An Alarm Clock That Runs Away

Gauri Nanda

Gauri Nanda, then a student at the MIT Media Lab, invented Clocky — an alarm clock mounted on wheels that, when the snooze button is pressed, rolls off the bedside table and flees across the room, obliging the sleeper to rise and give chase in order to silence it. The device was designed to defeat the single greatest weakness of the ordinary alarm clock, which is that it remains within arm's reach of a person determined not to wake, and it works by making surrender physically impossible: by the time you have cornered Clocky behind the wardrobe, you are awake. The committee reasoned that the invention thereby stood to save the citizenry incalculable hours of otherwise unproductive sleep, at a small cost in early-morning dignity. Clocky went on to sell in genuine commercial quantities, which suggests the problem it addressed was widely, and sheepishly, felt.

Ig Nobel Prize in Literature

The Prince Who Needs Your Bank Details

Internet entrepreneurs of Nigeria

The prize honoured the anonymous authors of the Nigerian advance-fee email — the deposed prince, the stranded official, the vast fortune requiring only a modest facilitating payment to be liberated and shared — for their contribution to the literature of the epistolary short story. The committee's citation praised their use of such colourful characters as General Sani Abacha and his widow, recognising a body of narrative fiction distributed to millions of readers worldwide, each tale a small tragedy of misfortune and opportunity crafted to move the recipient to open his wallet. The genre is a genuine folk form, endlessly varied upon a fixed template, and its authors are more prolific than any conventional writer could hope to be. That the stories are also a fraud is, in the committee's generous reading, a matter best left to the literary critics.

Ig Nobel Prize in Nutrition

Thirty-Four Years of Photographed Dinners

Yoshiro Nakamatsu

Yoshiro Nakamatsu — the prolific Japanese inventor who claims several thousand patents, among them a disputed forerunner of the floppy disk — photographed and analysed every single meal he consumed over a period of more than thirty-four years, in order to determine the effect of diet on brain function and longevity. The project was self-experimentation of extraordinary persistence: a complete photographic record of a lifetime's eating, catalogued and studied by the very man doing the eating. Nakamatsu attributes his inventive productivity to the resulting regime and intends, by his own account, to live to 144. The committee honoured a data set of unrivalled dedication and a sample size of one; whether the conclusions generalise beyond a single determined Japanese inventor remains, for the moment, untested.

Turing Award

The Grammar Notation Every Compiler Uses

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Peter Naur

In 1960, a committee of European and American computer scientists produced the ALGOL 60 report — a language specification so carefully designed and precisely stated that it influenced virtually every programming language that followed it, from Pascal to C to Java. Peter Naur was its principal editor, responsible for the clarity and rigour of a document that had to be understood by both implementers and theorists. More durably still, he had developed, with John Backus, the notation now called Backus-Naur Form: a compact, unambiguous way of describing the grammar of a programming language using production rules, the same method now used in essentially every language standard, compiler textbook, and RFC that describes a formal syntax. Naur received the Turing Award at 77, which reflected not any tardiness in his career but the length of time it sometimes takes for foundations to be recognized as such. He was, in the most literal sense, one of the people who decided what programming languages should look like — a decision that turned out to matter rather a lot.

Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)

A Single Cell, Renewing Itself

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Ernest A. McCulloch · James E. Till

In the early 1960s, Ernest McCulloch and James Till were at the Ontario Cancer Institute, studying what radiation did to bone marrow — a pressing question in the nuclear age, when the damage done to the blood-forming system by ionising radiation was both a clinical problem and a potential weapon effect to be understood. Their method was to irradiate mice, transplant bone marrow cells, and count the nodules that grew in the animals' spleens. What they noticed, and took with great care to explain, was that each nodule seemed to arise from a single cell, and that the cells in those nodules could themselves be transplanted and give rise to more nodules — suggesting that something in the marrow could both renew itself and differentiate into multiple cell types. They had, without using the term, discovered the stem cell. The concept took decades to fully diffuse through biology, and the direct therapeutic applications — bone marrow transplantation, and eventually the whole enterprise of regenerative medicine — came later still. By the time the Lasker arrived in 2005, McCulloch and Till had been waiting roughly four decades, which is the biomedical world's way of saying the work was foundational rather than fashionable.

Lasker Award (Clinical Medical Research)

A Pattern Distinctive to One Person

Albert Lasker Clinical Medical Research Award

Alec Jeffreys · Edwin Southern

Edwin Southern's 1975 technique — since called the Southern blot, with the dry reciprocity that science occasionally allows — solved a nagging practical problem: how do you find a specific DNA sequence in a complex mixture containing millions of others? His answer was to separate fragments by gel electrophoresis, transfer them to a membrane, and probe for the sequence of interest with a complementary labelled strand; the target lights up while everything else stays dark. It was a tool of extraordinary generality, applied immediately to diagnosing genetic disease and mapping genomes. Alec Jeffreys then did something different: in 1984, staring at an autoradiograph in his Leicester laboratory on a Monday morning, he noticed that the pattern of bands he was seeing was distinctive to individual people — that certain hypervariable regions of DNA varied so dramatically between persons that they amounted to a molecular identity. Within two years, genetic fingerprinting had been used to solve a murder. The two discoveries are now so thoroughly woven into forensic science, clinical diagnostics, and evolutionary biology that the effort required to imagine the field without them is itself a measure of how much they changed it.

Huygens probe lands on Titan

Methane Rivers on a Frozen Moon

On 14 January 2005, the Huygens probe separated from the Cassini orbiter and fell alone into the nitrogen atmosphere of Titan, Saturn's largest moon, the only moon in the solar system with a substantial atmosphere and the only world besides Earth known to have standing liquid on its surface. The descent lasted two and a half hours, during which Huygens transmitted data almost continuously, sending back pictures of cloud layers, drainage channels carved into dark highland terrain, and a pale shoreline — unmistakably the work of flowing liquid, though the liquid in question was methane rather than water, at a surface temperature of around minus 179 degrees Celsius. When it finally touched down on what turned out to be a damp, pebbly plain, it found rounded cobbles of water ice that had been smoothed and tumbled just as river stones are smoothed on Earth. It was the first soft landing on a world in the outer solar system, and it revealed Titan as the most Earth-like place in the solar system that is nothing like Earth: the same geological processes, the same landscape vocabulary, the same hydrological cycle — just running on entirely different chemistry at temperatures that would liquefy oxygen.

Eris discovered, triggering Pluto's reclassification

The Rock That Demoted a Planet

On 5 January 2005, Mike Brown, Chad Trujillo, and David Rabinowitz announced the discovery of a trans-Neptunian object they had photographed the previous October, initially nicknamed Xena and eventually named Eris. The problem it posed was immediate and uncomfortable: Eris appeared to be slightly more massive than Pluto, which was still nominally the ninth planet, meaning the solar system either had ten planets or needed a new definition of the word. Brown, with the cheerful ruthlessness of someone who had just detonated a taxonomy, titled his memoir of the period How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming. The International Astronomical Union convened in Prague in 2006 and, after debates that were unexpectedly spirited for a room full of astronomers, produced a new definition of "planet" requiring an object to have cleared its orbital neighbourhood — a criterion Pluto and Eris both failed. Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet. The public reacted to this bureaucratic adjustment with an intensity that suggested the emotional stakes of planetary taxonomy had been somewhat underestimated. Eris, having caused all the trouble, continues orbiting serenely at the edge of the solar system, indifferent to the category assigned to it.

First partial face transplant performed

A Borrowed Face, Given Back

On 27 November 2005, a team of surgeons at Amiens University Hospital led by Bernard Devauchelle and Jean-Michel Dubernard spent fifteen hours transplanting a triangle of facial tissue — nose, lips, and chin — from a brain-dead donor onto Isabelle Dinoire, a 38-year-old French woman who had lost the lower half of her face after being mauled by her dog earlier that year. It was the first operation of its kind ever performed, a procedure that the surgical community had debated for years as a theoretical possibility burdened by practical and ethical complications: Would the immune system accept tissue from another person's face? Would the psychological experience of wearing a stranger's features be bearable? Would the nerves reconnect well enough to restore sensation and expression? The answers, in Dinoire's case, came gradually and were, in the main, yes: she required lifelong immunosuppressive drugs and faced complications over subsequent years, but she regained meaningful sensation and movement, could eat, speak, and be photographed without distress, and lived another eleven years. The operation opened a field that has since extended to full face transplants, giving surgeons a tool for injuries that no reconstructive surgery using the patient's own tissue could previously address.

World Year of Physics — centenary of Einstein's annus mirabilis

A Patent Clerk's Extraordinary Spring

In 1905, Albert Einstein was 26 years old, working six days a week as a technical expert third class at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern, and had not yet completed his doctorate. Between March and September of that year he submitted four papers to Annalen der Physik that would, taken individually, have each constituted a major contribution to physics. The first explained Brownian motion — the jittery movement of small particles in fluid — by treating it as the cumulative effect of molecular bombardment, providing the most direct evidence yet that atoms were real. The second explained the photoelectric effect by proposing that light consists of discrete packets of energy, the paper for which he would eventually receive the Nobel Prize. The third, in June, introduced the special theory of relativity, doing away with absolute time and space and placing the speed of light at the centre of the universe's geometry. The fourth, in September, contained the expression E = mc². The United Nations designated 2005 the World Year of Physics to mark the centenary, with events in more than a hundred countries. The tribute was earned, though it is worth noting that when Einstein submitted those four papers, the patent office considered him too junior for promotion.

Death of Hans Bethe

The Man Who Fed the Stars

Hans Bethe

Hans Bethe died on 6 March 2005 in Ithaca, New York, at the age of 98, having outlasted virtually everyone who had been present at the creation of modern physics and having remained intellectually active almost to the end. In 1938, working out the details at a meeting and then refining them on a cross-country train journey that became something of a legend in physics circles, he identified the carbon-nitrogen-oxygen cycle as the mechanism by which massive stars produce their energy through nuclear fusion — work that earned him the Nobel Prize in 1967. He arrived in the United States in 1935 as a refugee from Nazi Germany and promptly wrote a three-volume review of nuclear physics so comprehensive that it was known simply as Bethe's Bible. He led the theoretical division at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project, contributing essential calculations to the design of both the fission and fusion bombs, and spent the subsequent decades arguing with equal technical authority that nuclear weapons should never be used and that missile defence systems would destabilise rather than protect. He was among the last people alive who had known both Einstein and Oppenheimer, had helped invent the nuclear age, and had spent the long remainder of his life trying to contain what he had helped create.