Field
Relativity, quantum mechanics, particle physics, condensed matter, and the foundations of how the universe behaves.
The first direct detection of gravitational waves, a century after Einstein predicted them. On 14 September 2015 the two LIGO detectors recorded the spacetime ripple (event GW150914) from two black holes spiralling together and merging over a billion light-years away.
Chemistry & Materials
Geim and Novoselov isolated graphene — a single atomic layer of carbon — and showed it is a stable, highly conductive two-dimensional crystal. Famously, they peeled it from graphite using adhesive tape.
Earth & Space Science
By measuring distant exploding stars, this team found that the expansion of the universe is speeding up, not slowing down. The acceleration implies a mysterious 'dark energy' filling space — one of the great puzzles of modern physics.
Chemistry & Materials
Bednorz and Müller discovered superconductivity in a copper-oxide ceramic at a far higher temperature than any known material, breaking the long-standing temperature ceiling and launching the field of high-temperature superconductivity.
Earth & Space Science
Penzias and Wilson reported a faint, uniform microwave hiss coming from every direction in the sky that they could not eliminate. It was the cosmic microwave background — the leftover radiation from the hot early universe, and decisive evidence for the Big Bang.
Bell turned the EPR debate from philosophy into experiment. He proved that any theory based on local hidden variables must obey an inequality that quantum mechanics violates — making the question of non-locality empirically decidable.
Higgs showed how gauge bosons — the carriers of fundamental forces — can acquire mass through spontaneous symmetry breaking without spoiling the underlying gauge symmetry. The mechanism predicts a new scalar field and its associated particle.
The BCS theory gave the first microscopic explanation of superconductivity. It showed that below a critical temperature electrons bind into 'Cooper pairs' via lattice vibrations and condense into a single coherent quantum state that carries current without resistance.
The 'EPR paradox' argued that quantum mechanics, if taken as complete, implies a spooky instantaneous link between distant particles. Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen used this to claim the theory must be incomplete — that hidden variables underlie its probabilities.
Earth & Space Science
Hubble showed that distant galaxies are receding from us at speeds proportional to their distance — the first observational evidence that the universe is expanding. The proportionality is now called Hubble's law.
A three-page sequel to the special-relativity paper in which Einstein drew out its most famous consequence: mass and energy are equivalent. A body that emits energy loses mass in proportion, captured by the relation later written as E = mc².
Einstein's founding paper on the special theory of relativity. Starting from two postulates — that the laws of physics are identical in all inertial frames and that light travels at the same speed for every observer — he reconstructed the relationship between space and time without invoking a luminiferous ether.
Planck's derivation of the black-body radiation law, which resolved the 'ultraviolet catastrophe' of classical physics. To match the measured spectrum he was forced to assume that energy is exchanged in discrete packets — the birth of the quantum.
Maxwell unified electricity, magnetism, and light into a single field theory. From his set of equations he showed that electromagnetic disturbances propagate as waves at the speed of light — concluding that light itself is an electromagnetic phenomenon.