2005

Nobel Prize in Physics

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

Glauber gave quantum optics its proper theoretical foundation, explaining the difference between coherent and incoherent light in terms no classical theory could manage. Hall and Hänsch built the optical frequency comb — a laser tool that measures the colour of light with such precision that it serves as a kind of optical ruler for the whole electromagnetic spectrum.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

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

Metathesis is a reaction in which carbon-carbon double bonds break and re-form, shuffling molecular fragments like a card dealer. Chauvin worked out how it happened at the atomic level; Grubbs and Schrock developed catalysts that made it practically useful. It is now among the most widely used reactions in pharmaceutical and fine chemical manufacturing.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Barry J. Marshall · J. Robin Warren

Warren first noticed the spiral bacteria lurking in stomach biopsies in 1979; Marshall, unable to infect laboratory animals, drank a flask of the culture himself, developed gastritis, treated it with antibiotics, and recovered. Two decades of medical orthodoxy — that peptic ulcers were caused by stress and acid alone — dissolved in the face of an experiment almost comically direct.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Harold Pinter

Pinter's plays make ordinary conversation feel like a minefield — menace accumulating in the silences, violence latent in small domestic exchanges. The academy cited his capacity to uncover "the precipice under everyday prattle," and he used his Nobel lecture to deliver an extended polemic against Western foreign policy that surprised no one who had followed his later career.

Nobel Peace Prize

International Atomic Energy Agency · Mohamed ElBaradei

The IAEA and its Director General received the prize during a period of acute tension over Iran's and North Korea's nuclear ambitions. ElBaradei had spent years insisting that the agency's inspectors be allowed to do their work and that diplomacy be given time that various governments preferred not to grant it.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Robert J. Aumann · Thomas C. Schelling

Schelling showed how conflicts can be steered through the artful use of commitments and credible threats — ideas that bear directly on nuclear deterrence, and which he had been thinking about since the Cold War. Aumann formalised the concept of common knowledge and developed the mathematics of repeated games, making clear why cooperation sometimes emerges even among self-interested parties.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physics

John Mainstone · Thomas Parnell

The University of Queensland's pitch drop experiment was begun by Parnell in 1927 to demonstrate that tar, though brittle to the touch, is in fact a viscous liquid. By 2005, eight drops had fallen, each taking roughly nine years. Mainstone, custodian of the experiment for decades, never witnessed a drop fall in person.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine

Gregg A. Miller

Miller invented Neuticles — prosthetic implants for dogs that have been neutered, available in three sizes and varying degrees of firmness. The product has sold hundreds of thousands of units. Whether the dogs needed them is a philosophical question the medical literature has not fully addressed.

Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Edward Cussler · Brian Gettelfinger

Cussler and Gettelfinger filled a pool with guar gum solution twice as viscous as water and had human swimmers race in both. The swimmers were no slower in the syrup, resolving a question that had inspired strong opinions but little data since at least the eighteenth century.

Ig Nobel Prize in Fluid Dynamics

Victor Benno Meyer-Rochow · Jozsef Gal

Meyer-Rochow and Gal applied the principles of fluid mechanics to calculate the pressures generated when penguins defecate, publishing the results — necessarily titled "Pressures Produced When Penguins Pooh" — in a peer-reviewed journal. The forces, it turns out, are impressive relative to the animal's size.

Ig Nobel Prize in Peace

Claire Rind · Peter Simmons

Rind and Simmons wired up a locust's visual neurons and showed it clips from Star Wars, monitoring how the cells responded to approaching objects. The research illuminated how collision-detection systems work in insect nervous systems, though the locust's opinion of the film remains unrecorded.

Turing Award

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Peter Naur

Naur was principal editor of the ALGOL 60 report and gave his name to Backus-Naur Form, the notation now used universally to describe programming language grammars. His contributions shaped the formal foundations of computing at a moment when those foundations were still being laid.

Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Ernest A. McCulloch · James E. Till

McCulloch and Till were studying radiation injury in mice in the early 1960s when they noticed that individual bone marrow cells could both self-renew and give rise to multiple cell types — the defining properties, they had just discovered, of stem cells. The insight took decades to be fully recognised; by the time the Lasker arrived they had been waiting for it for forty years.

Lasker Award (Clinical Medical Research)

Albert Lasker Clinical Medical Research Award

Alec Jeffreys · Edwin Southern

Southern's blotting technique of 1975 gave molecular biology a way to detect specific DNA sequences in complex mixtures. Jeffreys, in 1984, noticed that certain regions of DNA vary so distinctively between individuals that they constitute a molecular fingerprint. Both discoveries are now so embedded in forensics, diagnostics, and genetics that imagining the fields without them requires real effort.

Huygens probe lands on Titan

On 14 January, the Huygens probe separated from Cassini and spent two and a half hours descending through Titan's nitrogen atmosphere before landing — the first touchdown on a world in the outer solar system. The images showed drainage channels, a pale shoreline, and rounded pebbles of water ice, all carved by a liquid that turned out to be methane.

Eris discovered, triggering Pluto's reclassification

Astronomers Mike Brown, Chad Trujillo, and David Rabinowitz announced Eris on 5 January — a trans-Neptunian object slightly more massive than Pluto, which immediately made the definition of "planet" a practical problem rather than a philosophical one. The International Astronomical Union would resolve it, at Pluto's expense, the following year.

First partial face transplant performed

On 27 November, surgeons at Amiens University Hospital transplanted a triangle of facial tissue — nose, lips, and chin — from a deceased donor onto Isabelle Dinoire, who had lost much of her face in an accident. It was the first operation of its kind, and it worked: Dinoire's own immune system eventually required suppression, but she regained sensation and movement.

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

In 1905, a 26-year-old patent clerk in Bern published four papers in a single year: explaining Brownian motion, establishing the photoelectric effect, proposing special relativity, and deriving E = mc². The UN designated 2005 the World Year of Physics to mark the centenary, and outreach programmes ran in more than a hundred countries.

Death of Hans Bethe

Hans Bethe

Bethe died on 6 March in Ithaca at 98, having explained in 1938 how stars produce energy through nuclear fusion and received the Nobel for it in 1967. He also contributed foundational work to quantum electrodynamics, played a central role in the Manhattan Project, and spent the rest of his long life arguing strenuously for nuclear arms control.