2011

Nobel Prize in Physics

The Universe Is Speeding Up, Not Down

Saul Perlmutter · Brian P. Schmidt · Adam G. Riess

In the late 1990s, two competing teams — the Supernova Cosmology Project and the High-Z Supernova Search Team — set out to settle one of the more straightforward questions in cosmology: how quickly is the expansion of the universe slowing down? The answer, delivered via the dimness of distant Type Ia supernovae used as standard candles across billions of light-years, was that the universe is not slowing down at all. It is accelerating. Something — catalogued under the diplomatically agnostic label 'dark energy' — is pushing everything apart at an increasing clip, and that something appears to constitute roughly 68 percent of the total energy content of the cosmos. The teams were, by multiple accounts, not pleased with their own results; Adam Riess later recalled checking and rechecking the data in hopes of finding the error. No error appeared. The prize honoured a discovery that replaced one mystery (how will the universe end?) with a deeper one (what is most of the universe made of?), and three decades on we are no closer to a satisfying answer — which is either alarming or invigorating, depending on temperament.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

There Is No Such Creature — Except There Was

Dan Shechtman

Crystallography in 1982 had, in one sense, solved itself: the mathematics of periodic crystal lattices was settled, and the list of allowable symmetries was short and final. Fivefold rotational symmetry was simply not on it, because you cannot tile a plane with pentagons without leaving gaps. Dan Shechtman, examining an aluminium-manganese alloy at the National Bureau of Standards on 8 April 1982, found a diffraction pattern with exactly that forbidden symmetry — sharp spots arranged in a tenfold ring — and wrote in his notebook, in Hebrew, 'Eyn chaya kazo': 'There is no such creature.' There was. The quasicrystal, as it came to be called, is ordered without being periodic: like a Penrose tiling, it never repeats but never falls into chaos either. His colleagues were not encouraging; the double Nobel laureate Linus Pauling reportedly said, 'There are no quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists.' Shechtman was asked to leave his research group. It took a decade of quiet accumulation before consensus shifted, and another two before the prize arrived — which in the long history of crystallography is practically prompt.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Two Immune Systems, Finally Introduced

Bruce A. Beutler · Jules A. Hoffmann · Ralph M. Steinman

The immune system runs in two distinct registers. The innate response is ancient, fast, and blunt — it detects molecular patterns common to bacteria and fungi and raises the alarm within minutes. The adaptive response is slower, more precise, and capable of memory: it learns to recognise specific pathogens and holds that knowledge for decades. Jules Hoffmann, working in fruit flies in the 1990s, identified the Toll signalling pathway as central to innate immunity; Bruce Beutler found the mammalian equivalent, the Toll-like receptors that detect bacterial lipopolysaccharide and trigger inflammation. Ralph Steinman, over thirty years at Rockefeller University, discovered and characterised the dendritic cell — the professional antigen-presenter that bridges the two systems, ingesting debris from the innate response and carrying it to T-cells to initiate adaptive immunity. Steinman died of pancreatic cancer on 30 September 2011, three days before the Nobel Committee called. The rules barred posthumous prizes, but the Committee, having announced in ignorance, allowed the award to stand — a rare act of institutional common sense. He had, it emerged, been treating himself with experimental dendritic-cell-based therapies for four years, surviving considerably longer than prognosis suggested. The work and the life were, at the end, inseparable.

Nobel Prize in Literature

A Door Opens in an Ordinary Wall

Tomas Tranströmer

Tomas Tranströmer published his first collection in 1954, when he was twenty-three years old, and by the time the Nobel Committee reached him in 2011 he had produced roughly two hundred poems in total — a slender output by any measure, yet one that had been translated into more than sixty languages, which suggested the poems were doing something that resisted the usual losses of translation. A stroke in 1990 had taken his speech but left his memory and his inner life intact; he continued to write, and to play piano with his left hand alone, the music and the silence becoming new formal constraints rather than defeats. His poems move characteristically between the social surface of Swedish life — commuter trains, government offices, suburban evenings — and something much older and stranger beneath it, a geological depth where the human and the cosmic sit in close, unsettling proximity. The Swedish Academy called his work a 'condensed, translucent image of reality,' which is accurate as far as it goes, though it rather undersells the sensation of reading him: the feeling that a door has opened in a perfectly ordinary wall, and that what is on the other side is not another room.

Nobel Peace Prize

Three Women, Three Ways of Refusing to Go Home

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf · Leymah Gbowee · Tawakkol Karman

The 2011 Peace Prize took three women and three countries and compressed into a single award something that might otherwise have required a lecture series. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf had been imprisoned, exiled, and returned to Liberia to win the presidency in 2005 — the first woman elected head of state on the African continent — and had spent six years reconstructing a country that had known almost nothing but war for fourteen years. Leymah Gbowee organised the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace during that war, convening Christian and Muslim women across ethnic divisions to pray, protest, and refuse to go home until the killing stopped; she has credited the movement with forcing Charles Taylor and the rebel factions to the negotiating table in Ghana in 2003. Tawakkol Karman, a journalist and activist in Yemen, had been organising protests since 2007 and was at the forefront of her country's Arab Spring; she was thirty-two at the time of the award, the youngest Nobel Peace laureate to that point. Three methods, three contexts, three ways of deciding that the situation was unacceptable and that someone had better do something about it.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

An Economy That Anticipates Its Own Policy

Thomas J. Sargent · Christopher A. Sims

The fundamental problem with studying a macroeconomy is that it will not hold still. Policies change expectations; expectations change behaviour; behaviour changes the data that the next policy-maker reads. Classical economic models of the 1970s struggled with this because they treated policy as something imposed on passive actors, rather than something anticipated by rational ones who promptly adjust. Thomas Sargent developed methods for estimating models in which agents form expectations about the future — rational expectations models — and for identifying how policy shifts alter the structure of the economy itself. Christopher Sims took a different route, pioneering Vector Autoregression, a statistical framework for tracing how shocks propagate through multiple economic variables over time without imposing strong theoretical assumptions about causality in advance. The two approaches are complementary rather than competing: Sims offers a disciplined way to let data speak; Sargent offers a way to interpret what the data says in light of how people actually think about the future. Central banks around the world now use variants of both, which is either reassuring or sobering depending on how central banks have been performing lately.

Ig Nobel Prize in Biology

Beetles Preferred the Beer Bottle

Darryl Gwynne · David Rentz

In 1983, entomologists Darryl Gwynne and David Rentz published a paper documenting an unexpectedly specific ecological crisis: male jewel beetles of the species Julodimorpha bakewelli were attempting to mate with discarded Australian beer bottles. The bottles in question were the old-style amber stubbies — dimpled at the base, a rich brown, roughly the right size and texture to trigger, in a beetle whose mate-recognition system had evolved for a very different world, something like enthusiasm. Critically, the beetles preferentially chose the bottles over actual female beetles nearby, which raised questions both about beetle cognition and about the power of supernormal stimuli to hijack perfectly functional instincts. The Australian government eventually changed bottle designs; the dimples were eliminated. Gwynne and Rentz received the Ig Nobel twenty-eight years after publication, which is either a testament to the award's reach back through literature or an indication that the peer-review process for entomological erotica moves slowly.

Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Waking the Deaf With Wasabi

Makoto Imai · Naoki Urushihata · Hideki Tanemura · Yukinobu Tajima · Hideaki Goto · Koichiro Mizoguchi · Junichi Murakami

The conventional fire alarm — a piercing electronic shriek — has a well-known failure mode: it does not wake the deaf. A team of Japanese researchers led by Makoto Imai set out to find a chemical alternative, and arrived at wasabi. More precisely, at allyl isothiocyanate, the compound responsible for the nasal assault that accompanies fresh wasabi and which the researchers confirmed, through careful trials on sleeping subjects, could rouse a person within two minutes and thirty seconds even at low airborne concentrations. They determined the optimal delivery dose, filed a patent, and built a prototype alarm. The device works. The smell has not been described, by anyone present during testing, as a pleasant way to wake up — which is, of course, precisely the point. A fire alarm that drifts gently into consciousness like a warm melody has misunderstood its assignment.

Ig Nobel Prize in Literature

Getting Things Done by Avoiding Them

John Perry

John Perry, a philosopher at Stanford, published 'How to Procrastinate and Still Get Things Done' in 1996, and in it described what he called Structured Procrastination: the observation that committed procrastinators are rarely idle, because in avoiding their most important task they find themselves industriously completing all the lesser ones on the list beneath it. The solution, he proposed, is not to fight this tendency but to exploit it, by placing a sufficiently important-seeming — but actually deferrable — task at the top of the list and allowing the avoidance energy to power everything else. He expanded the essay into a book, published in 2011, which was presumably written while he was avoiding something else. The Ig Nobel committee recognised this as a contribution to literature that was both entirely useless as advice and completely accurate as observation — which is, as it happens, also a fair description of most philosophy.

Ig Nobel Prize in Mathematics

Six Confident, Six Wrong Doomsdays

Dorothy Martin · Pat Robertson · Elizabeth Clare Prophet · Lee Jang Rim · Credonia Mwerinde · Harold Camping

The Ig Nobel in Mathematics went, collectively and in absentia, to a group of individuals who had each publicly predicted the end of the world and had each been, in the strict arithmetical sense, incorrect. The laureates spanned decades and denominations, from Dorothy Martin's 1954 prediction to Credonia Mwerinde, whose followers in Uganda sold their possessions before a 1999 date that passed without incident, and Harold Camping, who achieved a particular distinction by failing twice in a single calendar year — first on 21 May, then on 21 October 2011 — thereby demonstrating that a wrong answer, issued with sufficient conviction, need not preclude a second attempt. The citation noted that the collective work had taught the public 'to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and predictions.' It was, in its way, a kinder assessment than the subject warranted.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physics

Why Discus Throwers Get Dizzy and Hammer Throwers Don't

Philippe Perrin · Cyril Perrot · Dominique Deviterne · Bruno Ragaru · Herman Kingma

Discus throwers, after releasing their implement, frequently report dizziness. Hammer throwers, who spin at comparable speeds and exert similar forces, do not. Philippe Perrin and colleagues at the University of Nancy investigated this disparity and found that the difference lies in the direction of rotation relative to the throw: discus athletes release the disc in the same rotational direction as their spin, creating a sharp mismatch between the vestibular system's expectation and the sudden cessation of movement that the inner ear interprets as the world tipping. Hammer throwers rotate in the opposite direction from the release, which resolves the conflict more smoothly. Athletics, it turned out, had been conducting an informal experiment in vestibular neuroscience for roughly three thousand years — from the ancient Greek pentathlon to the modern Olympic field — without anyone thinking to write up the results.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine

A Full Bladder Sharpens Some Judgment

Mirjam Tuk · Debra Trampe · Luk Warlop · Matthew Lewis · Peter Snyder · Robert Feldman · Robert Pietrzak · David Darby · Paul Maruff

Two independent research teams converged on the same uncomfortable finding: the need to urinate affects decision-making in ways that are not straightforwardly bad. One group found that people with full bladders were more risk-tolerant in financial scenarios; the other found improved self-control on certain tasks. The proposed mechanism, in both cases, is inhibitory spillover — the cognitive effort required to suppress the urge to act on one impulse leaks into adjacent domains, sharpening restraint elsewhere while degrading it in others. The effect is real, the interpretation contested, and the practical implications left, with admirable restraint, entirely unaddressed. The prize was shared between both teams, which is the kind of collaborative spirit that flourishes when the subject matter is sufficiently absurd to dissolve competition.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physiology

A Tortoise, Unmoved by Yawning

Anna Wilkinson · Natalie Sebanz · Isabella Mandl · Ludwig Huber

Contagious yawning — the reflexive urge to yawn upon seeing someone else do it — is often taken as a marker of empathy or social bonding, which raised the question of whether it appears in animals not conspicuously noted for either. Anna Wilkinson and colleagues trained a red-footed tortoise named Alexandra to yawn on cue and then presented her performance to other tortoises to see whether the yawn would spread through the group. It did not. Across repeated trials, tortoises watching a yawning companion were no more likely to yawn than tortoises watching nothing in particular, suggesting that contagious yawning is not a simple reflexive response to the sight of a gaping mouth but something requiring social machinery the tortoise has never needed. The committee awarded the Physiology prize for a carefully negative result — a demonstration that a reptile, shown a yawn, remains admirably unmoved.

Ig Nobel Prize in Psychology

What a Sigh Actually Means

Karl Halvor Teigen

Karl Halvor Teigen, a Norwegian psychologist, set out to answer a question most people have never thought to ask: why do we sigh, and what do we mean by it? He surveyed people about when they sighed and asked them to interpret the sighs of others, and found that a sigh is rarely a simple exhalation — it signals resignation, mild disappointment, the giving-up of a task deemed not worth the effort, a small surrender to circumstance. Interestingly, people reading someone else's sigh tended to assume sadness, while the sighers themselves more often reported frustration or fatigue, a modest mismatch between the signal sent and the signal received. The committee awarded the Psychology prize for treating with proper seriousness a gesture that everyone performs and almost no one examines. The findings are unlikely to change anyone's behaviour, which is, in a way, exactly the sort of conclusion a sigh is for.

Ig Nobel Prize in Peace

A Tank Solves the Parking Problem

Arturas Zuokas

Arturas Zuokas, the mayor of Vilnius, had grown tired of luxury cars parked illegally in the bicycle lanes of his city, and rather than issue another round of tickets he arranged a demonstration: he climbed aboard an armoured personnel carrier and drove it directly over an offending Mercedes, flattening it before the assembled cameras. The car, it should be noted, was a prop and the event was partly staged for publicity, but the message was delivered with a clarity that no parking fine has ever achieved. The committee awarded the Peace prize for demonstrating that the problem of illegally parked luxury cars can be solved by running them over with a tank — a solution that is disproportionate, satisfying, and, as a matter of municipal policy, mercifully rare. Zuokas was subsequently re-elected, which suggests the electorate did not find the approach excessive.

Ig Nobel Prize in Public Safety

Driving Blind, on Purpose, to Measure Attention

John Senders

John Senders, a pioneer of the study of human attention, wanted to know how much of the road a driver can afford to ignore, and designed an experiment of memorable directness: he drove a car along a highway while a helmet fitted with an opaque visor flipped down over his eyes at regular intervals, repeatedly blinding him for measured fractions of a second. By varying how often the visor dropped and observing how the driving degraded, he could quantify how much visual information a driver actually needs and how long the road can be safely left unwatched. The experiments date from the late 1960s and were, by the standards of any era, alarming to witness. The committee awarded the Public Safety prize for research that advanced the science of attention by the simple expedient of removing it, on a live highway, at speed. The work is genuinely foundational; it is also not to be attempted.

Turing Award

Teaching Machines to Ask What If

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Judea Pearl

Judea Pearl arrived at UCLA in the 1970s with a background in physics and electrical engineering, and spent the following decades doing something that much of the artificial intelligence community had not thought to attempt: taking probability seriously as the language of machine reasoning. His development of Bayesian networks in the 1980s gave AI a formal way to represent uncertain knowledge — not as a list of facts and rules but as a graph of variables and conditional probabilities, capable of updating coherently as evidence arrived. That alone would have been substantial. But Pearl then turned to a problem statisticians had long preferred to treat as philosophical: the distinction between correlation and causation. His do-calculus, developed through the 1990s, provided a mathematical language for asking not just 'what variables tend to occur together?' but 'what would happen if I intervened to change one?' — a question that requires fundamentally different tools. The work underpins modern epidemiology, economics, and the emerging field of causal machine learning; a world without it would be one in which AI systems could describe patterns but could not, even in principle, reason about consequences.

Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)

Proteins Need a Chaperone to Fold Right

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Franz-Ulrich Hartl · Arthur L. Horwich

A protein is, at the moment of its synthesis, a linear chain of amino acids emerging from a ribosome in no particular shape — and shape, for a protein, is everything. The same chain folded one way is an enzyme that catalyses a crucial reaction; folded another way, or not folded at all, it is at best useless and at worst a toxic aggregate of the kind associated with Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases. For decades it was assumed that proteins fold spontaneously into their correct forms, guided entirely by the thermodynamics of the amino acid sequence. Franz-Ulrich Hartl and Arthur Horwich showed that many proteins, particularly large ones, cannot manage this alone: the cell operates a class of proteins called molecular chaperones — most notably the GroEL/GroES complex in bacteria and its equivalents in human cells — that capture newly synthesised chains before they misfold, sequester them inside a barrel-shaped cavity, and provide a controlled environment in which correct folding can proceed without interference from the crowded cellular surroundings. The discovery reframed protein folding from a solved problem in physical chemistry into an active, supervised cellular process, and opened a line of inquiry into every disease where misfolded proteins accumulate.

OPERA experiment claims faster-than-light neutrinos

A Loose Cable, Not a Broken Universe

In September 2011, the OPERA collaboration at Gran Sasso announced that muon neutrinos produced at CERN and fired 730 kilometres through the earth had arrived approximately 60 nanoseconds earlier than the speed of light would permit. The number was small — sixty billionths of a second — but its implications were not: if correct, it would have required dismantling special relativity, the principle of causality, and a century of physics built on both. The scientific community responded with enthusiasm and methodical suspicion in roughly equal measure, and within months two sources of error had been identified in the timing system: a faulty fibre-optic connector between the GPS receiver and the OPERA master clock, and an oscillator running slightly fast. Correcting both eliminated the anomaly entirely. The neutrinos had not been early; the clock had been slow. Special relativity, characteristically, declined to be falsified by a loose cable — and the episode served as a useful reminder that the most exciting result in experimental physics is always the one most in need of checking.

Kepler discovers first Earth-sized exoplanets and circumbinary world

A Planet That Orbits Two Suns

The Kepler space telescope, staring at a patch of sky containing roughly 150,000 stars and watching for the slight, regular dimming caused by a planet crossing in front of its host, delivered several landmarks in 2011. Kepler-22b was confirmed in the habitable zone of a sun-like star — not Earth-sized, but closer to Earth's temperature range than anything previously found, occupying the 'just right' orbital distance in what astronomers call the Goldilocks zone, with the fairy-tale connotations left to the press. Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f became the first confirmed rocky, Earth-sized planets beyond the solar system, though both orbit too close to their star for liquid water. Most arresting was Kepler-16b: a planet confirmed to orbit two stars simultaneously, a circumbinary world that traces an ellipse around a stellar pair. Astronomers noted its similarity to Tatooine with the weary good humour of people who know the reference will appear in every press release, and then confirmed it anyway, because it was true.

HPTN 052 trial shows antiretroviral treatment prevents HIV transmission

Treatment Was Prevention All Along

The HPTN 052 trial enrolled 1,763 serodiscordant couples — one partner HIV-positive, one not — across nine countries and randomly assigned the HIV-positive partners to begin antiretroviral therapy immediately or to wait until their CD4 count declined to the threshold then standard for treatment. The trial was halted early because the result was so clear it would have been unethical to continue withholding early treatment from the control group: among couples where the positive partner started therapy immediately, sexual transmission to the negative partner was reduced by 96 percent. Science magazine named it the Breakthrough of the Year. The significance extended well beyond the statistic: it established that treatment and prevention were not separate public health strategies but the same one, that every person started on antiretrovirals was simultaneously being treated and made dramatically less infectious — a reframing that altered the logic of every HIV control programme written in the decade that followed.

Space Shuttle program ends

Atlantis Lands for the Last Time

On 21 July 2011, Atlantis touched down on Runway 15 at Kennedy Space Center at 5:57 in the morning, completing STS-135 and closing the Space Shuttle programme after thirty years and 135 missions. The shuttle had flown 355 people to space — some of them twice, a few of them more — and had assembled the International Space Station piece by piece over more than a decade of construction flights. It had also destroyed two of its five orbiters, killing fourteen people in Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003, and those losses had defined the programme as much as its achievements. The design had always been a political compromise: a vehicle asked to be cheap, reusable, crew-capable, and cargo-capable simultaneously, demands that turned out to be partially incompatible, and the resulting machine was magnificent and expensive and not quite safe enough. When Atlantis stopped, the United States had no replacement, and American astronauts rode Russian Soyuz capsules to the station for the next nine years, which is a thing the programme's architects had not planned for and would rather not have arranged.

MESSENGER enters Mercury orbit

Ice at the Sun's Nearest Doorstep

MESSENGER launched in August 2004 and spent nearly seven years doing what orbital mechanics required: flying past Earth once, Venus twice, and Mercury itself three times, using each encounter to bleed off enough speed to permit orbital insertion around the solar system's innermost planet. On 18 March 2011, it fired its main engine for fifteen minutes and became the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury. What it found there was unexpected in ways that should, by now, no longer surprise anyone studying planetary science: despite surface temperatures reaching 430 degrees Celsius by day, Kepler's permanently shadowed polar craters — never touched by sunlight because Mercury's axial tilt is vanishingly small — harbour water ice, deposited over billions of years by comets and asteroids and preserved in the dark. The Sun, burning at less than 60 million kilometres, has been maintaining a cold trap at its nearest neighbour's poles the entire time. It was the kind of discovery that makes the solar system feel, after fifty years of exploration, no less strange.