2016

Nobel Prize in Physics

Matter Protected by Counting Its Holes

David J. Thouless · F. Duncan M. Haldane · J. Michael Kosterlitz

In the 1970s and 1980s, when condensed-matter physics was largely occupied with incrementally better materials, Thouless and Kosterlitz noticed something strange in thin conducting films: rather than changing gradually with temperature, their properties jumped — abruptly, decisively, like a light switching on. The explanation turned out to live in topology, the branch of mathematics that distinguishes a sphere from a donut by counting holes rather than measuring angles, and Thouless found that certain quantum properties of thin layers are protected by these same topological invariants, which cannot change without catastrophe. Haldane extended the framework to quantum spin chains, producing results theorists initially refused to believe. The prize arrived roughly three decades after the work, which in Nobel timescales barely counts as delayed. What the laureates built is now the conceptual foundation for topological insulators and quantum computing architectures — materials that conduct electricity on their surfaces while remaining insulating in their bulk, a combination that would have sounded like a contradiction before these three came along.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

A Motor Built From a Single Molecule

Jean-Pierre Sauvage · Sir J. Fraser Stoddart · Bernard L. Feringa

Chemistry's long ambition had been to build things — to assemble atoms into structures with desired properties. What Sauvage, Stoddart, and Feringa accomplished was something stranger and more delightful: they built machines, structures with moving mechanical parts, at a scale where the parts are individual molecules. Sauvage in the 1980s found an elegant way to link molecular rings into chains — catenanes — where the rings are genuinely interlocked but not covalently bonded, so they can rotate around each other. Stoddart built rotaxanes, dumbbell-shaped molecules with a ring threaded onto an axle that could be toggled between two positions, the first credible molecular switch. Feringa went furthest: in 1999 he built a molecular motor, a structure that rotates continuously in a single direction when driven by light, like a microscopic turbine you cannot see. The committee gave them the prize for inventing machines so small that 10,000 of them laid side by side would fit across a human hair — which is a genuine achievement, even if the practical applications are still largely conceptual. The machines work; what they will be made to do is the question for the next generation.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Cells Learn to Clean Their Own Rubbish

Yoshinori Ohsumi

The idea that cells eat themselves had been around since the 1960s, when electron microscopes first revealed organelles that seemed to be consuming other organelles — a process Christian de Duve named autophagy, from the Greek for 'self-devouring,' which is either poetic or alarming depending on one's frame of mind. For decades it remained a curiosity, impossible to study molecularly because nobody knew which genes ran it. Ohsumi's solution, in the early 1990s, was wonderfully direct: starve yeast until autophagy accelerates, create mutants in which it fails, and look for the genes that differ. Working in a lab that colleagues considered modest even by Tokyo standards, he identified fifteen autophagy genes in short order. The cellular machinery those genes encode turns out to be conserved from yeast to human neurons with remarkable fidelity, and its failure is now implicated in Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's, type 2 diabetes, and certain cancers. Cells that cannot clear their own damaged components accumulate debris the way a city accumulates rubbish during a strike — slowly at first, then all at once. Ohsumi won the prize alone, which is unusual, but he did the work alone, which is rarer still.

Nobel Prize in Literature

He Sent an Ambassador Instead of Himself

Bob Dylan

The Swedish Academy cited Dylan for 'having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition' — a formulation careful enough to sidestep the obvious question of whether song lyrics constitute literature, while implicitly answering it. Dylan, born Robert Zimmerman in Duluth in 1941, spent the 1960s writing verses of a kind that had not quite existed before: 'Blowin' in the Wind,' 'The Times They Are A-Changin',' 'A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall,' pieces that drew on Whitman, Ginsberg, Woody Guthrie, and the King James Bible in roughly equal measure and arrived sounding like none of them. He did not respond to the Academy's announcement for days; when he did, he said he was 'speechless.' He did not attend the ceremony in Stockholm, citing what his office described as 'pre-existing commitments,' and sent instead the US Ambassador to Sweden, Azita Raji, to read a speech in which he mused on the Nobel tradition and wondered whether Shakespeare himself had considered his plays literature while writing them. The speech, read aloud in his absence, was widely considered the most Dylan thing he could possibly have done. Whether his songs are literature is a question that feels less urgent with each passing decade; that they endure is no longer seriously in dispute.

Nobel Peace Prize

A Deal Voters Rejected, Then Won Anyway

Juan Manuel Santos

Colombia's conflict with the FARC — the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia — had been running since 1964, making it one of the longest-running insurgencies in the Western Hemisphere, one that had produced hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of displaced people, and a generation that had known nothing else. Santos, a former defence minister who had prosecuted the war vigorously before concluding it could not be won militarily, spent four years negotiating with FARC leadership in Havana, producing a 297-page agreement announced in August 2016. The Colombian public, asked to ratify it in a referendum on 2 October, rejected it — by 50.2 to 49.8 percent, the closest possible margin. The Nobel Committee announced his prize four days later, an unusual endorsement of a deal the relevant population had just voted down. Santos chose to read this not as irony but as encouragement, and returned to renegotiate; a revised agreement was ratified by Congress in November. The prize was awarded, the committee said, to support a peace process, and support was precisely what the moment required. The guns had stopped. That mattered.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Why No Contract Covers Everything

Oliver Hart · Bengt Holmström

Classical contract theory assumed that parties to an agreement could specify in advance everything that might go wrong and write a clause for it. Hart and Holmström, working largely independently in the 1970s and 1980s, built the theory of what happens when they cannot — when information is asymmetric, when effort is unobservable, when the future is simply too complicated to enumerate. Holmström's work on incentives under incomplete information produced what he called the informativeness principle: you should tie payment to any signal that reveals something about effort, and not to signals that don't. This seems obvious in retrospect; it was not obvious before him. Hart's incomplete contracts theory asked what happens when parties know they cannot write a complete agreement — who should own the assets? — and found that ownership is really about the distribution of bargaining power when things inevitably go sideways. Together, their work explains why CEOs have equity, why employees do not own the factories they work in, why certain industries integrate vertically and others do not, and why reforming executive pay is so much harder in practice than on a whiteboard. The mechanisms underlying almost every contract you have ever signed trace back, at some remove, to these two.

Ig Nobel Prize in Biology

Two Men Went to Live as Animals

Charles Foster · Thomas Thwaites

Foster, a British barrister and author, spent periods living as a badger (sleeping in a hole, eating earthworms), an otter (swimming rivers in Wales), a red deer (trotting on all fours across Scottish highland), an urban fox (rummaging through London rubbish at night), and a swift (being strapped into a harness and suspended from a roof). He wrote a book about it. Thwaites, a designer, built a prosthetic exoskeleton to redistribute his weight onto four limbs, moved into a Swiss meadow, and spent several days living among a herd of goats; a goat herder was consulted as an expert. Both approached their projects with the earnestness of men who had thought very hard about something slightly mad and decided to see it through anyway, and both produced work that raises, without quite answering, the question of what it might feel like to be another animal. The Ig Nobel committee, recognising genuine inquiry conducted in the least dignified possible manner, divided the prize between them.

Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Software That Cheated on the Air Test

Volkswagen

The Volkswagen emissions scandal, which broke publicly in September 2015, revealed that the company had installed defeat device software in approximately eleven million diesel vehicles worldwide — software that detected the precise conditions of an emissions test (specific wheel speed, steering angle, duration, and ambient conditions) and switched the engine into a cleaner-running mode accordingly. On the road, outside testing conditions, the vehicles emitted nitrogen oxides at levels up to forty times the legal limit. The Ig Nobel committee awarded the Chemistry prize for 'solving, at the molecular level, the problem of air pollution' — a description so technically accurate and morally deranged that it more or less captures the whole affair. Volkswagen did not send a representative to accept.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physics

Dark Horses Look Like Water to Flies

Gábor Horváth · Miklós Blahó · György Kriska

Horváth and colleagues had spent years studying polarised light and its effects on insect behaviour, and what they found was both tidy and quietly tragic. Horseflies locate water by following horizontally polarised light reflected from the surface — a reliable cue for millions of years, until humans introduced other smooth dark surfaces that produce the same signal. Dark horses attract far more horseflies than white horses because their coats reflect more strongly polarised light, more closely resembling water; white horses, by a fortunate quirk, confuse the insects into leaving. Dragonflies are drawn to lay their eggs on certain black gravestones for the same reason, making the gravestone an ecological trap — a biological dead end dressed as a breeding ground. The finding earns its prize not for absurdity but for revealing that a physical property humans barely notice shapes the invisible lives of entire insect populations, and has been doing so, in new and lethal ways, since we started paving things.

Ig Nobel Prize in Perception

The World Shrinks Upside Down

Atsuki Higashiyama · Kohei Adachi

The posture known informally as 'looking between your legs' — bending at the waist, inverting one's head, and peering at the world upside-down — has presumably been available to human beings for as long as human beings have had legs and waists. Higashiyama and Adachi were the first to subject it to rigorous psychophysical measurement, asking subjects to estimate distances and sizes while in this position and while standing normally. The inverted view consistently made objects appear smaller and closer — a systematic, reproducible perceptual distortion, not a random one. The cause is not entirely settled, but the body's orientation relative to gravity appears to recalibrate how the visual system interprets space. Whether this knowledge makes the posture more or less worth adopting in daily life is a question the paper does not address, though one suspects the authors had views.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine

Scratching the Wrong Arm on Purpose

Christoph Helmchen · Carina Palzer · Thomas Münte

The mirror box — a device in which a mirror creates the visual illusion that an absent limb is present — had already demonstrated that the brain can be persuaded into updating its body map by visual feedback alone. Helmchen, Palzer, and Münte extended this logic to itch: if you hold a mirror so that your right arm appears in place of your itchy left arm, and scratch the right arm in the location where the left arm itches, the itch diminishes measurably. The brain, watching what it believes to be the correct arm being scratched, revises its assessment of what the skin is experiencing. This is simultaneously a respectable finding about the hierarchy of the senses and an image of a person sitting quietly with a mirror, scratching the wrong arm on purpose. The sensory system, it turns out, is considerably more credulous about what the eyes report than what the skin insists upon.

Ig Nobel Prize in Reproduction

A Surgeon Dressed Rats in Trousers

Ahmed Shafik

The late Ahmed Shafik, an Egyptian surgeon of formidable and eclectic productivity, spent part of his career dressing rats in trousers. The garments were cut from polyester, cotton, or wool, worn for extended periods, after which Shafik assessed the animals' subsequent sexual activity — and reported that the polyester-clad rats fared distinctly worse, an effect he attributed to electrostatic charges generated in the synthetic fabric. He extended the enquiry to human volunteers, with broadly consistent findings. Behind the immediate comedy lies a real hypothesis about static fields and fertility, pursued with a seriousness that the sight of a rat in tailored polyester tends to obscure. Shafik published prolifically across urology and physiology; this was neither his strangest study nor, in its way, his least rigorous. The committee recognised a body of work that took the trouser question further than anyone had thought to ask it.

Ig Nobel Prize in Economics

Even a Rock Gets a Personality

Mark Avis · Sarah Forbes · Shelagh Ferguson

Marketers have long relied on the notion of brand personality — the idea that a product can be warm, or rugged, or sophisticated, and that consumers respond to these imagined traits. Mark Avis, Sarah Forbes, and Shelagh Ferguson set out to test how far the notion could be stretched, and stretched it to rocks: they asked people to assess the personalities of stones, from a sales and marketing standpoint, using the same scales ordinarily applied to cars and soft drinks. Respondents obligingly attributed character to the rocks, which the researchers took as evidence not of geological charisma but of a flaw in the method — if a scale finds personality in an inert lump of mineral, the scale is measuring the respondent's willingness to answer rather than any property of the thing itself. It was a critique of marketing theory dressed as an exercise in geology, and the rocks maintained a dignified silence throughout.

Ig Nobel Prize in Psychology

Asking Liars How Often They Lie

Evelyne Debey · Maarten De Schryver · Gordon Logan · Kristina Suchotzki · Bruno Verschuere

Debey and her colleagues surveyed roughly a thousand people, spanning childhood to old age, and asked each how frequently they told lies — a study design that carries, at its heart, an obvious and unavoidable problem, which the researchers acknowledged with commendable directness. Setting the paradox aside, the self-reports produced a coherent developmental curve: lying rises through childhood, peaks in adolescence, and gradually declines across adulthood, with a small number of prolific liars responsible for a disproportionate share of the total. The pattern is genuinely useful to psychologists studying deception, provided one is willing to take a liar's account of their own lying at something other than face value. The committee honoured the willingness to build a body of data on a foundation that the field itself admits may be, in part, fabricated.

Ig Nobel Prize in Peace

Wholeness Quiets Infinite Phenomena

Gordon Pennycook · James Allan Cheyne · Nathaniel Barr · Derek Koehler · Jonathan Fugelsang

Gordon Pennycook and his colleagues took an interest in a specific class of statement — grammatically sound, superficially deep, and on inspection entirely vacuous, of the sort assembled by stringing together fashionable abstractions until a sentence like 'wholeness quiets infinite phenomena' emerges. They presented such sentences to participants alongside genuine aphorisms, and measured who rated the empty ones as profound. The people most receptive to pseudo-profound nonsense, it emerged, tended to score lower on analytic thinking and higher on a general readiness to find meaning wherever it is implied. The paper, published under a title that used the plain Anglo-Saxon word for the phenomenon, was a rigorous piece of work about the psychology of being impressed by nothing. It has been cited widely, in an age that furnishes an ample and renewable supply of its subject matter.

Ig Nobel Prize in Literature

A Life Spent Collecting Hoverflies

Fredrik Sjöberg

Fredrik Sjöberg, a Swedish entomologist, wrote a three-volume autobiographical work whose ostensible subject is the collecting of hoverflies — insects that mimic bees, that most people never notice, and that Sjöberg has gathered on a small island for years with a devotion that is really the book's true theme. The first volume, translated as The Fly Trap, is less about the flies than about the peculiar contentment of narrowing one's attention to something small and largely disregarded, and finding in that narrowing a whole world. The committee honoured a meditation, spread across three books, on the pleasures of collecting flies that are dead and flies that are not yet dead. It is a quietly persuasive argument that the size of a passion has nothing to do with the size of its object.

Turing Award

Vague but Exciting, It Turned Out

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Sir Tim Berners-Lee

In March 1989, a quietly persistent CERN physicist named Tim Berners-Lee submitted a proposal to his supervisor titled 'Information Management: A Proposal.' The supervisor wrote 'vague but exciting' on the cover and handed it back. Berners-Lee, undeterred, spent the next two years building anyway: a system of hyperlinked documents served over the internet, navigable by any machine that could speak his protocols — HTTP, HTML, and the URL — and run on a NeXT workstation he labelled 'This machine is a server. Do not power it down.' The World Wide Web went public in 1991. Berners-Lee, who could have patented it and retired early, instead declined to do so, keeping the web royalty-free and open. By 2016, when the ACM finally awarded him the Turing, roughly half the global population was using the result. The prize citation called his contribution 'one of the most influential computing innovations in history,' which, in the measured language of computing awards, counts as effusive. Twenty-seven years is a long time to wait; it is also, given what he built, a reasonable period in which to confirm the observation.

LIGO announces first direct detection of gravitational waves

Spacetime Rang Like a Bell

On 14 September 2015 at 5:51 in the morning, a signal lasting 0.2 seconds swept through LIGO's detector in Livingston, Louisiana, and arrived 7 milliseconds later at the detector in Hanford, Washington — each instrument's mirrors shifting by roughly four-thousandths the diameter of a proton, a displacement so small that the instrument had to account for the quantum uncertainty of its own mirrors. The source was two black holes, of 29 and 36 solar masses, spiralling together and merging 1.3 billion light-years away in a collision that released, in those final fractions of a second, more energy than all the stars in the observable universe emit in that time. Einstein had predicted gravitational waves in 1916, as a consequence of general relativity, and later convinced himself that the effect would be too small ever to detect — an unusual error from a man not given to underestimating his own theories. The announcement came on 11 February 2016, after months of internal verification so rigorous that the team had introduced fake signals into their own data to test their analysts' integrity. A new kind of astronomy, one that listens to spacetime rather than looks at it, had begun.

Proxima Centauri b: Earth-sized planet at the nearest star

The Nearest Star Has a World Too

Proxima Centauri sits 4.24 light-years from the Sun — the nearest star of any kind, a dim red dwarf so faint that it was only discovered in 1915 despite being, cosmically speaking, next door. On 24 August 2016, the European Southern Observatory announced that it has a planet: Proxima Centauri b, with a minimum mass of 1.27 times Earth's, orbiting its star every 11.2 days at a distance that, given Proxima's low luminosity, places it in the habitable zone. The proximity of the orbit means the planet is almost certainly tidally locked, one face perpetually toward the star and one in permanent dark; its sun, though dim, is prone to violent flares of ultraviolet radiation that would challenge any atmosphere. Whether it has an atmosphere at all, whether liquid water could persist, whether a magnetic field exists to hold one — these are questions the instruments of 2016 could pose but not answer. The significance is less that the planet is promising and more that the nearest star has a planet at all; statistically, that suggests planets are everywhere. The TRAPPIST-1 system, announced the following year, would reinforce the point.

Ideonella sakaiensis: bacterium that breaks down PET plastic

A Microbe Learned to Eat Bottles

PET — polyethylene terephthalate — was introduced in the 1940s and is now the plastic of water bottles, food packaging, and synthetic fibre. It had been assumed to be essentially inert in the natural environment: stable, non-biodegradable, accumulating in soils and oceans at a rate that no biological process could meaningfully address. In 2016, Kohei Oda and colleagues at the Kyoto Institute of Technology reported finding, at a plastic-recycling facility in Sakai, Japan, a bacterium — Ideonella sakaiensis — that was quietly eating PET as its primary carbon source. The bacterium deploys two enzymes, PETase and MHETase, in sequence, breaking the polymer first into an intermediate and then into its constituent monomers, which it then metabolises. The discovery did not, on its own, solve plastic pollution; the bacterium works slowly, and scaling biology is hard. What it demonstrated is that evolution, given enough time and enough plastic, will find a way — the polymer had been in the environment for barely seventy years before a bacterium worked out how to eat it. Engineered versions of PETase, made substantially faster by protein engineering, are now in development for industrial recycling. Nature found the proof of concept; the rest is engineering.

Juno spacecraft enters Jupiter orbit

A Five-Year Trip, Then a Blind Burn

Juno launched in August 2011 and spent five years crossing the inner solar system, including a gravity-assist flyby of Earth in 2013, before arriving at Jupiter on 4 July 2016 — a date the mission team selected, and freely admitted to selecting, for its symbolism. The thirty-five-minute engine burn required to enter polar orbit was conducted autonomously, too far from Earth for real-time commands to be useful, which is a particular kind of engineering courage: you design it right once and then wait. Juno is the first spacecraft to orbit Jupiter from pole to pole, passing inside the radiation belts on each close approach — a brutal electromagnetic environment that required its electronics to be shielded in a titanium vault — and the first designed to see beneath the planet's cloud deck by measuring its gravitational and magnetic fields in detail. What it found revised several assumptions: Jupiter's interior is more disordered than the clean layered models had predicted, its magnetic field more asymmetric, its poles covered in cyclonic storms clustered in geometric patterns that nobody had expected and nobody had a ready explanation for. It is still operating.

China completes FAST, the world's largest radio telescope

A Mountain Valley Tuned to the Sky

The Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Telescope — FAST — fills a naturally occurring karst depression in the mountains of Guizhou Province, its surface tiled with 4,450 triangular aluminium panels whose positions can be adjusted to focus on any part of the sky. At 500 metres across, it surpasses the Arecibo Observatory — which stood for decades as the world's largest single-dish radio telescope, at 305 metres — by a margin that makes comparisons feel unkind. The area surrounding it was cleared of local residents to reduce radio frequency interference, a relocation whose scale drew its own commentary. FAST began formal operations in September 2016, and within two years had detected hundreds of new pulsars — rotating neutron stars that function as precision clocks and tests of general relativity — at a pace Arecibo could not have matched. It also listens for signals from elsewhere, though none have yet arrived that require that particular kind of explanation. The telescope is a statement about the seriousness of Chinese investment in fundamental science, made in the language of aperture.

Rosetta mission ends with controlled impact on comet 67P

An Unhurried Goodbye on a Comet

Rosetta launched in March 2004, spent ten years crossing the solar system using gravity assists from Earth and Mars, and in August 2014 became the first spacecraft to achieve orbit around a comet — a lumpy, rubber-duck-shaped body called 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, roughly four kilometres across. In November 2014 it deployed Philae, the first lander to touch a comet's surface (though Philae bounced, and landed in a shadow rather than in sunlight, limiting its scientific life). Rosetta itself spent two years studying 67P as it fell toward the Sun and receded again, sampling the gases and dust erupting from the nucleus and mapping the surface in detail that had not been possible from any previous comet mission. By September 2016, now 720 million kilometres from the Sun and losing power, Rosetta's mission controllers at ESOC in Darmstadt commanded a slow descent to the comet's surface, transmitting data until the moment of impact, when the signal ceased. It was, as endings go, unhurried and dignified — the natural conclusion for a mission that had done what it set out to do, and in doing so had found water ice, organic molecules, and a magnetic field weaker than the most sensitive instruments had dared expect. The questions it answered about the early solar system are outnumbered by the ones it raised.