2020

Nobel Prize in Physics

A Singularity, Proven and Then Watched

Roger Penrose · Reinhard Genzel · Andrea Ghez

In 1965, working with pencil and a piece of abstract mathematics called topology, Roger Penrose demonstrated something that even Einstein had doubted: that black holes were not exotic accidents of perfect symmetry but an inescapable conclusion of general relativity itself — that any sufficiently concentrated mass must collapse, without qualification, into a singularity. The theorem settled the theoretical question. The observational one took another few decades. Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez, working independently with separate teams on separate continents, spent the 1990s and 2000s tracking individual stars near the centre of the Milky Way, watching them wheel around an invisible point in tight, rapid ellipses that Newton's laws could read as clearly as a balance sheet. Whatever sits at the core of our galaxy — Sagittarius A*, as it is prosaically named — contains four million solar masses packed into a volume smaller than our solar system, and it neither glows nor explains itself. One half of the prize went to Penrose for proving the thing had to exist; the other half to the two astronomers who watched it hold a thousand stars in its grip.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Scissors Borrowed From a Bacterium

Emmanuelle Charpentier · Jennifer A. Doudna

Bacteria, it transpires, have been running their own immune memory for hundreds of millions of years, keeping short snippets of viral DNA in a dedicated section of their genome so they could recognise and cut intruders on the next encounter — a system discovered in stages through the 2000s and called CRISPR. Emmanuelle Charpentier, working in her lab on the bacterium Streptococcus pyogenes, identified a small RNA molecule central to the machinery; she then joined forces with Jennifer Doudna at Berkeley, and together they published a 2012 paper showing that the CRISPR-Cas9 system could be reprogrammed to cut any stretch of DNA you cared to specify, simply by swapping in a matching guide RNA. The elegance of it verges on the unsettling: a protein that reads your instruction, finds the exact sequence among three billion base pairs, and makes a clean double-strand break. Therapies for sickle cell disease and certain cancers have already reached clinical trials, and the longer-term implications for agriculture, basic biology, and the boundaries of medicine remain genuinely open — a rare situation in which the scientists awarded a Nobel may not yet have seen their own work's largest consequences.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

The Hepatitis That Had No Name Yet

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

In the 1970s, Harvey Alter was working at the National Institutes of Health and noticing something troubling: patients who received blood transfusions were developing hepatitis even when the blood had tested clean for both the hepatitis A and B viruses then known. The disease was real; its cause was not yet a thing that had a name. He called it, with clinical plainness, non-A non-B hepatitis. Michael Houghton, at Chiron Corporation, spent years working with an extraordinarily thin signal — infected chimpanzee blood, a molecular biology technique for fishing out viral genes, and a great deal of patience — before cloning the genome of the mystery virus in 1989, finally giving it a proper identity: hepatitis C. Charles Rice then constructed a synthetic version of the virus from the cloned sequence alone and showed it could reproduce the disease in a chimpanzee liver, closing the circle of proof that Koch's postulates demand. The consequences accumulated quietly but consistently: a reliable blood test, then antivirals that cure more than ninety-five percent of chronic infections in a few weeks, which is a sentence that would have been received as science fiction in 1975. Some 70 million people were chronically infected at the time of the prize; many of them are now curable.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Precision Mistaken for Coldness

Louise Glück

Louise Glück published her first collection in 1968 and spent the following decades building a body of work that is difficult to describe without reaching for the word 'austere,' and then having to explain that austerity, in her hands, is not withholding but precision — the removal of everything that does not need to be there. The Wild Iris, which won the Pulitzer in 1993, is among the stranger things in American poetry: a sequence in which flowers, a garden, and a god address each other and the gardener, and which handles grief and revelation with a calm that never topples into coldness. The Swedish Academy called her voice unmistakable, and so it is — spare in the way that bone is spare, carrying the weight without showing the effort, arriving at statements so exactly phrased that they feel both inevitable and, on re-reading, surprising.

Nobel Peace Prize

A Three-Year Experiment, Still Running

World Food Programme

The World Food Programme was established in 1961 as a provisional three-year experiment by the United Nations and the Food and Agriculture Organization, and has been provisionally feeding the world ever since. By 2019 it was reaching roughly 100 million people in 88 countries — a figure so large that it resists imagination, but which represents, in the main, people in places disrupted by conflict rather than by failed harvests, since chronic famine and acute hunger caused by war have traded places as the primary driver of severe food insecurity. The Nobel Committee noted particularly the WFP's work in conflict zones, where the deliberate obstruction of food aid has become, with dispiriting regularity, a weapon of war. The prize was awarded in 2020, the year that COVID-19 was compressing incomes, disrupting logistics, and multiplying the number of people who required the WFP's services — a coincidence of timing that required no elaboration.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Pricing the Winner's Curse

Paul R. Milgrom · Robert B. Wilson

Robert Wilson spent the 1960s and 1970s working through the mathematics of auctions where bidders face a common uncertainty — not just about what rivals will bid, but about the underlying value of the thing itself. When oil drilling rights go to auction, nobody knows exactly how much oil is down there, and a rational bidder must account not only for their own estimate but for the uncomfortable fact that winning, by definition, means everyone else thought it was worth less. Wilson called this the 'winner's curse' and worked out how it shapes rational bidding. His former student Paul Milgrom developed the theory further, extending it to multiple simultaneous auctions with interdependent values, and then the two men were handed a genuinely difficult practical problem: the US government wanted to sell radio spectrum licences to telecommunications companies, and no market mechanism for doing so cleanly existed. The simultaneous multiple-round auction format they designed — where all lots are open simultaneously and bidding continues until no new bids appear — is now used by governments worldwide to allocate spectrum, raising hundreds of billions of dollars in the process. It is a rare case where theoretical elegance and large-scale public revenue arrived together.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine

A Name for the Sound That Enrages

Nienke Vulink · Damiaan Denys · Arnoud van Loon

Misophonia — the specific, outsized, sometimes overwhelming emotional response triggered by particular sounds, most commonly other people chewing, breathing, or clicking their pen — had existed as a human experience long before anyone felt compelled to study it formally, but it lacked clinical standing, a diagnostic framework, or even a widely accepted name. Researchers at the University of Amsterdam characterised it as a distinct psychiatric condition in a 2013 paper, established diagnostic criteria, and documented its neurological fingerprint: a heightened response in regions associated with salience and emotional processing. The Ig Nobel was awarded in 2020 for this work, which will come as cold comfort to the many sufferers who have spent decades being told they are simply being dramatic. The condition now has a name, a neurological correlate, and no cure — which is, at minimum, two of the three things one hopes for from a formal diagnosis.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physics

An Earthworm Learns to Resonate

Ivan Maksymov · Andrey Pototsky

The physics of standing waves in elastic media is well established, elegant, and usually demonstrated with strings, rods, or columns of air — materials that do not have opinions about the experiment. Ivan Maksymov and Andrey Pototsky used a live earthworm. Subjected to acoustic vibration at increasing frequencies, the worm settled into a series of stable standing wave patterns, each distinct resonant mode producing a different visible shape along the animal's body, exactly as acoustic theory predicted for a soft elastic cylinder. The earthworm, for its part, appeared unconcerned. Whether this counts as a contribution to biology, physics, or animal welfare philosophy is a question the paper does not address, but the patterns were real, the mathematics were correct, and the choice of experimental organism remains, let us say, distinctive.

Ig Nobel Prize in Acoustics

Helium Changes an Alligator's Voice

Stephan Reber · Takeshi Nishimura · Judith Janisch

A long-standing question in bioacoustics concerns whether non-human animals use the same resonance-based mechanism that humans rely on to vary the pitch and quality of vocalisations — a mechanism that should, if universal, cause calls to shift predictably when the density of the surrounding air changes. The cleanest test is helium, which lowers air density and raises the resonant frequencies of any cavity it fills, producing the familiar cartoon-voice effect in humans. The researchers chose to test this on a female Chinese alligator, flooded her enclosure with a helium-air mixture, induced her to vocalise, and measured the resulting calls. Her bellows shifted in formant frequency precisely as resonance theory predicted. The alligator cooperated throughout and appeared no more perturbed than the earthworm in the physics prize, which raises its own quiet questions about the stoicism of reptiles in experimental settings.

Ig Nobel Prize in Psychology

What the Eyebrows Give Away

Miranda Giacomin · Nicholas Rule

The study of narcissistic personality has generated considerable research into the cues by which high-narcissism individuals can be identified, most of it relying on self-report scales, interviews, or extended interaction. Miranda Giacomin and Nicholas Rule at the University of Toronto narrowed the question considerably: could people identify narcissism from eyebrows alone? Across several experiments, participants shown photographs cropped to show only the eyebrows of individuals whose narcissism had been independently measured were able to pick out the higher scorers at above-chance rates. Thicker, more distinctive, more carefully groomed eyebrows were the primary signal. Whether this constitutes a useful screening tool for, say, corporate boards, is left as an exercise for the reader, but the finding does suggest that the face announces more than its owner intends.

Ig Nobel Prize in Materials Science

The Frozen Knife That Would Not Cut

Metin Eren · Michelle Bebber · James Norris

A story had been circulating in anthropological and survival literature — attributed originally to a 1998 account — that an Inuit hunter, having lost his knife in the field, fashioned a replacement from his own frozen faecal matter and used it to butcher an animal. The claim was intriguing, colourful, and entirely unverified. Metin Eren, Michelle Bebber, and James Norris, at Kent State University, approached this as scientists: they replicated the conditions, produced the implements, and tested them against appropriate materials. The knives failed. Immediately and comprehensively. No cutting was accomplished. The original claim could not be reproduced and appears to be, at the very least, considerably embellished. Science has many functions; one of the less celebrated is falsifying things that people would have preferred to remain legendary.

Ig Nobel Prize in Management

Five Hands, and the Fee Runs Out

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

The case, which unfolded in China and was subsequently written up as a study in organisational behaviour, involved a contract killing that was subcontracted through a chain of five successive intermediaries, each of whom accepted the fee, took their margin, and passed the remainder — and the obligation — to someone else. By the time the contract reached its fifth recipient, the sum on offer had been whittled to so modest a figure that this final link in the chain concluded that the economics no longer justified the action, and instead contacted the intended victim to propose splitting what remained. Everyone in the chain was subsequently arrested. The paper frames the whole affair as a demonstration of how incentive structures degrade through hierarchical delegation, which is accurate, and which also applies to a startling variety of organisations that would prefer not to be mentioned in the same paragraph.

Ig Nobel Prize in Economics

Kissing Tracks the Gini Coefficient

Christopher Watkins · Juan David Leongómez · Jeanne Bovet · Agnieszka Żelaźniewicz · Max Korbmacher · Marco Antônio Corrêa Varella · Ana Maria Fernandez · Danielle Wagstaff · Samuela Bolgan

Watkins and a large international team asked whether a society's economic inequality has anything to do with how much its people kiss — romantic, mouth-to-mouth kissing specifically. Gathering data across dozens of countries, they found a correlation: kissing was more common in nations with greater income inequality, a pattern they interpreted through the logic of mate choice. Where resources are unevenly distributed and the stakes of choosing a partner are correspondingly high, the reasoning goes, kissing may serve as an assessment tool, a close-range way of gauging a prospective mate's suitability. The interpretation is speculative, the correlation is real, and the study takes seriously the idea that so private a gesture might carry the fingerprint of a country's economic structure. The committee honoured research that connected the Gini coefficient to the kiss, two things rarely mentioned in the same breath.

Ig Nobel Prize in Entomology

Bug Experts, Afraid of Eight Legs

Richard Vetter

Richard Vetter, an arachnologist, noticed a peculiar pattern among his entomological colleagues: a striking number of people who study insects professionally, and who handle beetles and cockroaches without a flicker, are frightened of spiders. He surveyed them and confirmed it — arachnophobia is common even among scientists whose life's work is small many-legged creatures, provided the creatures have eight legs rather than six. The two extra legs, and the un-insect-like manner of moving, seem to be enough to trip the fear response in people otherwise immune to it. It is a genuine study in the specificity of phobia, and a quietly funny portrait of a discipline: a room full of experts on invertebrates, united in their willingness to study anything except the eight-legged thing in the corner.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medical Education

Politicians Outrank Doctors, It Turns Out

Jair Bolsonaro · Boris Johnson · Narendra Modi · Andrés Manuel López Obrador · Alexander Lukashenko · Donald Trump · Recep Tayyip Erdoğan · Vladimir Putin · Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow

This prize was awarded, with an unusually sharp edge, to nine heads of government — among them the leaders of Brazil, the United Kingdom, India, Mexico, Belarus, the United States, Turkey, Russia, and Turkmenistan — for demonstrating, during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, that politicians can have a more immediate effect on life and death than scientists and doctors can. The citation is bleak comedy: as physicians and epidemiologists worked out how the virus spread and how to slow it, the decisive variable in country after country proved to be the choices of those in charge, whose statements and policies shaped case counts more directly than any laboratory result. The committee, which usually honours work that makes you laugh and then think, here rather inverted the order. The laureates did not attend the ceremony.

Ig Nobel Prize in Peace

Statecraft, Reduced to Doorbell-Ringing

Government of India · Government of Pakistan

Awarded jointly to the governments of India and Pakistan, whose diplomats, during a period of especially strained relations, took to surreptitiously ringing each other's doorbells in the middle of the night and running away before anyone could answer. The behaviour, reported amid mutual accusations of harassment of embassy staff, is the stuff of childhood mischief conducted between nuclear-armed states, and the committee honoured it as such. There is a real and grim subtext — the doorbell-ringing was one item in a longer pattern of petty intimidation between two rivals with a great deal more than doorbells at their disposal — but the image itself is irresistible: the machinery of statecraft, briefly reduced to the oldest prank on the street, executed by grown professionals in the dark.

Turing Award

The Grammar Beneath Every Compiler

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Alfred Aho · Jeffrey Ullman

In the late 1960s and through the 1970s, Alfred Aho and Jeffrey Ullman worked at Bell Labs on one of the central plumbing problems of computer science: given a program written in a human-readable language, how do you transform it — reliably, efficiently, and correctly — into the instructions a machine can actually execute? The field of compiler design existed, but its theoretical foundations were scattered; Aho and Ullman provided the rigorous underpinning, formalising the parsing theory, the grammar structures, and the code-generation techniques that made the process tractable. They then wrote the textbooks. The 1977 volume known informally as the 'Dragon Book' — for its cover art — became the standard reference for generations of computer science students, updated through successive editions as the field matured. The algorithms they described underlie every compiler and interpreter in use today, from the toolchain that builds your operating system to the interpreter that runs a script you typed this afternoon. The foundations are so thoroughly embedded that their origins have become invisible, which is more or less the definition of success in infrastructure.

AlphaFold solves the protein-folding problem

Fifty Years, Then a Machine Learned the Shape

Since Christian Anfinsen's Nobel-winning work in the 1970s established that a protein's three-dimensional shape is encoded entirely in its amino acid sequence, biochemists have been trying to predict that shape from sequence alone — a problem that turned out to be vastly harder than it looked, since the number of possible conformations a chain of hundreds of amino acids could adopt is, for practical purposes, infinite. The CASP competition, running every two years since 1994, measured progress by giving entrants sequences for proteins whose structures had been determined experimentally but not yet published. Progress was slow and incremental for most of the competition's history. Then at CASP14 in November 2020, DeepMind's AlphaFold2 system achieved accuracy scores — measured by how closely predicted atomic positions matched experimental structures — comparable to X-ray crystallography, the gold standard technique that had taken years of painstaking wet-lab work to produce each one. The solution came not from the molecular dynamics simulations or energy minimisation approaches structural biologists had been refining for decades, but from a deep learning architecture trained on the existing database of known structures. That it required a machine-learning team rather than a structural biology team to crack it produced a certain productive unease among people who had been working on the problem the other way. The protein structure database has since expanded by millions of entries; drug discovery pipelines that previously stalled at the 'what does this target look like' stage no longer need to wait.

Phosphine detected in the atmosphere of Venus

A Gas That Should Not Be There

Phosphine — PH₃, three hydrogen atoms bonded to one phosphorus — is a molecule that, on Earth, emerges from two sources: anaerobic microbial metabolism in environments like swamps and penguin intestines, and deliberate industrial synthesis for use as a fumigant. It does not persist in oxidising atmospheres; in the presence of oxygen and ultraviolet light it breaks down quickly, which means that detecting it anywhere implies a continuous source. In September 2020, Jane Greaves and colleagues announced that spectroscopic observations with the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope and ALMA had found what appeared to be phosphine absorption lines in the cloud deck of Venus at roughly 20 parts per billion — a quantity too large to be explained by known photochemical or geological processes on that planet. The interpretation that this might indicate biological activity was stated cautiously and contested immediately: the calibration of the ALMA data was questioned, revised, and revised again; alternative abiotic sources were proposed; the inferred abundance was revised downward in reanalysis. The scientific debate remains unresolved, which is its own answer of a kind — not a confirmed biosignature, but not cleanly explained otherwise.

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

Eleven Months From Sequence to Syringe

The WHO's pandemic declaration on 11 March 2020 formalised something that borders and transport data had already made obvious: a novel coronavirus, first identified in Wuhan in December 2019, was circulating freely on every inhabited continent. What followed was an exercise in both institutional failure and scientific velocity, depending on where you looked. The mRNA vaccine platform had been in development since at least the 1990s, with Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman's key work on modified nucleosides published in 2005; it had never before received regulatory approval for use in humans, and it had sat, largely unfunded, waiting for an occasion worthy of its speed. The occasion arrived. BioNTech had begun designing an mRNA candidate within days of the viral sequence being published in January; Moderna followed within hours of their own design. Both were in large-scale clinical trials by summer. The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine BNT162b2 received emergency authorisation from the UK Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency on 2 December 2020, and from the US FDA on 11 December; Moderna's mRNA-1273 followed on 18 December. From a newly sequenced pathogen to authorised vaccination took eleven months — a timeline that would not have been credible as speculation two years earlier.

Three nations launch Mars missions in the same window

Three Rockets, One Narrow Window

The geometry of interplanetary transfer is indifferent to politics: Earth and Mars are aligned for energy-efficient travel only once every 26 months, and missing the window means waiting another two years. The July 2020 window was used, for the first time in the history of spaceflight, by three nations launching independently and for entirely separate purposes. The UAE's Hope orbiter departed on 20 July — the first interplanetary mission from any Arab country — designed to study Martian weather patterns across a full Martian year. China's Tianwen-1 lifted off on 23 July, an ambitious single mission carrying an orbiter, a lander, and a rover, with the rover Zhurong ultimately driving across the Utopia Planitia plain. NASA's Perseverance rover launched on 30 July, carrying the Ingenuity helicopter as a demonstration payload; Ingenuity went on to make the first powered flight on another planet. All three arrived at Mars in February 2021, though they left Earth independently, answered to no common authority, and shared nothing but an orbital window and the same red destination.

Death of Freeman Dyson

A Synthesiser, Not a Student

Freeman Dyson

Freeman Dyson arrived at Cornell in 1947 as a 23-year-old graduate student and spent the following year attending lectures by Richard Feynman, then travelling to Princeton to hear Julian Schwinger, and reading everything Tomonaga had published from Japan — three brilliant and completely different formulations of quantum electrodynamics, the theory of how light and matter interact. In 1949 he wrote a single paper demonstrating that all three were mathematically equivalent expressions of the same underlying theory. He was not a student; he was a synthesiser, which is a rarer and in some ways more demanding talent. Oppenheimer initially resisted the paper; after several seminars, he relented. Dyson then spent the next seven decades at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, working on nuclear reactors, interstellar travel, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and the foundations of statistical mechanics, declining to narrow himself, and declining also — with evident equanimity — to win a Nobel Prize, which the physics community considered a more serious slight than he apparently did. He died on 28 February 2020, aged 96, having written with lucidity and without sentimentality about science, war, and what human beings are for.