2012

Nobel Prize in Physics

Watching a Photon Without Touching It

Serge Haroche · David J. Wineland

The central paradox of quantum mechanics is not just philosophical: as soon as you look at a quantum system, you disturb it, collapsing the very superposition you were trying to study. Haroche and Wineland spent decades tunnelling around this problem from opposite ends. Haroche, working in Paris, constructed a microwave cavity so perfectly reflective that a single photon could bounce inside it for a tenth of a second, long enough to be probed by atoms sent through without the photon ever being absorbed — watching without touching, the physicist's ultimate ambition. Wineland, at NIST in Boulder, took the complementary approach: trapping individual beryllium ions with electromagnetic fields and manipulating their quantum states with exquisitely timed laser pulses, producing the first demonstrations of what the world would soon call quantum logic gates. Together their experiments transformed quantum measurement from a thought experiment into a laboratory discipline. Without their techniques, the quantum computing and quantum sensing industries being built today would have no experimental ground to stand on.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

A Mechanical Handshake at Atomic Scale

Robert J. Lefkowitz · Brian K. Kobilka

Somewhere between a cell's outer membrane and its interior chemistry, signals from the outside world must be converted into action — a task performed, with quiet ubiquity, by roughly 800 different G-protein-coupled receptors lodged in cell walls across the body. They detect light, smell, adrenaline, pain, and much else besides, and something close to a third of all drugs on the market work by latching onto them. Lefkowitz began pursuing the adrenaline receptor in the early 1970s, in an era when the concept of a receptor was still more hypothesis than established fact, and through painstaking radioactive-tracer work eventually isolated and cloned it. Kobilka, who trained partly in Lefkowitz's lab, pushed further: in 2011 he captured a crystal structure of the beta-2 adrenergic receptor at the precise instant an agonist was activating it, revealing — at atomic resolution — the mechanical handshake between outside signal and inside cascade. It was, structurally speaking, one of the harder things anyone had ever crystallised. Every drug currently being designed to target these receptors with greater precision depends on seeing exactly what they both made visible.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

The Cell's Past Is Not Its Prison

Sir John B. Gurdon · Shinya Yamanaka

The conventional assumption, for most of the twentieth century, was that cellular differentiation ran in only one direction: once a cell had committed to becoming a skin cell or a nerve cell, it shed its other options permanently. John Gurdon began dismantling this assumption in 1962, when he transplanted the nucleus of a mature intestinal frog cell into an enucleated egg and obtained a viable tadpole — proof that the adult nucleus still carried the full developmental programme, only suppressed. The result was met with considerable scepticism and earned him, as he later recalled, a school report noting that his ambition to become a scientist was “a waste of time.” Forty-four years later, Shinya Yamanaka showed that introducing just four transcription factors into ordinary adult mouse cells could reset them entirely back to a pluripotent state — induced pluripotent stem cells, requiring no embryo, no egg, no ethical controversy. The simplicity of the result shocked the field; laboratories rushed to reproduce it, half-expecting an error. The two discoveries, separated by nearly half a century, belong to the same story: the cell's past is not its prison, and medicine is now building patient-specific therapies on that single insight.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Folk Tales, History, and the Grotesque

Mo Yan

Mo Yan — the pen name, chosen with characteristic economy, means 'don't speak' — grew up in rural Shandong during the famine years of the Great Leap Forward, leaving school young and watching neighbours die while propaganda insisted the harvest had never been better. He eventually enrolled in the People's Liberation Army and began writing fiction that drew on those years with hallucinatory intensity: the work for which he is best known outside China, Red Sorghum, was published in 1987 and transformed into a celebrated Zhang Yimou film a year later. The Swedish Academy praised his fusion of folk tales, history, and the grotesque, and he became the first Chinese citizen residing in China to receive the prize. The award was not without controversy — Herta Müller and others objected to his association with the Chinese state — though the novels themselves, dense with violence and memory and absurdist humour, ask questions of authority that any censorship bureau would prefer unasked. The difficulty of Mo Yan is that you cannot reduce him to a position, which is, not coincidentally, exactly what good literature tends to do.

Nobel Peace Prize

A Circle of Children in Oslo

European Union

The European Union received the prize for six decades of advancing peace, democracy, and human rights across a continent that had spent the previous six decades — give or take — at war with itself in ways that killed tens of millions. The Nobel Committee's timing was, to put it charitably, bracing: the announcement arrived in October 2012, deep in the sovereign-debt crisis, with Greece and Spain suffering unemployment above twenty percent and euroscepticism rising sharply across member states. José Manuel Barroso and Herman Van Rompuy collected the prize in Oslo, where the ceremony included a symbolic gesture of children holding hands in a circle that did not entirely defuse the awkwardness. Whether the award was a statement of confident endorsement or a slightly anxious encouragement is a question historians will be sorting out for some time. The EU accepted graciously and donated the prize money to children's charities, which was, whatever one thinks of the politics, the correct move.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Theory Finds Its Practitioner

Alvin E. Roth · Lloyd S. Shapley

In 1962, Lloyd Shapley and David Gale published a short paper proving that stable matchings — arrangements where no two parties would both prefer to swap their current partners — could always be found, by an algorithm they called deferred acceptance, which turned out to be both elegant and fast. Shapley was a mathematician and proved theorems; he had no particular interest in applying them to real markets, which is where Alvin Roth came in. Roth spent the following decades taking Shapley and Gale's framework and doing something economists rarely do: actually fixing things. He redesigned the National Resident Matching Program — the system by which American medical graduates are placed in hospitals — making it stable where it had previously produced costly last-minute scrambles. He then applied similar logic to New York City's high school placement system, Boston's, and eventually to kidney exchange networks, where the matching problem involves live donors rather than preferences on paper. The prize went to both men, which was itself a neat piece of matching: theory had found its practitioner.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physics

The Ponytail Shape Equation

Joseph Keller · Raymond Goldstein · Patrick Warren · Robin Ball

The ponytail — that apparently simple mechanical object swinging from the backs of runners and cellos players the world over — had, until 2012, resisted a proper physics treatment. Joseph Keller, who had already won the Ig Nobel in 1999 for a previous study and was something of a connoisseur of the overlooked, joined Goldstein, Warren, and Ball to derive what they straightforwardly called the Ponytail Shape Equation: a relationship governing how gravity, hair's elastic stiffness, and the statistical curliness of individual fibres interact to produce the characteristic shape and bounce of a swaying bundle. The equation works. Given measurable parameters about a person's hair, it predicts ponytail geometry from first principles, which is either a minor triumph of applied mechanics or an admission about the priorities available to physics once the large problems are taken. The real grain of science underneath the absurdity is a model of fibre bundles under tension with random disorder — the sort of problem that shows up in composite materials and soft robotics, if you squint.

Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Why the Town's Hair Turned Green

Johan Pettersson

In the Swedish town of Anderslöv, residents began noticing something peculiar: their hair was turning green. Not dramatically, not all at once, but persistently — particularly among those who showered frequently, which in Sweden is most people. Johan Pettersson traced the problem methodically through the plumbing, eventually identifying an unhappy chain of events: copper concentrations unusually high in the hot water, a reaction between dissolved copper ions and a compound present in certain shampoos, and the deposition of the resulting compound directly onto hair shafts, where it sat, tinted and stubborn. The pipes were treated, the shampoos largely uninvolved, the residents relieved. Pettersson received the Ig Nobel for Chemistry, a prize that, in this instance, was almost precisely accurate: it was chemistry, it was investigated properly, and it solved a problem that was not imaginary, merely very strange.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine

Thinking Hard About Explosions So You Don't Have To

Emmanuel Ben-Soussan · Michel Antonietti

The colon, it turns out, is not a passive spectator during electrosurgical procedures: it can contain concentrations of hydrogen and methane sufficient, under the right conditions, to ignite. This is the sort of fact that, once you know it, seems obvious, and before you know it, seems impossible, and is in either case not the kind of thing you want to discover mid-procedure. Ben-Soussan and Antonietti published a careful clinical guide on bowel preparation protocols designed to reduce the concentration of combustible gas in patients before electrosurgery, covering dietary preparation, lavage techniques, and the conditions under which certain procedures should be delayed. The paper is entirely serious, practically useful, and written with the calm tone of people who have thought very hard about explosions so that others need not. The Ig Nobel Committee awarded it the Medicine prize, correctly perceiving that a piece of research this necessary and this inherently dignified-yet-absurd is precisely what the prize exists to honour.

Ig Nobel Prize in Neuroscience

A Dead Salmon Reads Your Emotions

Craig Bennett · Abigail Baird · Michael Miller · George Wolford

The experiment was conceived as a test of fMRI statistical methods: place an Atlantic salmon in a scanner, show it a series of photographs depicting humans in various social situations, and ask it to judge the emotional state of the people shown. The salmon, being dead, was expected to produce no response whatsoever. Without corrections for multiple comparisons — a standard and frequently skipped step in neuroimaging analysis — clusters of apparently significant activity appeared in the fish's brain, including, with some precision, in regions associated with social cognition. The paper, 'Neural Correlates of Interspecies Perspective Taking in the Post-Mortem Atlantic Salmon,' became a touchstone in discussions of false-positive rates in fMRI research and was eventually published in Perspectives on Psychological Science after initially being rejected as insufficiently serious. The salmon, for its part, achieved a more durable form of scientific prominence than most living experimental subjects.

Ig Nobel Prize in Psychology

Leaning Left Changes the Number

Anita Eerland · Rolf Zwaan · Tulio Guadalupe

Eerland, Zwaan, and Guadalupe recruited participants to stand on a Wii balance board while estimating various quantities — the height of the Eiffel Tower, the number of Grammy Awards won by Michael Jackson, the length of the Amazon river. Participants were secretly nudged to lean slightly left or slightly right by the board's calibration. Those who leaned left gave consistently lower estimates than those who leaned right, a result the researchers connected to the mental number line — the ingrained cognitive habit, at least in Western subjects, of representing smaller numbers to the left and larger ones to the right. The body, apparently, is not just carrying the brain around; it is quietly participating in the arithmetic. The finding was later subject to replication difficulties, which is a story so common in social psychology that it has become its own genre, but the underlying question — how posture and spatial orientation colour cognition — remains genuinely live.

Ig Nobel Prize in Acoustics

A Device That Politely Silences Ramblers

Kazutaka Kurihara · Koji Tsukada

Speech requires real-time auditory feedback: the brain monitors what the mouth is producing and adjusts on the fly, and if that feedback is returned with a delay of roughly two hundred milliseconds, the speaker begins to stutter, slow, and eventually fall silent — a phenomenon called delayed auditory feedback, known since the 1950s. Kurihara and Tsukada built this into a portable device they called the SpeechJammer, which captures a speaker's voice and plays it back through a directional speaker with precisely the disruptive delay, reliably interrupting unwanted public monologue at a distance. The paper was entirely straight-faced, the engineering modest and effective, and the implied use case — pointing it at someone talking too long in a meeting — left politely unstated. They received the Ig Nobel in Acoustics, which was appropriate, and presumably said their acceptance speech very quickly.

Ig Nobel Prize in Peace

Artillery Shells Become Polishing Powder

SKN Company

Russia had inherited, on the dissolution of the Soviet Union, rather more artillery shells than any peacetime economy requires, and the question of what to do with decommissioned ordnance is both practical and expensive. SKN Company developed an answer involving controlled detonation inside steel containment chambers: the intense pressure and heat of the blast compress and rearrange carbon atoms in the explosive, producing nanodiamonds — particles a few nanometres across with industrial applications as abrasives, coatings, and lubricant additives. The process was not symbolic; it was commercially viable. The Ig Nobel Committee awarded it the Peace Prize, on the reasoning that converting weaponry into material for polishing surfaces is, by almost any definition, an improvement. The slight comedy of giving a Peace Prize for an explosion was not, one suspects, lost on the committee.

Ig Nobel Prize in Literature

A Report About Reports About Reports

United States Government General Accountability Office

The United States Government General Accountability Office received the Literature prize for issuing a report about reports about reports — specifically, a report recommending the preparation of a report about the report on reports. The document in question was not a satire; it was a genuine product of the federal government's oversight machinery, in which the recursive scrutiny of paperwork had reached a depth the committee found worthy of literary recognition. There is a certain austere beauty in a bureaucracy that has learned to audit its own auditing, generating documents whose subject is the existence of other documents, in a regress that terminates only when someone runs out of budget. The committee awarded the prize for a contribution to the literature of self-reference that Borges might have admired and that no citizen was ever likely to read.

Ig Nobel Prize in Fluid Dynamics

Your Stride Is Resonating With Your Coffee

Rouslan Krechetnikov · Hans Mayer

Anyone who has carried a full cup of coffee across a room knows that it tends to slosh over the rim at the worst possible moment, and Rouslan Krechetnikov and Hans Mayer decided to work out precisely why. Filming volunteers walking with cups and modelling the physics, they found that the natural sloshing frequency of coffee in a typical mug happens to coincide almost exactly with the rhythm of human walking, so that each step pumps energy into the oscillation until it builds to the point of overflow — a resonance, in the strict engineering sense, between the gait and the fluid. They noted that watching the cup, walking more slowly, or starting off more gently all help, which most people had already discovered by trial and stained sleeve. The committee awarded the Fluid Dynamics prize for a rigorous account of a small daily catastrophe, and for confirming that the coffee is not, in fact, out to get you — merely in resonance with your stride.

Ig Nobel Prize in Anatomy

Chimpanzees Know You From Behind

Frans de Waal · Jennifer Pokorny

Frans de Waal and Jennifer Pokorny showed chimpanzees photographs of other chimpanzees' hindquarters and found that the animals could reliably match a given rear end to the correct face, identifying individuals they knew from an angle that humans generally consider uninformative. The finding is less frivolous than it sounds: it demonstrates that chimpanzees form whole-body representations of the individuals in their social group, integrating front and back into a single recognisable identity much as we recognise a familiar person by their walk or their silhouette. The committee awarded the Anatomy prize for establishing that a chimpanzee, shown a photograph of a posterior, performs a feat of individual recognition that a human presented with the same image could not. It is a reminder that the information an animal finds salient is calibrated to the life it actually leads, which for a chimpanzee involves rather more rear ends than ours does.

Turing Award

Proving What Secrecy Actually Means

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Shafi Goldwasser · Silvio Micali

Before Goldwasser and Micali, cryptographic security was an informal affair: experts argued about whether a scheme felt hard to break, and the argument was settled by whether anyone had yet broken it. Starting in the early 1980s, the two provided something more durable: rigorous mathematical definitions of what it would even mean for a cryptosystem to be secure, and formal proofs that specific schemes met those definitions assuming certain computational problems were hard. Their notion of semantic security — roughly, that an encrypted message reveals nothing about its plaintext — and their probabilistic encryption scheme were foundational. They also introduced the concept of zero-knowledge proofs, which allow one party to convince another that a statement is true without revealing any information about why it is true, a tool that has found unexpected relevance in privacy-preserving computation and blockchain protocols. The padlock icon in every browser address bar is a cultural shorthand for a chain of reasoning that begins, more or less, with their papers.

Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)

The Cell Runs a Logistics Operation

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Michael Sheetz · James Spudich · Ronald Vale

A cell is not a bag of chemicals in equilibrium; it is a logistics operation, with cargo being hauled continuously along protein tracks to precise destinations. Sheetz, Spudich, and Vale spent decades identifying and characterising the molecular motors responsible: myosin, which walks along actin filaments and powers muscle contraction; kinesin, which Sheetz and Vale discovered in the mid-1980s carries vesicles and organelles along microtubules toward the cell's periphery; and dynein, which hauls things in the opposite direction. Vale developed an in-vitro motility assay that let researchers actually watch individual motor molecules walking along isolated filaments — one of the more startling things early optical microscopy revealed about the interior of a cell. The motors they described run cell division, transport neurotransmitter vesicles to synaptic terminals, position the mitotic spindle, and distribute organelles to daughter cells. A neuron extending from the base of the spine to the tip of the toe cannot survive without kinesin ferrying material along a metre of axon; without these three men's work, that sentence would have no meaning.

Discovery of the Higgs boson

The Last Piece, Found at 125 GeV

In 1964, Peter Higgs and, independently, François Englert and Robert Brout, proposed a mechanism by which particles acquire mass: an invisible field pervading all of space, interacting with particles as they move through it and slowing them in a way that manifests as mass. The particle associated with this field — a consequence of quantum field theory — was the last missing piece of the Standard Model, and finding it required building the most complex scientific instrument in human history, the Large Hadron Collider, at a cost of several billion francs, and waiting. On 4 July 2012, the ATLAS and CMS collaborations at CERN announced simultaneously, with 5-sigma confidence, that they had observed a new boson at around 125 GeV behaving in precisely the ways the Higgs mechanism predicted. The announcement was made to an audience that included Higgs himself, then 83; he was seen to wipe his eyes. The discovery confirmed that the Standard Model is, at the very least, not wrong — a conclusion that is both deeply satisfying and, to physicists hoping for a crack through which new physics might enter, slightly disappointing.

Denisovan genome sequenced from fossil powder

An Entire People, From One Finger Bone

In 2008, archaeologists excavating Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia found a small bone fragment — the distal phalanx of a child's finger, about the size of a thumbnail — and sent it to Svante Pääbo's ancient-DNA laboratory at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. The bone was so well preserved in the cave's cold, stable conditions that by 2012 the team had sequenced a high-quality complete genome from the material: enough to establish that its owner belonged to a population of archaic humans previously unknown to science, genetically distinct from both modern humans and Neanderthals, who had lived across a vast stretch of Asia and interbred with both. Traces of Denisovan DNA persist in modern Melanesian populations at levels around four to six percent, and a Denisovan gene variant appears to have given Tibetans their adaptation to high altitude. An entire branch of human prehistory — its range, its relationships, its legacy in living people — emerged, with considerable surprise, from a single finger bone recovered from a cave in southern Siberia.

Curiosity rover lands on Mars

Seven Minutes of Terror, Lowered on Cables

The problem was straightforward to state and nightmarish to solve: Curiosity, at roughly a tonne, was too heavy for the airbag landing system that had worked for earlier rovers, and a conventional rocket-powered touchdown would have blasted the landing site with contaminating exhaust. NASA's solution was the sky crane: a rocket-powered descent stage that would slow itself to a hover roughly twenty metres above the surface and lower the rover on three cables, using bridles and a umbilical, until the wheels touched Martian ground, at which point the cables would cut and the descent stage would fly away and crash at a safe distance. The entire sequence — seven minutes, fully automated, with a fourteen-minute communication delay making real-time intervention impossible — was called 'seven minutes of terror' by the engineers who designed it. On 6 August 2012, it worked, depositing Curiosity in Gale Crater with an accuracy of less than three kilometres. In its first months on the surface, the rover found evidence of an ancient streambed and, later, of a lake environment that would have been chemically suitable for microbial life. Mars, it turned out, had once been genuinely habitable — not just survivable, but a place where life as we understand it could have existed without extraordinary strain.