2020

Nobel Prize in Physics

Roger Penrose · Reinhard Genzel · Andrea Ghez

Penrose proved mathematically in 1965 that black holes were not a curiosity of special symmetry but an inevitable consequence of general relativity — that matter collapsing past a certain point has no choice in the matter. Genzel and Ghez spent decades tracking the orbits of stars near the centre of our galaxy, each star tracing a tight ellipse around something invisible. Whatever Sagittarius A* is, it has the mass of four million suns and fits inside a volume smaller than our solar system.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Emmanuelle Charpentier · Jennifer A. Doudna

Bacteria, it turned out, had been defending themselves against viruses by keeping fragments of viral DNA and using them to recognise and cut future intruders. Charpentier and Doudna understood this system well enough to redirect it: point it at any sequence of DNA you choose, and it will cut there. The ability to edit genomes with that precision is, depending on who you ask, either the most important biological tool since PCR or something rather more consequential than that.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Harvey J. Alter · Michael Houghton · Charles M. Rice

Alter noticed in the 1970s that patients were getting hepatitis from blood transfusions, despite testing negative for hepatitis A and B; whatever was causing it had no name yet. Houghton cloned the genome of the unknown virus in 1989. Rice showed that this cloned material alone could cause the disease in chimpanzees — confirming that hepatitis C was not a phantom but a thing you could, in principle, now eliminate. The drugs came eventually, and they work.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Louise Glück

Glück's poems are spare in the way that bone is spare — no excess, no decoration, nothing that is not doing work. Her collection The Wild Iris speaks in voices that include flowers addressing their gardener, and manages to be neither whimsical nor absurd. The committee called her voice unmistakable, which it is.

Nobel Peace Prize

World Food Programme

The WFP fed roughly 100 million people in 88 countries in 2019, which is a number large enough to be difficult to think about properly. The committee noted its work in conflict zones, where hunger is sometimes a tool rather than a misfortune. The prize was awarded in the same year that COVID-19 began interrupting supply chains and collapsing incomes in the places the WFP most reliably operated.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Paul R. Milgrom · Robert B. Wilson

Wilson analysed auctions where bidders share a common uncertainty about what they're buying — oil drilling rights, say — and showed how rational bidders account for the risk of overpaying. Milgrom extended this to more complex settings and then, with Wilson as collaborator, designed the simultaneous multiple-round auction format that governments now use to sell radio spectrum. Good theory, it turns out, has practical consequences measured in billions.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine

Nienke Vulink · Damiaan Denys · Arnoud van Loon

Misophonia — the experience of disproportionate rage or disgust triggered by specific sounds, particularly other people chewing — was formally characterised as a distinct psychiatric condition, with its own neurological signature. This will be familiar to anyone who has eaten lunch near a colleague who breathes through their mouth. The finding gives the condition a name; it does not, unfortunately, give it a cure.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physics

Ivan Maksymov · Andrey Pototsky

A live earthworm, vibrated at increasing frequencies, does not simply vibrate uniformly: it settles into stable standing wave patterns, different shapes emerging at different frequencies, the worm apparently untroubled by any of this. The physics is orthodox; the experimental choice of organism is not.

Ig Nobel Prize in Acoustics

Stephan Reber · Takeshi Nishimura · Judith Janisch

The researchers placed a female Chinese alligator in a helium-enriched atmosphere and induced her to bellow, finding that her vocalisations shifted in formant frequency in precisely the manner predicted by resonance theory. The alligator was, by all available accounts, cooperative. This is among the more baroque methods of testing acoustic physics, and also among the more reliable.

Ig Nobel Prize in Psychology

Miranda Giacomin · Nicholas Rule

Across several studies, the thickness and distinctiveness of a person's eyebrows proved a reliable predictor of their narcissism score. Participants shown only cropped photographs of eyebrows could identify high-narcissism individuals at above-chance rates. The practical applications of this finding are left as an exercise for the reader.

Ig Nobel Prize in Materials Science

Metin Eren · Michelle Bebber · James Norris

A paper had claimed that an Inuit hunter, lacking a knife, had once fashioned one from his own frozen faeces and used it successfully. The winners attempted to replicate this. The knife failed immediately and repeatedly to cut anything, leaving the original claim unverified and the experimental setup best not described further.

Ig Nobel Prize in Management

Xi Guang-An · Mo Tian-Xiang · Yang Kang-Sheng

A hired assassination was subcontracted through a chain of five intermediaries, each taking a portion of the fee and passing the remainder along, until the final recipient decided the sum remaining was too small to act on and instead contacted the intended victim with a proposition to share it. Everyone involved was subsequently arrested. The paper treats this as a case study in organisational incentives, which it is.

Turing Award

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Alfred Aho · Jeffrey Ullman

Aho and Ullman worked out how compilers should work — how to take a program written by a human and convert it, reliably and efficiently, into something a machine could execute — and then wrote the textbooks, including the "Dragon Book," that taught this to the next several generations of computer scientists. The foundations they laid are so thoroughly embedded in modern tools that their absence is difficult to imagine.

AlphaFold solves the protein-folding problem

A protein's function is determined by its shape, and its shape is determined by how its amino acid chain collapses on itself — a problem that had defeated structural biologists for fifty years because the number of possible configurations is astronomically large. DeepMind's AlphaFold2, announced as the winner of CASP14 in November 2020, predicted structures with accuracy comparable to X-ray crystallography. The solution came from machine learning rather than from physics, which surprised people who thought they understood what kind of problem it was.

Phosphine detected in the atmosphere of Venus

Spectroscopic observations with two radio telescopes detected what appeared to be phosphine in the Venusian cloud deck at roughly 20 parts per billion — a molecule that, on Earth, is produced almost exclusively by anaerobic life or industrial chemistry, neither of which should exist in the atmosphere of Venus. The finding generated immediate and intense argument about the measurement, the data reduction, and what the molecule's presence would actually imply. The debate continues.

WHO declares COVID-19 a pandemic; mRNA vaccines reach emergency authorisation

The WHO declared a pandemic on 11 March 2020. By December, two mRNA vaccines — Pfizer-BioNTech's BNT162b2 and Moderna's mRNA-1273 — had received emergency authorisation and begun deployment, the first mRNA vaccines ever approved for use in humans. The platform had been in development for decades; the pandemic gave it an urgent occasion. From sequence publication to vaccination took eleven months.

Three nations launch Mars missions in the same window

Earth and Mars align favourably for launches only every twenty-six months. Three nations used the July 2020 window: the UAE's Hope orbiter on 20 July, China's Tianwen-1 on 23 July, NASA's Perseverance on 30 July. All three arrived at Mars in February 2021. It was the first time three separate spacecraft from three separate space programmes had been aimed at another planet in the same fortnight.

Death of Freeman Dyson

Freeman Dyson

Dyson arrived at the problem of quantum electrodynamics in 1948 and spent a year working through what Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga had each done differently, before writing a single paper showing they were all the same theory. He never received a Nobel Prize, which is a fact physicists mention more often than Dyson apparently did. He died in Princeton on 28 February 2020, aged 96, still writing.