Nobel Prizes

By John Greenwald, Natalie Angier, Jamie Murphy, Paul Gray

"It's fantastic! I can't conceive of it!" exclaimed Klaus von Klitzing last week. The inconceivable, however, has long been familiar territory to the Polish-born, 42-year-old director of the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research, in Stuttgart, West Germany: the mind-boggling field of quantum mechanics is his special ground. This year, taking note of Von Klitzing's quantized Hall effect, an application of quantum theory's abstruse axioms to the more mundane field of commercial electronics, the Nobel Committee named him physics laureate. Said the boyish-looking father of three: "I've always wanted to answer all the questions that nature posed for us."

Von Klitzing's breakthrough, which bears directly on the design of semiconductors, was based on a discovery in 1879 by Edwin Herbert Hall, an American physicist. Hall had observed that electricity traveling through a metallic strip is diverted to one side when a magnetic field is applied perpendicularly to the flow of the current. A measurement of that diverted current is known as Hall voltage. Von Klitzing expected to find that Hall voltage in semiconductors is affected by the material from which they are composed. To his astonishment, Von Klitzing discovered that a measure of the voltage did not depend on the nature of the materials. Moreover, he noticed that as he increased the magnetic force, the Hall voltage did not climb gradually; it jumped abruptly at regular intervals.

A cornerstone of the quantum theory holds that electrons leap from one energy state to another with mathematical regularity. Von Klitzing provided a practical demonstration of the phenomenon, accurate to within 0.0000001 of a predicted interval. For the past decade, scientists have suspected that Hall voltage conforms to quantum mechanics. "It was not expected, however," noted the Nobel Committee, "that the quantization rule would apply with such high accuracy."

He has been unofficially mentioned as a runner-up for nearly two decades. So when the Swedish Academy last week finally awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature to French Novelist Claude Simon, 72, the news seemed both , inevitable and a little outdated. Simon had a period of modest renown during the 1950s and early '60s. Along with Nathalie Sarraute, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Michel Butor, he became a chief exponent of the French nouveau roman, a form of fiction that rigorously questioned traditional narrative devices. Reality, so the Gallic logic went, is not easy to read. Simon has proved himself just as good and as exhausting as the form that he helped to develop.

His family grew wine grapes in the Pyrenees. Simon was educated in Paris and then worked at becoming a painter. He served in the Spanish Civil War and later in the French cavalry. Captured by the Germans in 1940, he escaped and joined the French Resistance.

Autobiographical details sometimes flicker behind Simon's torrential, Faulknerian sentences. The Wind (1959) deals with a man's doomed attempt to claim his father's vineyard; The Flanders Road (1961) hovers around the memories of French POWs in retreat from the Germans; The Palace (1963) portrays tenuous, indeterminate remembrances of the Spanish Civil War. But it is often impossible to tell what is going on in Simon's novels. His microscopic attention to objects can lead to elephantine maunderings like this disquisition on a briefcase: ". . . a supplementary organ doubtless invented to remedy the inadequacies of the others (the muscles, the bones crushed under the monstrous weight of fat and distended flesh, of matter that had become unsuited to satisfy its own needs by itself so that it seemed to have invented, secreted, like a kind of replacement by-product, an artificial sixth sense, an omnipotent prosthesis . . .)."

Such sentences may have dazzled the cognoscenti 20 years ago. From the perspective of 1985, both the French new novel and the Nobel given to one of its exemplars seem a bit anciens. --By Paul Gray