Surely you have heard of the Nobel Prize before, whether in a classroom setting or simply joking with your friends about who is most likely to win one. This exclusive and highly prestigious set of five prizes in various areas is awarded annually to those who have “conferred the greatest benefit to humankind” in their respective fields. This usually occurs in early October, so let us dive right into what the world’s greatest scientists have been cooking! Before that though, here is an optional background section on the Nobel Prizes.

Alfred Nobel and His Legacy

Alfred Nobel was a Swedish chemist and engineer, best known for his pioneering invention of dynamite. His early work involved a tragic explosion of an early dynamite prototype in a warehouse, which took his brother’s life. Many media outlets blamed Alfred for this tragedy. After reading a mocking obituary of him (“Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday”), he was determined to leave behind a more positive legacy. Nobel’s will allocated 94% of his assets (equivalent to $200 million in 2023) for five annual prizes (whose winners were determined by committees of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences), three in the sciences of physics, chemistry, and physiology or medicine, the fourth for literature, and the fifth for a person or organization who has promoted the most “international fraternity, the suppression or reduction of standing armies, or the establishment or furtherance of peace congresses”—or in short, the Peace Prize. These prizes were established in 1895 and were first awarded in 1901, after the original funds had gained enough interest to fund the awards for the year and many more after. Cumulatively, it has been awarded 621 times over the past 123 years, to 965 different individuals.

In 1968, Sweden’s central bank Sveriges Riksbank celebrated its 300th anniversary by donating a large sum of money to the Nobel Foundation to set up a sixth “Nobel” prize, in economics. In this article we do not consider this prize due to its controversiality, nor will we consider the Peace and Literature prizes in much detail due to the lack of information regarding the laureates.

Nobel Prize in Physics 2023: A Microscope in Time

Whenever we open a new window on the universe, we expand our understanding of it—whether it’s been telescopes, gravitational waves, or particle detectors. The 2023 Noble Prize in Physics has been awarded to three physicists, Pierre Agostini, Frenec Krausz, and Anne L’Huillier, who contributed to opening just such a new window—but it’s not a window to a new size scale or a new mode of seeing—it’s for a new window in time.

As we move from cosmic scales down to atomic ones, we find an interesting pattern: as we investigate smaller and smaller scales, we find faster and faster processes. Subatomic processes such as the motion of atoms in a chemical reaction and the motion of electrons bound to atoms are measured in tiny, tiny timeframes called attoseconds. An attosecond is a billionth of a billionth of a second—there are more attoseconds in a single second than seconds in the entire lifetime of the universe! The 2023 laureates were awarded the prize for bringing into possibility new methods to observe these phenomena in tiny timeframes, specifically with extremely short light pulses. In other words, they founded the field of attosecond physics.

So why was this so difficult in the first place? Let’s make an analogy with photography here: to capture fast moving targets such as a hummingbird’s wings, a camera would have to have an extremely short exposure. Generalizing this to atomic observations, this is even more difficult to do due to the implications of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. This difficulty was first overcome by L’Huillier in 1987 who discovered that brief light beams, when scattered by noble gasses, produce different overtones that “resonate” with incident beams. For further details regarding how atomic emission works, refer to the accompanying diagram:

In further pursuit of attosecond pulses, the other two laureates separately created methods of producing extremely short light pulses—Agostini created consecutive light pulses that lasted only 250 attoseconds, while Krausz was able to create a single pulse that lasted 650 attoseconds, both types of pulses which are useful in observing different effects. These pulses have far reaching consequences, such as identifying molecules in medical diagnostics and controlling electron behaviour in semiconductors.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2023: Foundations in Nanotech

The fact that atoms and molecules properties are determined by their nucleic and electronic structures is fundamental to most chemistry humans know of today. However, at miniscule sizes this assumption breaks down and gives way to mysterious properties that depend on the size of the nanoparticles. The 2023 Noble Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to Moungi Bawendi, Louis Brus, and Aleksey Yekinov, who contributed to the opening of this new window—they discovered and synthesized quantum dots.

Although physicists had long known that particles with size-dependent properties could exist within the quantum framework, it was not until the early 1980s when Yekimov first succeeded in demonstrating size-dependent effects in coloured glass. Independently, Brus’ research led him to prove that these particles float freely in fluids as well. Both of these discoveries did nothing to counter the then popular belief that these nanoparticles won’t be put into practical use because of the difficulty of synthesizing them. However, in 1993, Bawendi succeeded in revolutionising the production of nanoparticles called quantum dots, resulting in almost perfect particles—a key quality of being useful in commercial application. They’re now being used in illuminating screens and tissue mapping; and in the future their use could extend into compact electronics, solar cells, and even quantum cryptography!

Nobel Prize in Biology 2023: Disease Detectives

Vaccination stimulates the formation of an immune response to a particular antigen, giving the body extra support in the early stages of combatting an infectious disease. It is a long-standing medical technique that previously received the Nobel Prize in 1951. In 2023 though, you might naturally expect that this has to do with COVID— Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman have been awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Medicine for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19.

In our cells, genetic information encoded in DNA is transferred to messenger RNA (mRNA), which is used as a template for protein synthesis. During the 1980s, efficient methods for producing mRNA without cell culture were introduced, called in vitro transcription. The laureates noticed that dendritic cells (a type of cell in the human immune system) were recognising in vitro mRNA as foreign but normal mammalian mRNA as completely fine—leading them to the discovery that the two seemingly similar types of mRNA actually differ in the frequency that their bases were modified. Through their discoveries that base modifications both reduced inflammatory responses and increased protein production, Karikó and Weissman had eliminated critical obstacles on the way to clinical applications of mRNA. The impressive flexibility and speed with which mRNA vaccines can be developed pave the way for using the new platform also for vaccines against other infectious diseases. In the future, the technology may also be used to deliver therapeutic proteins and treat some cancer types, in addition to combatting more infectious diseases with even more effective vaccines.