The various Nobel-prize committees work in mysterious ways
The physics prize went to three researchers who have studied complex, chaotic and apparently random systems and developed ways to predict their long-term behaviour, with implications ranging from how to study the climate to the exploitation of exotic materials. Half of the award of SKr10m was shared by Syukuro Manabe of Princeton University and Klaus Hasselmann of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, in Hamburg.
In the 1970s Dr Hasselmann developed models to show how weather, despite being chaotic and unpredictable in the short-term, could yield reliable models to foreshadow Earth’s climate over much longer periods. In describing his work he made an analogy to Brownian motion, the jostling movement of pollen grains in water that was first observed down a microscope by Robert Brown, a botanist, in 1827.
Some chemical reactions proceed with alacrity. Most, though—including many that are industrially important—need a helping hand in the form of a catalyst. Evolution has provided a goodly range of these in the form of enzymes, which are large, complicated and sometimes temperamental protein molecules, but which have the advantage that they can create pure versions of what are known as optical isomers. These are molecules that have two forms which are mirror images of each other.
Dr MacMillan came from the other end of the problem. He wanted to remove the metal from the catalyst involved in a different process, the Diels–Alder reaction. This is a way of joining two molecules into a six-carbon ring. One of the reagents contributes four carbon atoms to the ring and the other contributes two. Six-carbon rings are ubiquitous in organic chemistry, and by putting different side groups onto the reagents a vast variety of them can be turned out.
The winners were David Julius of the University of California, San Francisco and Ardem Patapoutian of Scripps Research, a biomedical institute in San Diego. Dr Julius did the pioneering work on temperature. He and Dr Patapoutian, acting independently, then advanced this work. After that, Dr Patapoutian moved on to look at mechanical stimulation.
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