The Nobel Prizes that are so weird they don't seem true.

 

Today, I’m looking at the Nobel Prizes that sound as if they can't possibly be real.  They are just too weird. If these ideas and theories had been presented as plot devices for sci-fi movies, they would have been dismissed as too implausible. 

 

1. Particles committing Identity Fraud.

In 2015, Takaaji Kakita and Arthur B McDonald earned the 2015 Physics Nobel for 'Neutrino Oscillation'. 

 

                             Takaaji Kakita                                         Arthur B McDonald                                                           

 Neutrinos were first proposed in 1930 to explain energy that was missing in radioactivity. They have no charge, almost no mass and interact weakly with matter.  

The sum emits three kinds of neutrino; electron, muon and tau, with it assumed that these kinds were fixed -i.e. an electron neutrino cannot become a muon, and a tau cannot become an electron. But in 1998, Kajita's team in Japan provided evidence that neutrinos left the sun as one kind of neutrino - but arrived at Earth as a different kind.  Kajita's team was using a gigantic water tank to detect muon neutrinos in the atmosphere, but these neutrinos were disappearing. In 2001, McDonald's team were able to show that electron neutrinos from the sun were transforming into other types. The work of Kajita and McDonald proved that neutrinos change identity in flight.  These identity changes were caused by neutrinos essentially banging into each other - or oscillating with each other. Due to the fun of quantum mechanics, this proved that the neutrinos actually have mass. The Standard Model that describes fundamental particles and forces predicted massless neutrinos. This hints at new possible physics that could provide explanations for things not yet understood. For example, the slight mass of the neutrino could influence the formation of galaxies. 

2. The Universe is Humming in the background.

In 1964, it was discovered that the universe is filled with faint microwave radiation. This discovery was a complete accident and ultimately was a result of Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson thinking there were issues with their equipment.   

                        

                         

Robert Woodrow Wilson                                      Arno Allan Penzias

Penzias and Wilson were using a giant microwave antenna called the Holmdel Horn with the aim of using it for satellite communications. For this, they needed to eliminate any background noise. But despite their effects, they kept picking up a constant microwave signal coming from every direction in the sky. Initially, they thought this low frequency background noise they were detecting could be caused by faults in their equipment or interference from cities. At one point, they kicked out pigeons that were living in their antenna and removed their droppings - tactfully described as 'white dielectric material'. But the signal persistently remained. 

Eventually, this signal was discovered to be coming from the universe itself- and actually was the first evidence for the Big Bang.  In the 1960's, scientists were debating two theories regarding the origins of the universe. One theory -the Steady State theorized that the universe always had existed in the state it is now. But one theory- the Big Bang, suggested that (in the immortal words of Barenaked Ladies and the Big Bang Theory theme song,) 'our whole universe was in a hot dense state. Then nearly fourteen billion years expansion started, wait. The Earth began to cool, the autotrophs began to drool....'. As fun as the song is, I won't carry on with it. Point is, the Earth was contained in one single point and as it cooled, it expanded. But there should be leftover radiation. The heat energy had to go SOMEWHERE. What Penzias and Wilson took for interference was exactly that; the leftover radiation.  For this, they were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1978. 

In effect, these scientists thought their equipment was broken, they tried removing pigeon poo from their equipment and discovered the Big Bang. 

Penzias and Wilson at the Holmdel Horn Antenna 

3 Nobel Blue LEDs. 

In essence, three scientists - Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura, won the 2014 Nobel prize in Physics for making a blue light. But this blue light is what made modern lighting possible- and also made your smart phone possible. 

 

Left to right, top to bottom: Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano

, Shuji Nakamura

In a blue LED, an intense blue light is produced. This might be seen as a little obvious but what's clever about it is that this light passes through a phosphor coating, which converts some of this blue light into yellow. This combination of blue and yellow will appear white. Before the invention of this blue LED, it was impossible to produce bright efficient white light using LED. This meant that LED lighting- one of the most efficient and energy saving forms of electricity, could not be used for homes or cities. Without a blue LED, it was also impossible to make a full colour spectrum that phone screens or laptop screens rely on.  Blue is needed to make Cyan and Magenta and without these two colours, coloured images could not be seen on a screen.  The blue LEDs are also much more energy efficient than other LEDs as blue light has a shorter wavelength but a higher energy. Without blue LEDs, smartphones would need to be a lot bigger to accommodate the battery you would need. Blue LEDs are the reason that your phone can be small, colourful and bright.

Between 1989-1992, the blue LED was invented by Akasaki and Amano who were working with gallium nitride. This proved crucial to making LEDs work. In 1993, Nakamura working for Nichia Corporation created the first practical blue LED. This led directly to energy efficient lightning solutions and developments in RGB screens. Nakamura actually sued Nichia Corporation in 2001 for fair compensation regarding the invention. In 2004, a Tokyo court caused shock after awarding him approximately $190 million - one of the largest invention related awards ever given to an individual researcher.  

Ultimately, three researchers made a light, won a Nobel Prize, changed the world and contributed to the world's overreliance on smartphones. 

 

 

4. Bacteria have vendettas against viruses and seek their revenge with molecular scissors. 

Bacteria, after being infected by a virus, are able to capture a small fragment of the viral DNA and store it in their own genome. If the bacterium is attacked again by the virus, the bacteria is able to access that stored DNA and convert it into RNA. The RNA can then guide a small protein called Cas9 to the matching sequence on the DNA of the re-offending virus. Cas9 cuts it, stopping the virus from replicating. 

As strange as this is, this became the basis of CRISPR gene editing which Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier for which won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020.

                  

                   Jennifer Doudna                                   Emmanuelle Charpentier               

CRISPR itself stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats - and is the part of the genome where the viral DNA fragments can be stored. The CRISPR region is like an archive of past infections. This region was discovered in 1987 in bacteria by Yoshizumi Ishino who noticed short repeating DNA sequences which were separated by unique fragments of DNA.  In the early 2000s, researchers began noticing that these unique fragments matched viral DNA and suggested it could be some sort of immune system. It wasn't until 2012 that Doudna and Charpentier discovered that the Cas9 protein could be used to cut any DNA sequence - provided that the guide RNA took it there in the first place. The guide RNA itself could be designed to target any DNA sequence you wanted. This turned the CRISPR cas9 system into a precise genetic editing tool.  

Yoshizumi Ishino 

In short, a bacterial archive, several viral mugshots and a particularly vicious vendetta-seeking enzyme was used to create a system that was described by the Nobel Committee as 'A tool for rewriting the code of life'. 

 

5. The Universe contains invisible monsters that chew up light.

Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez won the Nobel Prize in 2020 by proving that the Milky Way has an invisible monster that chews up light. In other more scientific words, these three proved that black holes do indeed exist. 

From left to right, top to bottom: Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel

and Andrea Ghez.

Ultimately, a black hole is a region of space that is so dense not even light can escape it. This idea dates back to Einstein's 1915 Theory of Gravity.  Mass bends spacetime and if something were to reach a certain density within a small enough region, it would bend the spacetime so dramatically that nothing - not even light could escape. At first, this was purely theoretical and many physicists wondered if they actually existed. 

In 1965, Penrose proved that black holes could - and should naturally form in the universe. He showed that massive stars could collapse under gravity and create a singularity- a point where gravity becomes effectively infinite. When physicists say 'effectively infinite' in this context, it basically means that our understanding of gravity no longer works. 

Starting from the early 1990s, Genzel and Ghez began observing stars near the centre of the Milky Way. Over a period of approximately three decades, they noticed a star -called S2, moving insanely fast- about 7600 km/s and orbiting close to the centre of its orbit every 16 years or so. It was clearly orbiting something and using the speed and motion, they were able to calculate the mass of the object being orbited. This gave them an object about 4 million times the mass of the Sun packed into a very tiny region. The only thing this could possibly be was a Black Hole.  This proved that there was a Black Hole at the centre of our universe.

By using maths and theories predicted by Einstein, and massive telescopes (one of which was actually called Very Large Telescope- it's in Chile), a light-chewing hole was proven to exist. It's at the centre of your universe. 

 

6 Jumping genes.

Barbara McClintock received the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for showing that genes do not necessarily stay still on a chromosome and can hop around elsewhere in the genome. 

Barbara McClintock

Barbara McClintock was working with maize plants in the 1940s and 1950s and noticed some strange colour patterns in corn kernels. They would be patches of different colours and random spots appearing. It seemed that genetic traits were being turned on and off- but what was switching this switch as it were? It was suggested that some genes were somehow moving around the chromosome, switching neighbouring genes on and off. 

Almost predictably, her work was more or less ignored until the 1960s, where it was discovered that DNA actually can move. Scientists studying antibiotic resistance noticed that bacteria could gain resistance very quickly. They traced this to small mobile DNA segments in the bacteria -called Transposons that could carry antibiotic resistance genes. This transposons could jump between chromosomes and plasmids and rearrange the genome.  Crucially, they could jump between genomes of several bacteria, explaining why bacteria is able to gain antibiotic resistance so quickly. In the 1970s-1980s, scientists began finding regions of DNA in several organisms that appeared to come from transposable elements.  In 2001, researchers discovered that 45% of human DNA was essentially a genetic fossil - sequences that were left behind by transposable elements copying themselves into the genome millions of years ago. Some sequences resemble viruses and are remnants of viruses infecting our ancestors millions of years ago and leaving behind a footprint.

All in all, your genome isn't just a set of instructions. It's also an evolutionary record of DNA jumping from one place to another, hitchhiking though the genome and leaving behind a tip in a currency we can no longer use. 

 

As strange as these discoveries are, they have ultimately made a huge difference in how we live in our world today as well as understanding the world around us.  They really highlight just how funky and strange science actually can be!