Awards: Unpredictable Nobel

Nobel Prize selection committees tend to wait decades rather than years to bestow their awards. Last week Sweden’s Royal Academy of Sciences, which picks laureates in physics and chemistry, ran true to Nobel form.

The prize for physics went to Hans Albrecht Bethe, 61, mainly for discoveries during the 1930s concerning the energy production of stars. A German-born scientist who fled the rising Third Reich and who has been teaching at Cornell University since 1935, Bethe (pronounced Baytuh) theorized that the inordinate energy emitted by stars results from two protracted nuclear processes during which hydrogen fuses into helium. Similar research placed Bethe in the front rank of atomic-era scientists such as Edward Teller and Robert Oppenheimer who gave birth to the Abomb.

Sharing this year’s three-way Nobel Prize for chemistry are German Chemist Manfred Eigen, 40; Ronald G.W. Norrish, 70, professor emeritus of physical chemistry at Cambridge University; and Norrish’s onetime student George Porter, 48, now a professor of chemistry. Eigen, Norrish and Porter were honored for their studies of rapid chemical reactions, which date from the late 1940s and early 1950s. Their Nobel-winning research revealed the subtle changes that take place during chemical reactions that last only one-billionth of a second. All three came to their award-winning conclusions by subjecting samples of various chemicals to short bursts of energy, then electrically, acoustically and optically measuring the time that elapsed before the chemicals’ return to a state of equilibrium.