Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hmm.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
The streshold opens, step through fast present future. We are not.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
Alone in time, don't time?
Speaker 2 (02:19):
Chris.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
Welcome to the perhaps single most prestigious ceremony in podcasting
history that has never once been recognized by the Nobel Committee.
This is the sixth annual ITC Nobel Prize Awards Show,
and I am your host, Je double f That's right.
(02:49):
I've been doing this for six years, from twenty twenty
to now. Through pandemics, elections, quantum entanglements, honk at farms
with Viking curses, windegos, and much much more. Every year,
right around October, when the real Nobel Prizes are announced,
we gather to ask I think some of the bigger questions,
(03:12):
who won, Why did they win? Should they have? We've
handed out a words of scientists who prove gravity still works.
We've honored economists sometimes who explained inflation with grabs so
confusing they caused inflation. And we've grudgingly given the Peace
Prize to people who later got indicted. But through it
(03:34):
all we've held one sacred truth. It's not about the prize,
It's more about the story behind it. This year we're
celebrating nineteen twenty five nineteen seventy five, and of course
the current year winners, the Nobels of nineteen twenty five.
(03:58):
We found the world stuck between wars, where physicist was
exploding and well physics was exploding and literature was chainsmoking.
Then you had the Nobels of seventy five, when the
Cold War tensions turned scientists into diplomats, an economist into
rock stars, and of course twenty twenty five, this year,
(04:19):
when the prize announcements came with hashtags, live streams and
a little bit of you know, thirty percent more irony.
So give me a favor, Grab your tux tuxedo t shirt,
your physics pH D if you happen to have one,
we might actually have one listening, and maybe a glass
of cold fusion, because tonight we're not just handing into
(04:42):
talking the awards. We're handing out maybe a little bit
of perspective on it. This is ITC Episode seventy two,
the sixth Annual Nobel Prize Awards, and you are officially invited.
It's the year nineteen twenty five. World War One has
(05:06):
been over for less than a decade, but the scans
and scars still run deep across Europe. In America, jazz
roars from phonographs, while prohibition squeezes bootleggers. In the shiny cadillacs.
Women are wearing short hair and shorter patients, and Freud
is just now convincing people that their dreams means something
worse than indigestion. The global economy hasn't collapsed just yet.
(05:31):
The Nazis haven't taken power just yet, and the atom
hasn't been split just yet. The world is holding its
breath between disasters, and somehow, in this jittery, champagne soaked calm,
humanity finds time to hand out some words, and not
just They're not just any awards. They are the Nobel
(05:51):
Prizes of nineteen twenty five. But this wasn't a year
of easy answers. They weren't feel good victories wrapped in
gold foil. These prizes were tense, complicated, and in some
cases embarrassingly delayed, and even in one case not even given.
(06:12):
So tonight we fire up the spotlight and drag nineteen
twenty five into center stage, because behind every metal handed
out in Stockholm or Oslo that year is a story
far more explosive than anything they dared to write. On
the certificate. So the Nobel Prize in physics that year
(06:37):
was awarded to James frank and Gustav Hertz for the
discovery of the laws governing the impact of an electron
upon an adam. So we're going to talk about violence
on a quantum scale sort of their work, the now
(06:58):
famous Frank Art's experiments was like an interrogation scene from
a Bond film, if Bond were played by a well
dressed electron with too much kinetic energy and a taste
for neon gas. I don't know about you, but that
sounds a little bit like maybe the original Bond. Here's
what they did, and a glass too filled with mercury vapor.
(07:21):
They fired electrons at atoms and watched what happened when
they cranked up the voltage, and something very strange happened.
Electrons didn't gradually lose energy like marbles rolling a pill. Instead,
they lost energy in discrete jumps, only at specific energy levels.
It was like watching a child hop on a certain
steps of a staircase, ignoring everything in between. No in betweens,
(07:43):
no sliding, just quantized plops. One jump, then a sudden stop, nothing,
then another jump. That behavior confirmed one of the weirdest
and most important predictions of quantum theory that atoms don't
just absorb energy like sponges, they absorb it in quantum chunks.
It was experimental confirmation for Neil's Boor's atomic model and
(08:07):
a key puzzle piece for the new frontier physics that
would soon welcome Heisenberg, Schrodinger in Darrock to the table. Now,
before we start throwing confetti at Frankinhurtz, let's be honest.
Their experiment set up looked like something out of a
high school shop class. Glass tubes, mercury bapor dials and
wires and speculative guesses, and yet it changed the world.
(08:33):
There were proved that quantum behavior was not just theoretical daydreaming.
Adams weren't just behaving weirdly in math, that was good.
They were behaving weirdly in real life, predictably weird, repeatedly weird,
annoyingly weird. We'd go on to build nuclear power computers, lasers, mriyes,
(08:55):
semiconductors and quantum mechanics and self on the shoulders of
their data. And if you're wondering what happened to our heroes,
Gustaf Hertz went on to work in Germany through the
Nazi era, eventually being liberated by the Soviets and sent
to work in Russia on their atomic program. James Frank,
Jewish by heritage and integrity by choice, left Germany when
(09:15):
Hitler came to power, and spent the rest of his
life in the United States warning scientists about the moral
consequences of atomic research. He helped draft the franc Report,
which urged the US not to drop the atomic bomb
without warning Japan. In other words, the men who once
watched electrons bounce off Adams would later watch morality bounce
off government policy. One walked into the Cold War, the
(09:39):
other tried to stop one from ever starting. And all
of that started here in nineteen twenty five. Why I
do this show summed up in the very first award
a Nobel Prize for bouncing electrons and a warning bell
for what was to come. The Nobel Prize in chemistry
(10:00):
Richard Zigmondy or his demonstration of a heterogeneous nature of
coloid solutions and for his method of researchs have since
been fundamental in modern coloid chemistry. I also hate this
show because of this kind of talk coloid chemistry it
doesn't exactly scream blockbuster here I am. In fact, most
(10:22):
people don't even know what a coloid is. But trust me,
if you've ever had milk, blood, fog, mayonnaise, or a
bad experience with jello, you've probably encountered it. A codloid
is a type of mixture, not quite a solution, not
quite a suspension. I think particles suspend it in another substance,
too small to settle, too big to dissolve. In the
(10:43):
early nineteen hundreds, coloids were mysterious. Scientists didn't know if
they were actual heterogeneous meaning made of distinguishable parts, are
just poorly behaving solutions entered Richard Zigmundy, an Austrian German
chemist with a spectacular mustache and is quite spectacular and
a microscope that saw too much. He developed the ultra microscope,
(11:07):
a device that allowed scientists to observe particles smaller than
the wavelength of visible light, not by directly seeing them,
but by observing the way lights scattered around them. Think
of like watching dust motes in a sunbeam. You don't
see the moat, you just see how the light dances
around it. Zigmondy did that, but for particles. A thousand
(11:29):
times smaller than a speck of pollen. And he saw,
well what he saw changed everything. You proved that coloids
were made up of tiny, independent particles, real physical structures,
not just some sort of weird, messy goop. And this
mattered a lot because everything from food science to ink,
(11:51):
from blood plasma to vaccines depended on coloid behavior, and
Zigmondy had given us a way to look under the hood.
His work laid the ground work for nanotechnology, pharmaceutical suspensions,
material science, and even molecular biology. He also mentored a
young scientist named Theodoor Zvedberg, who went on to win
(12:11):
his own Nobel Prize in twenty six using refined versions
of Sigmandi's technique. So yeah. In nineteen twenty five, the
Chemistry Nobel went to a guy for well playing hide
and secret particles so small they make COVID look like
at Thanksgiving turkey. And somehow that award has age better
(12:33):
than ones we've given now for crisper edits and microreactors.
Maybe maybe not sexy, but I would say essential in
the century where we increasingly manipulate matter at the smallest levels.
It turns out this dusty chemist with a beautiful stash
and a flashlight might have seen the future long before
(12:54):
the rest of us did. Now the Noble Prize in
Physiology or Medicine, I guess we take a moment of
silence here for the Nobel Prize that never was, because
(13:17):
in twenty five the Nobel Committee for Medicine looked at
the global landscape of biomedical achievement and decided they were
going to take a swipe so hard to the wrong
side that no prize was awarded, not because no one
was trying, but because no one apparently met their standard
up quote the greatest benefit to mankind unquote was it elitism, indecision,
(13:44):
bureaucratic bull crap. I think already has a statement for this,
embrace the power of and Ironically, nineteen twenty five was
a huge, huge year for medicine. In hindsight, Frederick Banting
and Garl's best we're still refining insulin therapy, which had
only been recognized in nineteen twenty three. A long term
(14:06):
impact was becoming clear. Diabetics we're living decades longer. How
about the work of Hans Berger, who would invent the
EEG and record the first human brain waves. Advances in
tuberclucus diagnostics, blood transfusion, and public hygiene. We're saving lives
across Europe. But Nobel said, nope, not gone do it
(14:29):
blood and by prodin So instead of applause and medals,
nineteen twenty five's medical pioneers got a shrug and a
reminder that even the most pertitious award can occasionally with
harder than me hitting on certain prime ministers of Finland.
But we'll come back to this, you know, nineteen seventy five,
(14:49):
when the Medicine Award arguably tried to overcompensate for this.
But for now, for now, let's let's just move on.
The Nobel Prize in Literary award it to George Bernard
Shaw for his work which is marked by both idealism
and humanity, at stimulating satire, often being infused with a
(15:13):
singular poetic beauty. Oh this was a fun one. George
Bernard Shaw, playwright, socialist, contrarian many would call a professional grump.
He won the Prize in Literature in nineteen twenty five
and almost turned it down. Why because, in his own
(15:35):
words and I quote, I can forgive Alfred Nobel for
inventing dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could
have invented the Nobel Prize. Unquote, that's right, George Bernard
Shaw mocked the award while accepting it. He accepted the honor,
(15:58):
but refused the money as to be used to translate
Swedish books into English. Okay, I'll give him credit for
that one. A move that was kind of passive aggressive.
It deserves its own oscar. But Nick, let's be honest,
like Aggie and An already did he earn it? Kind
(16:22):
of have to think maybe. By nineteen twenty five he
had already one of the most famous writers in the
English speaking world. His plays Man and Superman Major Barbara.
I ain't even try to pronounce that one. It didn't
just entertain, They did provoke. They provoked, coalsing capitalism, war, class,
religion in the British Empire itself. He made audiences uncomfortable
(16:44):
on purpose. In Arms and the Man, he mocked romanticized war.
In The Doctor's Dilemma, he questioned medical ethics long before
insurance companies would finish the job permanently. He wasn't just
a dramatist. He was a philosopher with a spotlight, a
razor wit dressed in god awful tweed. And while most
Nobel laureates not politely during their ceremony, Shaw sat there
(17:07):
thinking I could have written this whole ceremony better, and
you know he thought it. You know he did. And
the scary part is he probably could have. Later. He'd
go on to win the Academy Award for adapting that
pegmlion into a screenplay, which fun bit of trivia if
(17:32):
you want to win some money at your local bar.
That makes him one of two people in history to
win both a Nobel Prize and an Oscar. The other
Bob fucking Dylan. Let's all just sit here a second
(17:55):
with that. Okay, Now even more reason they hate Church
Bernard Shaw. Nineteen twenty five Nobel Peace Prize was awarded
to Sir Austin Chamberlain and Charles Dawes. Now this is
(18:18):
where it gets a little complicated. The Peace Prize in
nineteen twenty II went to two men who, let's just say,
didn't exactly solve world peace, but managed to delay World
War by about a decade. Sir Austin Chamberlain, British Foreign secretary,
and Charle Dahles, American banker. Termed diplomat and part time
composer of piano Sonatas were honored for their roles in
(18:42):
the Locarno Treaties and the Dolls Plan. So let's unpack
those a minute. The Dolls Plan was a financial agreement
that tried to stabilize germany shattered post World War One
economy by restructuring reparation payments and then injecting loans from
the US banks. The Lokarna Treaties were series of diplomatic
agreements aiming to secure post war borders and reduce tensions
(19:03):
between Germany, France, and Belgium. And we all the hell
that turned out. So in short, Dolls ended up giving
Germany money. Chamberlain Cocker gave them a handshake. Together they
bought Europe a little time, not much, mind you, but
just a little bit of time. Now Were these actions peaceful? Yes?
(19:31):
I guess Were they successful? For thirty seconds song? Maybe?
The Dolls planed temporarily did stop German hyperinflation, but made
Germany dangerously dependent on American loans. And when Wall Street
crashed in nineteen twenty nine, the whole plan unraveled and
(19:52):
the Nazi robes to power. As for Chamberlain, well. His
half brother Neville, who we all love, would later try
the whole peace in Our Time thing again in nineteen
thirty eight, and we all know how that freaking worked out.
But here's the thing. For a few years, the Doll's
plan in Lolcano gave eure up the illusion that World
(20:15):
War One was the last of its kind. It gave
people a little bit of breathing room, a little bit
of hope, and maybe a slim window of diplomatic calm
before the storm. So yes, nineteen twenty five Piece Prize
didn't prevent World War two, not at all. But maybe,
just maybe, it reminded us the piece of sometimes built
(20:35):
not on victory but on credit extensions and tenuous handshakes.
So what do we make of nineteen twenty five? It
was a nobel year of half steps in high stakes.
Physics gave us evidence of the atoms, mysterious behavior, and
a preview of moral dilemmas to come. Chemistry saw deeper
(20:56):
into matter than ever before, planning the seeds of nanosciences
in biomedicine. Medicine gave us nothing, and yet the world
somehow continued on. Literature gave us a savage wit who
didn't even like the damn prize in peace. Peace gave
us an IOU for the future that would eventually come
(21:17):
back and cost everyone. In hindsight, nineteen twenty five feels
like standing on the edge of something, a world eager
to rebuild, desperate to forget, and tragically unaware of what
was about to happen. Next, it was the calm before
the quantum, the last applause before the curtain of chaos
lifted again. But in a brief moment, awards were given,
(21:38):
geniuses were recognized, George Bernard Shaw too, and history, however,
imperfectly took note. So coming up next we have nineteen
seventy five. Disco is rising, nuclear paranoia is peaking, and
(22:01):
one Nobel Loret may or may not be a literal
war criminal. We'll be back in about twenty five seconds.
(22:35):
I spared no expense the music budget. So here we are.
It's now nineteen seventy five. Taigon has fallen, Nixon has resigned,
Kissinger's glasses are still foggy from all the secret meetings.
(22:56):
Vietnam over sort of, Watergate is over, sort of, and
the Cold War, well, the Cold War is just getting warm.
This is a world of sharp suits and sharper ideologies.
The World War disco dominates the clubs, and Dalte's dominates
the headlines, where Americans still fear communism and Soviets still
(23:19):
pretend they invented everything somehow, including jazz and the telephone.
But underneath the headlines, a few remarkable minds and a
few controversial ones have been busy changing the world in quieter,
more precise ways. Sciences splitting genes, economics is rewriting poetry,
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and literature is going full tilt existential crisis. This is
the Nobel Prize class of nineteen seventy five, and it's weird,
it's brilliant, and it's deeply political shocker. So let's start
with the bang Nobel Prize and a ward of two
(24:01):
OGIE four ben Roy Modelson and James Rainwater for the
discovery of the connection between collective motion and particle motion
and atomic nuclei and the development of the theory of
the structure of the atomic nuclei based on this connection.
On the surface, this one sounds more like a ted
(24:21):
talk written by a committee of confused AI. Probably is,
But there here's where it really matters. These three men
cracked one of the strangest riddles in modern physics. Why
atomic nuclei don't behave like billiard balls but more like
jazz bands. Let me explain this. Up until the mid
(24:43):
twentieth century, scientists had had a working model the atom
nucleus and the center electrons on the outside neutrons and
protons stuck together, and the core like grapes and the
jello neats contained and yet highly predictable. Then along comes
James Rainwater in the US, who's suggested, hey, hey, maybe
the nucleus isn't perfectly spherical. Now that may sound trivial,
(25:06):
but in the quantum world that was huge and asymmetrical
nucleus means new kinds of motions, and the more motion
that are the boat rocks also means new energy levels,
new behaviors under radio active decay. Rainwater proposed the idea
Aggi bor Son of legendary Neils bor and Ben Motelson,
(25:29):
and Denmark said, hey, let's test that, And they did
over and over and more. Time's over. They built a
model that showed the nucleus behaves like both the collection
of independent particles and a unified, spinning, squishy little blob.
(25:49):
So if you will basically a middle school marching band.
Particles inside acted individually, but they also moved in collected
rhythms like neurons fire and sink, or or unsettingly like
an army with no general It changed nuclear physics forever
and beyond the math and data charts. This model helped
lay the groundwork for things like nuclear reactors radios so
(26:14):
type therapies are radio isotope therapies. There we go Jeff
neutrino research and maybe someday a unified field theory. And also,
in case you're wondering, yes, Oggi Borr did win the
Nobel Prize like his father, making the Boars one of
the only father son Nobel duos in history. So the
(26:34):
next time your dad complains you haven't followed in his footsteps,
just remind him you haven't unified nuclear physics across generational
lines yet. Next we go to Nobel Prize in chemistry
to Vladimir Prelog for his research into stereochemistry or organic
(26:54):
molecules and reactions. Let's get a little let's get twisted,
shall we. In nineteen seventy five, the Chemistry prize went
to a man who studied how molecules twist, mirror and fold.
How about that on your resume. Meet Vladimir Prelog Born
(27:16):
in what is now Bosnia. Prelog fled to Switzerland during
World War Two, barely escaping the chaos of Nazi Europe.
There he would become one of the greatest chemists of
the twentieth century. His specialty stereochemistry. Now this sounds like
a bad college elective, Stay with me, because stereochemistry affects
everything from how you smell to how you survive. It's
(27:38):
the study of how the three D shape of a molecule,
it's orientation, it's handedness, it's twist, if you will, affects
its function. Take two molecules with the exact same atoms,
same formula, same weight. One smells like oranges, the other
smells like gym socks left over from your hockey bag
three months ago. What is harmless the other poisonous in
(28:00):
many ways? But why is this so? Because in the
molecular world's shape is destiny. Enzymes in your body are
like locks. Molecules are the keys. But if the keys
twisted the wrong way, it doesn't fit, or worse, it
jams the lock permanently. Prelogs work help chemists understand how
(28:22):
to build selective molecules, molecules that know which receptor to target,
which protein to bind with, which virus to disrupt. Now,
without him, we don't get modern antibiotics, we don't get
targeted cancer therapies, we don't get molecular biology as we
know it, and possibly the answer to why cilantro tastes
(28:43):
like soap do so many people?
Speaker 2 (28:46):
You know, the.
Speaker 1 (28:46):
Important stuff here, So yeah, that's right, a Nobel prize
basically for explaining why your friend Karen can't eat tacos
without weeping about soap leaves. But in all seriousness, prelogs
work did change medicine, and maybe more importantly, it changed
how we think about molecules. No longer just static little diagrams,
(29:07):
but dynamic, asymmetrical, three D little creatures, almost cryptid, like,
if you will, little molecular dancers twirling in the bloodstream,
waiting for the perfect partner, elegant, complex, deadly, just like
many of the discos of the seventies, if you were
snorting the right stuff. Next we go to the Nobel
(29:33):
Prize in Physiology or Medicine awarded to David Baltimore Renaldo
Dolbecco and Howard Martin Temmen fur their discoveries concerning the
interaction between tumor viruses and the genetic material of the cell.
You want drama, you want betrayal, You want invisible assassins.
(29:54):
Rewrating your DNA from the inside. Welcome to the wonderful
world of retroviruses, the cold world, operatives of the microscopic world.
The nineteen seventy five Nobel on Medicine went to three
scientists who uncover how certain viruses, the ones that cause cancer,
won't just infect your body. They hijack your genome. These
(30:17):
viruses like ros sacarma virus and others carrying enzyme called
reverse transcript transcripts, which rewrits the viruses RNA in the
DNA and then inserts its own DNA. Your body literally
starts manufacturing the virus. This wasn't just virology, This was
a revolution in genetics. Baltimore Tenminent and Dolbecco helped reveal
(30:40):
that cancer could be viral and that DNA wasn't as
untouchable as we once thought. This meant you could inherent
viral DNA through generations. You could engineer genetic material, You
could understand and maybe stop cancer at its genetic root.
(31:01):
Sound sounds familiar, it should. These discoverers paid the way
for HIV research, Crisper gene therapy, and everyone's favorite m
R in A vaccines. Yes, yes, those ones. Timin and
Baltimore in particularly, were laughed at when they first proposed
(31:23):
reverse transcriptees. People said it was utter bullshit, I mean
not nonsense. Sorry, I've got to speak like a scientist here.
Then they isolated it in a Peatri edition basically said
checkmate chromosome doubters, with a firm middle finger extended. Also
(31:45):
fun fact, David Baltimore won the Nobel Prize at age
thirty seven. So if you happen to be listening to
this in your mid thirties and still trying to figure
out how you know roth IRA's work, I get it.
I really do. I didn't know until I was in
my mid forty. So next we're going to move into
(32:08):
the Nobel Prize in Literature to Eugeno Montelle Montali. I
don't know, We'll just go Monteal because it looks like
Mondale for his distinctive poetry, which with great artistic sensitivity,
has interpreted human valumes under the sign of an outlook
on life with no illusions. Okay, let's dim the lights.
(32:31):
A little poor glass is something bitter because this year
went to Italy's Yuggio Montali. I'm Italian, so I'm gonna
say Montali from now on, screw it. A man who
didn't write poetry to celebrate life, but to expose the
illusion of it. This man probably smelled his own farts.
His poems are spare, hauntingly fragmented. They feel like letters
(32:54):
written in the margins of a crumbling book. All that said,
he did grow up under facet fought against Mussolini, lived
through the collapse of the Italian idealism. And when he wrote,
he didn't write odes to glory. He wrote about the
k about absence, but the sense that modern man had
been unmoored from meaning. His most famous collection Osi da siepier,
(33:17):
also known as Cuttlefish Pones, Leave that one here for
a second, was less about the ocean than about what
the ocean leaves behind. Driftwood bones, the echo of something
once alive. Is poetry wrestled with fascism, war, extentialism, and
the idea that faith, love, and even language may be
(33:38):
broken tools Montali wasn't trying to save the world. He
was trying to describe it from an Italian point of view,
as it is, as it feels flawed, empty, beautiful in
that emptiness. He once wrote, quote, don't ask us for
the word that squares our aim with yours unquote, meaning
(33:58):
I'm not your prophet, just here too. And apparently in
seventy five the Nobel Committee decided to listen. They gave
the prize to a man who looked straight at the
delusions of modern age and refused to pretend he was satisfied.
And you know, I gotta admit, at least a little bit,
I kind of honesty actually feels more radical than anything
(34:18):
that's happened lately. Okay, here we go. If you thought
Obama was the first one, I got news for you.
The Nobel Peace Prize for nineteen seventy five went to
Andrea Sakharoff. The prize went to the man who literally
(34:42):
helped build the hydrogen bomb. Oh granted, the wards that
we're talking about tonight we're named after and created by
the man who created dynamite. So I guess it's not
that far from a stretch. So Andrea Sakharov, Soviet physicist Geni,
an architect of Thermo nuclear destruction, became a global symbol
(35:04):
of peace. Not because he was always peaceful, but because
he changed. He changed for the better. So let's rewind,
shall we. In the forties and fifties, Sakarov was the
golden boy of Soviet physics. He helped invent the USSR's
H bomb. He was brilliant, loyal, respected. Then he asked way,
(35:31):
way too many questions like I don't know, why do
we need so many damn bombs? What's the moral cost
of living under totalitarianism? What happens when science becomes servitude.
From the late nineteen sixties he had gone full dissident.
He publicly criticized Soviet censorship, opposed nuclear proliferation, defended human
(35:56):
rights activists being imprisoned by the state. He wrote essays,
gave speeches, and tried tried to remind the world that
freedom mattered more than fear. In the West, he was
a hero in the USSR. He was a little bit,
a little bit of a problem. When he won the
(36:18):
Nobel Peace Prize in nineteen seventy five, he wasn't allowed
to attend the ceremony in Oslo. His wife Elena Bonner,
accepted it for him in secret, under surveillance, with more
courage than most governments, and back in Moscow, Sakarov kept
fighting until nineteen eighty when the KGB exiled him to Gorky,
(36:38):
a city closed to foreigners. He lived under house arrest
for years, no travel, no phone, no press. Yet the
world did listen. When Garbatrov rose to power in the
mid eighties, one of his first public acts was to
pardon Sockar Sakaroff, he returned to Moscow and walked straight
back into the fight. He died in nineteen eighty nine,
(37:01):
just before the Iron curtain fell. But make let's make
no mistake here, Andre, it's a car up. The bomb
builder who became a humanist helped swing a little bit
of that wrecking ball, because peace doesn't always wear robes
and sandals, thankfully, sometimes it does wear a lab coat
and carries many, many scars. So what did nineteen seventy
(37:24):
five give us? Science that looked inward, to the nucleus,
to the gene, to the twisted folds of matter, Literature
that refused to lie, at least from one person's point
of view and instead handed us a mirror that many
didn't want to use. And in peace laureate who understood violence,
because let's face it, he helped build it. This wasn't
(37:46):
a year of innocence. It wasn't even a year of healing.
It was more a year of reckoning. The Cold War
still shimmered, Vietnam was smoldering, the nuclear shadows were still lingering.
But inside those shadows glimmers of Claire. Scientists who hold
hard truth, poets who refused the blanket, activists who paid
the price. And yeah, fifty years later, we're still living
(38:08):
a bit with that legacy. The physics of Cold War,
the chemistry of medicine, the biology of revolution, the poetry
of disillusionment and peace of defiance, all of it wrapped
in medals, sealed with speeches and London like stones, into
a dark lake. With that, you start to head into
twenty twenty five. This year's Nobelle's Prize winners. We'll be
(38:32):
back in forty seconds. The year is twenty twenty five,
(39:12):
No really, the year, current year, twenty twenty five. We're here. Yay,
we made it, sort of one hundred years since Franken
Hurts smashed electrons in the atoms, and fifty years since
Andre Sakara dared to speak truth through a superpower, a
century between collisions of atomic and political, And here we
are again, peering into the heart of things, wondering what
(39:36):
kind of creatures we've become the air humes with artificial
intelligence and honestly exhaustion. We've survived a plandemic, rewritten the
rules of work, and spent five years arguing with algorithms
that know our moods better than most of our friends do.
The planet runs on code and caffeine. Empires compete not
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for colonies now, but for and Yet, amid all that noise,
the Nobel Prize remains, this odd ritual of reverence, the
world pausing once a year to applaud the best of
what we still call human achievement. So Yes, twenty twenty
five marks the sixth annual ITC Nobel Review, a tradition
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that started as a book and turned into a strange
kind of confessional, because when you line these prizes up,
it's like stepping stones across the century. You don't just
see progress, you see a bit of reflection, distored it
brilliant and sometimes occasionally ridiculous. This year, the metals glint
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against a backdrop of quiet crisis. The Ai Revolution promised
to liberate us and somehow handled us. Spreadsheets of our
own obstilence. Climate pledges are signed in the same breath
as new oil leases, and then some little tat gets
on a boat and trade sides of travel Somewhere. Democracies
wobble like badly coated simulations. And yet the laureates of
twenty twenty five remind us that discovery is still possible,
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even when optimism isn't as fashionable. Ask me once we're
so tonight. We take our final step in the triptage
of nineteen twenty five, nineteen seventy five, and now the
mirror year. And yes, I used triptich in a show.
I deserve bonus points. Now, one hundred years after the
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Adam began the dance, we taught it choreography. Fifty years
after Sakar pleaded for peace, we still haven't quite learned
his rhythm. This is the act three finale, Adam's Algorithms
and the aftermath. The nineteen twenty five Nobel Prize in
Physics went to John Clark, Michel Dere and Jean Martinez.
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So if you're drinking martiniz in chat, which I think
I saw, Aggie was congratulations. Three men who did something
almost mystical. They proved that quantum mechanics, that jittery theory
of sub atomic uncertainty could exist not just in atoms,
but in circuits you can hold in your hands. They
took the mathem miracles and soldered it onto a circuit bore.
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Their experiments demonstrated macroscopic quantum tunneling and energy quanticization into
superconducting circuits. Okay, I'll translate that into English. They coaxed
the weirdness of the atom into the visible world. For
most of the twentieth century, business has treated quantum behavior
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as something confined to the microscope. An electron could be
a wave or a particle. We've done shows on that
You're welcome, and a cat could be dead and alive
once again shows on that You're welcome, but only in
the safety of equations. Then came the Yopisin junction, two
(42:53):
superconductors separated by a thin barrier through which electrons could tunnel.
It was the atomic world large. Clark and Debray realized
that it could control if you could control those junctions.
You could build circuits that behave like single atoms, circuits
that could hold superpositions, entangle, and even remember their quantum state. Martinis, meanwhile,
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was the engineer priest who turned theory into hardware. His
labs at UC Santa Barbara and later at Google created
the super conducting cubits that became the backbone of early
quantum computers. Together, their work showed that quantum mechanics isn't
just a metaphor for uncertainty anymore. It was an instruction manual.
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Think it like this. In nineteen twenty five, Frankin Hurts
proved electrons could only lose energy and quantized chunks, and
twenty five Clerking Company proved that whole circuits could jump
between energy states like atoms built out of wire and willpower.
It's one thing to watch a single electron tunnel through
a barrier. It's another to watch a current of billions
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of electrons behave like one nified quantum entity, a kind
of superconducting choir humming in perfect days. These experiments gave
us the foundation of quantum information science. Without them, there
is no quantum computer, no quantum sensors, no cubits, humming
away in cryogenic chambers, promising to outthink the universe, and yet,
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as always, the irony does run deep. A century go,
quantum physics made us rethink the naturary reality. Today it's
the engine behind a high accelerators that model weather markets
in even more. In a few podcasts on many networks,
we built the ultimate calculators. Immediately ask them to calculate
our next mistake. In nineteen twenty five we learned electrons
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jump in discrete steps. In and twenty five we learned
humans do too, usually off the clips of our own design. Still,
there's a bit of beauty there any world obsessed with simulation.
The twenty five Physics Prize celebrated the raw physical act
of observation, the idea that even the strangest rules of
nature can be coaxed into the macroscopic if you're patient
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enough and colder, very cold, way colder than even my
ex wife. So let's jump to chemistry, shall we, and
unapologize ahead of time for this one, because yeah, this
(45:32):
one's gonna The Award for Chemistry for twenty twenty five
went to Susumo Kitagawa, Richard Robson, and Omar Yahi, three
architects of the molecular world. Their creation metal organic frameworks
or mfs crystalline scaffolds that looks a little something like
Escher might have sketched after inhaling his household, chemistry set
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or other stronger stuff. Imagine, if you will, a sponge,
but made of metal in carbon with internal surfaces so
vast that a single gram could cover a football field.
This frameworks can trap gases, filter toxins, store hydrogen, or
capture carbon dioxide right out of the air. Moths are
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built from metal ions connected by organic linkers lego pieces
at the atomic scale, if you will. By choosing different
metals and linkers, you can design structures with specific pores, shapes,
and chemical properties. Kitagawa and Robson laid the groundwork in
the nineteen nineties, creating stable frameworks that didn't collapse when
exposed to air. Yah He took the concept further, building
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massive poress networks and coining the term reticular chemistry chemistry
of the net. In essence, they turned matter into architecture,
and in an era suffocating under the lies of climate change,
the architecture might actually just save us, not just on
(47:04):
this planet, but maybe others. Mars Now moths can act
like filters from carbon dioxide, absorbing greenhouse gases far more
efficiently than traditional material so they can star hydrogen for
clean fuel, capture water vapor from desert air, or even
act as a drug delivery system in medicine. They are
kind of a Swiss army knife of modern chemistry, flexible, modular,
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almost absurdly adaptable. It's how do I put this inn
it term? Oh? I know how It's as if the
universe finally admit it it has storage issues. We've all
been there. I mean not recently, not with the terabytes
and petrobytes hard drives we can get now, but those
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of us in my age we remember how much of
a struggle it was. I said, there is some irony
that's beautiful in this novel. The world is, you know,
thinking about going to another planet in hopes of maybe
finding a way for breathable air there. So this could
be something that gets revisited in the coming years. One
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hundred years ago, Richard Zigsmann won his Nobel for Colloid's
mixtures suspend it in balance, and now his intellectual hairs
build lattices to trap the very molecules that could change planets.
If twenty five was about suspension, twenty twenty five is
about its capture. The same humans urged to hold chaos
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still long enough to study it. So what do we
make of the twenty twenty five Chemistry Prize. Yeah, it's
a story of holes, gigantic intricate mathematically, and yet in
these voids lies possibility. So the chemists of twenty five
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didn't just discover something new. They build a structure for redemption,
what one could possibly call a lattice of second chances.
So now we go to medicine in twenty twenty five
that reminded us how the body learns to forgive itself
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a lesson many many, many of us, yes I'm looking
at me, seem to have forgotten. But this year's Nobel
Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to Mary bruncow Bred
Ramsdell and Timone Sakagucci for discovering the small but mighty
class of immune cells known as regulatory T cells or trags.
(49:39):
They're the peacekeepers of your immune system, if you will,
the quiet diplomats that stop your defenses from going rogue.
Without them, your white blood cells can turn mutinouts, mistaking
your joints, your nerves, even your heart for foreign invaders.
Autoimmune diseases lupus arthritis MS are what happens when these
immune systems lose its sense of mercy. Now Saka Gucci
(50:03):
first identified a subset of T cells and mice that
prevented this autoimmune chaos. Frunkow and Ramsdell, working independently, trace
the genetic basis a gene called fox P three, the
molecular switch that teaches immune cells tolerance. Together, their work
revealed how the body maintains an uneasy truce with itself.
(50:24):
It's a delicate balance attack the invader's spare thyself, and
sometimes even nature forgets who it's fighting. Now, this discovery
transformed immunology. It paved the way for therapies that dampen
immune overreaction, not by blunt force, but by education. We
now manipulate regulatory T cells to treat autoimmune disorders, to
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reduce transplant rejections, even to calm some of the long
covid lingering fire that some people I know. We call
it a plandemic, but some people had legit issues with it,
and this has helped with them. So in nineteen twenty five,
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medicine managed to offer us silence with no award at all,
and then twenty twenty five I decided to offer a
whisper that sometimes the most important cure is restraint. The
novel wasn't about conquest or vaccines or miracle drugs. It
was about humility, teaching the body win to stop fighting,
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and maybe, if we really think about it, just maybe
that lesson applies outside the lab too. Looking at you. Yes,
I have a mirror by my monitor. I'm looking at you.
So we go to literature next. This one is going
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to okay, I'm just gonna jump into it. I The
Nobel Prize in Literature for twenty twenty five went to
Laslow Krasna Hakorai, the Hungarian Master of the Endless Sentence,
a novelist who writes like a philosopher trapped in an earthquake.
So we're just going to call him Laslow from now on,
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where we are not going to try to pronounce his
last name again. His works Satan Tango, The Melancholy of Resistance,
Baron Rekkheim's Homecoming. Maybe that should have been a porn
rewrite for spirited book Saggy or dense, hypnotic, and almost
defiantly uncommercial. They read like biblical parables rewritten by Kostka
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after way too much espresso. Alaslow's world is bleak, absurd,
and terrifyingly recognizable. His characters stumble through decaying towns and
collapsing systems, haunted by bureaucracy, faith, and entropeat His prose,
Wine's one for pages and pages without a break, like
he thought itself, refusing to stop until it hits a wall.
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The Nobel Committee praised him quote for a compelling visionary
wa va that reaffirms art amid apileptic terror. Now we
know who's smelling. They ruined farts, which is a plate
way of saying. He writes about us, the humans watching
the end of the world in four K resolution, while
still arguing over the damn Wi Fi password that said,
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there is something you could say as brave in Laslow's
refusal to make things easy. He doesn't give you comfort
or closure. He gives you a mirror that, oh, maybe
a little wobbly, and that never stops fogging up. Reading
him feels like wandering through a falk theedra when someone
keeps muttering the sermon on the mount through a short
wave radio, and yet buried in the despair is an
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insistence on art itself, a slight over insistence if I
do say so, that to describe the apocalypse is already
an of defiance. So in twenty five we had Gbs
mocking the Nobel Prize. In seventy five we have Montali
accepting it as a weary survivor, and Lazlow decided to
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inherit both traditions, the irony and the endurance. He writes
in long spiraling sentences, because maybe that's the only way
to capture modern like one continuous breath held against the noise.
And then then we get to the what was maybe
(54:35):
possibly going to be a big one. The Novl Piece
Prize awarded to Maria Corina my Shadow the venezuel and
an Opposition later who, by the way, and some of
her earlier pictures of the stone Cold Fox, spent years
fighting for democracy in a nation that forgot what that
word meant. The committee cited her quote tireless work promoting
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democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her
struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship
to democracy unquote talk about long sentences. Machado's story is
a story of a modern resistance. A former engineer turned politician,
she co founded Sumte election monitoring group that dared to
(55:24):
challenge Hugo Chavez has remain regime in the early two thousands.
For that, she was charged, banned, exiled, and vilified. That said,
like your average woman, I mean, like your average laureate.
She never stopped speaking. When Nicholas Medora tightened his grip.
Machado became the voice of an exhausted people calling for
(55:44):
nonviolent change, civil courage and please forgive me for that
last comment, Aggie, and international attention while much of the
world looked on. She was arrested, released, band from running
from office, and still she kept going. By twenty twenty five,
Venezuela has endured two decades of economic collapse, in political repression,
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millions have fled the rest survival in ingenuity and faith,
and a handful of zoo animals. Awarding the Peace Prize
to Machado wasn't just about this one woman. It was
about the idea that democracy still has defenders willing to
risk everything for it. And it was a shot across
the bowl to dictators everywhere. The Nobel Committee still knows
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how to weaponize a medal to some degree. Fifty years earlier,
the Peace Prize went to Andre Sakharov, the Soviet physicists
who built a bomb and then fall to undo it.
Machado stands in a little bit of that lineage the
dissident as a moral confass. Both used the only weapons
(56:49):
tyrants can't confiscate, and that is conviction. Both prove that
peace isn't necessarily pass of its resistance conducted with dignity.
Twenty five piece was a treaty signed in ink that
faded very quickly, and seventy five piece was a dissident
(57:10):
under house arrest, and a twenty five pieces a woman
with no office, no army, and most importantly no quit
The shadows. Nobel is a reminder that the Peace Prize,
for all of its controversies past and present in future,
it still actually does carry some moral voltage. When they
(57:32):
give it to people who actually deserve it. It honors
the people who stand unarmed before power and says no more.
And I know others would have wished a certain other
individual to win it this year, but I cannot argue
with the individual who did end up winning this. So
(57:53):
here we are a century of nobels behind us, with
twenty five giving us quantumized Adams, coloids and false peace,
seventy five giving us nuclear conscious, molecular symmetry, viral revelation,
poetry of endurance, and the courage of the sense, and
twenty twenty five giving us the quantum computer, the molecular sponge,
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the immune truth, the apocalyptic poet, and the unbroken woman.
From Boor to Boor Sun, from Sakarof to Machado, from
mercury vapor to cubits, the story hasn't really changed. We build,
(58:35):
we break, we rebuild, we repeat. Each generation of laureates
inherit the same paradox. Knowledge without wisdom is dangerous, but
ignorance without curiosity is fatal. Typically, the physic prizes have
taught us to question certainty has taught us with the
Chemistry Prize, to clean up after ourselves internally and sometimes externally.
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The Medicine Prize has taught us mercy in many many ways.
The Literature Prize often teaches us reflection, whether you understand
the language it was awarded to or not, And the
Peace Prize as well They have taught us a mixture
of everything, from people not deserving it, to people who
should have gotten it never did, and to those that
(59:21):
actually did deserve it. So one hundred years of Nobel stories,
that one pattern does emerge. We're still learning how to
deserve our own brilliance. The tools, well, they get sharper,
but the heart not always. But the fact that we
keep trying, that we still gather once a year to
(59:41):
celebrate curiosity. Maybe this is just my little piece of
helping because progress isn't the metal. It's about the persistence
of doing this. And with that we have a century
(01:00:07):
of Nobels behind us. We have real legacy, and the
legacy yet to uncover, and uncover it we will because
in two weeks we're gonna get a little weird, because
(01:00:27):
October belongs to the unknown, to the things that creek
just passed the edge of science, and to the stories
we tell when logic runs out from the pine barrens
of colonial New Jersey, a cursed birth with wings, from
the coastal towns of Connecticut with a black dog. We're
(01:00:48):
gonna talk about some horror stories, a history lesson in disguise,
how fear becomes folklore, and folklore becomes a flag of
a nation that never stopped inventing its own monsters. For
next on ITC seventy three, we will be talking to
the Republic of Monsters. Part of Juxtober here on k
(01:01:11):
l RN Radio's month long descent into cryptids. This has
been in the crease. I am J. Eble F, And
now you know the rest of the century
Speaker 3 (01:02:00):
And