2023

Nobel Prize in Physics

Pierre Agostini · Ferenc Krausz · Anne L'Huillier

An electron moves through an atom in about a hundred attoseconds — a tenth of a billionth of a billionth of a second. L'Huillier discovered that blasting noble gases with short laser pulses produces harmonics of light on those timescales; Agostini and Krausz developed ways to isolate and measure individual attosecond pulses. Physics now has a camera fast enough to watch electrons move.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Moungi Bawendi · Louis Brus · Aleksey Yekimov

Quantum dots are crystals so small — a few nanometres across — that their colour is determined not by their material but by their size, a consequence of quantum mechanics that seemed merely elegant until Brus demonstrated it in solutions, Yekimov in glass, and Bawendi worked out how to make them precisely enough to be useful. They now light up display screens and biological microscopes, and are being threaded into solar cells.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Katalin Karikó · Drew Weissman

Karikó spent years unable to get funding for mRNA research that most colleagues considered unpromising. The insight she and Weissman eventually published — that replacing uridine with pseudouridine made synthetic mRNA invisible to the immune system's alarm — was the chemical trick that made COVID vaccines possible. Stockholm arrived about forty years after the question was first worth asking.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Jon Fosse

Fosse writes in Nynorsk, Norway's minority literary language, and his plays and novels circle fundamental experiences — longing, loss, the inadequacy of words — through dialogue so sparse it feels less like minimalism than like bones. The Swedish Academy honoured his ability to give voice to what resists being said.

Nobel Peace Prize

Narges Mohammadi

Mohammadi received the prize in absentia. She was in Tehran's Evin Prison, where she has been held on and off for years for her work with the Defenders of Human Rights Center. The committee noted her fight against the oppression of women in Iran; the Iranian government responded by declining to release her.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Claudia Goldin

Goldin combed two centuries of American data and found that the gender wage gap is not primarily about discrimination or occupation — it is about parenthood. Motherhood reduces earnings in ways that fatherhood does not, and the penalty is largest in jobs that reward continuous availability. The research is patient, historical, and quietly devastating.

Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry and Geology

Jan Zalasiewicz

Geologists in the field lick rocks. This is not an eccentricity; it aids identification, since saliva enhances colour and texture in ways that make mineralogy much easier. Zalasiewicz explained this practice to the scientific community with the earnest thoroughness it deserved, and was rewarded accordingly.

Ig Nobel Prize in Literature

Chris Moulin

Moulin studied jamais vu — the inverse of déjà vu, where something familiar suddenly seems strange — and found it can be induced by writing or reading the same word over and over until it dissolves into meaningless shapes. Volunteers who typed "door" for several minutes began to feel they no longer knew what a door was. This is either a flaw in the brain or the beginning of philosophy.

Ig Nobel Prize in Mechanical Engineering

Te Faye Yap

Spiders move their legs hydraulically — a small pump rather than muscles. Yap's team realised that a dead spider, with its hydraulic lines still intact, could be reanimated as a gripper by injecting air into its body. The resulting device grabbed objects and released them on command. It is called necrobotics, a term that was apparently not in use before this paper.

Ig Nobel Prize in Public Health

Seung-min Park

Park built a toilet at Stanford equipped with a camera, a fingerprint reader on the flush handle, and software that analyses what it photographs, so that a person's digestive health can be tracked over time without any conscious effort on their part. It identifies the user by their anus, which raises questions the paper does not fully address.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine

Christine Pham

Pham counted the nostril hairs in cadavers — left nostril and right nostril separately — to determine whether they are distributed symmetrically. The answer, which required patience rather than inspiration, is that they more or less are. This is the kind of knowledge that completes a picture no one knew was missing.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physics

Bieito Fernández Castro

Fernández Castro measured how much anchovy schools mix the ocean simply by swimming and spawning. The answer — not trivially — carries genuine implications for how we model ocean circulation, since the contribution of biological mixing had been largely ignored. The anchovies are unconcerned.

Turing Award

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Avi Wigderson

Wigderson spent decades showing that randomness and computational hardness are deeply connected — that the apparent unpredictability built into many algorithms is, in a precise sense, equivalent to the difficulty of certain mathematical problems. He also helped develop zero-knowledge proofs, which let one party convince another they know a secret without revealing what the secret is. The cryptography that protects most online transactions descends from this.

Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Demis Hassabis · John Jumper

The protein-folding problem — given a chain of amino acids, predict the three-dimensional shape it folds into — had been open for fifty years when AlphaFold 2 effectively solved it. Hassabis and Jumper built the deep-learning system; biologists worldwide immediately began using it to understand proteins they had never managed to crystallise or sequence by hand.

Lasker Award (Clinical Medical Research)

Albert Lasker Clinical Medical Research Award

James G. Fujimoto · David Huang · Eric A. Swanson

Fujimoto, Huang, and Swanson invented optical coherence tomography, which uses light interference to produce cross-sectional images of biological tissue at micrometre resolution without touching it. Ophthalmologists now use OCT routinely to catch glaucoma and macular degeneration years before they would otherwise be visible.

Chandrayaan-3 lands near the lunar south pole

On 23 August, India's Vikram lander touched down within a few degrees of the Moon's south pole — a region of permanent shadow, suspected ice deposits, and no previous soft landing — making India the fourth country to land on the Moon and the first to reach its high southern latitudes. The Pragyan rover that rolled out confirmed sulphur in the regolith, among other elements, during its two weeks of operation before the lunar night ended the mission.

GPT-4 and large language models reach mainstream deployment

GPT-4 arrived in March 2023, passed the bar exam and medical licensing tests, and was promptly embedded in productivity software used by tens of millions of people. Anthropic released Claude that same month; Google released Bard. By year's end, arguing about what these systems were — tools, oracles, a mirror, a threat — had become a full-time occupation for people who had never before thought about language models.

SpaceX Starship completes first integrated flight tests

Starship's first full-stack test flight in April ended when the vehicle tumbled and the automated flight termination system intervened four minutes after liftoff; the second, in November, reached stage separation before meeting the same fate. Neither result was a failure in the engineering sense — both cleared the launch pad intact, gathered data no simulation could replace, and advanced a vehicle that, at 120 metres tall, had never before been tested at full scale.