An Echo from The Creation

Two Americans, a Russian and a Briton win Nobels

It was a classic case of scientific serendipity. The two young scientists at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in Holmdel, N.J., were using a hornlike antenna to "listen" to the faint background hiss created by stars and other radio sources in the Milky Way galaxy. What they picked up was a faint echo of the creation, the remnant of the cataclysmic fireball, or Big Bang, that gave birth to the universe 15 to 20 billion years ago.

For that discovery, made in 1964, Arno Penzias, 45, and Robert Wilson, 42, last week won the 1978 Nobel Prize for Physics, sharing half of the $165,000 award. The other half of the prize went to a Russian, Peter Kapitsa, 84, for his work in low-temperature physics. Also awarded last week was the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, given to British Biochemist Peter Mitchell, 58, for elucidating energy-producing processes in living cells.

When Penzias and Wilson first noticed the unexpected background static picked up by their antenna, they considered a number of causes, including the effect of what the German-born Penzias whimsically called "a white dielectric material"--pigeon droppings --in their antenna. But soon they learned from a Princeton group that was trying to detect evidence of the Big Bang that the radiation picked up by their antenna was of far greater significance: its temperature was remarkably close to what scientists had been predicting for radiation left over from the primordial fireball. In theory, this radiation should be equivalent to what would be emitted by a so-called black body with a temperature of only 3.5 Celsius degrees above absolute zero--or about what the temperature of the universe should be now, billions of years after the fireball. The Bell scientists' discovery virtually confirmed that the universe had begun with a bang and, as the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences put it, "has made it possible to obtain information about cosmic processes that took place a very long time ago, at the time of the creation of the universe."

Kapitsa's research was in an entirely different field: the behavior of materials at extremely low temperatures. In the early 1930s, while working at Britain's Cambridge University, the young Russian won international acclaim for creating for the first time a device for liquefying helium in large quantities. That was no small feat, because helium does not become liquid until its temperature has been reduced to about 4DEG above absolute zero. When Kapitsa returned to the Soviet Union for a visit in 1934, Stalin refused to let him leave again--on the ground that he was too precious a commodity to be allowed abroad. Continuing his experiments at home, Kapitsa helped shed light on the extraordinary behavior of supercold helium--helium II--which acts as a perfect fluid, so lacking in viscosity that it will creep over the wall of a glass container. After World War II, Kapitsa was placed under house arrest in what was apparently a dispute with Secret Police Chief Lavrenti Beria, who was then also head of the Soviet atomic bomb project. Finally released after Stalin's death, he resumed the direction of his own Moscow Institute for Physical Problems, helped promote the idea of an entire city, Akademgorodok, devoted to science and, along with Physicist Andrei Sakharov, became an outspoken champion of intellectual freedom.

Mitchell, who works in a six-member private laboratory housed in a restored Regency-style mansion in Cornwall, first proposed his ideas about energy production within living cells in 1961. Until then, scientists knew that such energy-producing processes as photosynthesis and cell respiration depended on a substance dubbed ATP (for adenosine triphosphate), which conveyed energy through the cell to power the cell's varied chemical reactions. But they had not been able to explain satisfactorily how ATP was formed. Mitchell suggested the novel theory that the key to ATP synthesis is the creation of a kind of gradient --or difference in voltage--on opposite sides of the membranes of bacteria, as well as of such cellular bodies as mitochondria and chloroplasts. This gradient is coupled with a flow of protons (which Mitchell calls "proticity") that in turn provides the energy for the synthesis of ATP. In addition to explaining this vital cell process, the Swedish Academy noted, Mitchell's so-called chemiosmotic theory may suggest new technologies for meeting future energy needs.

By the end of the week, Mitchell held another distinction. With the Peace Prize still to be announced, his Nobel was the only one presented this year that U.S. citizens did not either share in or win outright. In recent years, Americans have dominated the ranks of newly elected Nobel laureates. In 1978 the U.S. is continuing this streak, with six Americans among the nine winners so far.

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