American Scientist

The Cambridge Dictionary defines annus mirabilis as “a year of extremely good events.” When otherwise unqualified, the term is usually understood to refer to “the miraculous year” of 1666, during which the Great Plague continued and the Great Fire of London raged for four days. These were certainly not good events, but several contemporaneous achievements in science were, and the date itself was remarkable.

Regardless of what happened during 1666, when written in Roman numerals, the date is distinguished by the curious fact of its being the only year that was or ever will be written as MDCLXVI. Of course, the same can be said of every year, whether designated in Roman or Arabic numerals, but MDCLXVI possesses what might be considered, at least from a numerological point of view, some more curious significance. It is the only year containing every one of the Roman numerals I through M only once and in the strict order of decreasing value.

This observation would certainly have interested the fictitious numerologist Dr. I. J. Matrix, whose achievements were satirically chronicled in Scientific American half a century ago by polymath Martin Gardner. Once when being “interviewed” by Gardner, Matrix did note that the descending string DCLXVI, or 666, represents to some the Antichrist or the devil, although to Chinese people the number 666 represents good luck. In fact, as Matrix “told” Gardner, it is “easy for a skillful numerologist to find 666 in any name,” including his own full name, Irving Joshua Matrix. Because each of its components has six letters, it might be said to represent 666. More generally, virtually any number, date, or epithet can be interpreted to have multiple and contradictory meanings the way that 666 and 1666 do.

The Latin adjective mirabilis has been associated with many events for which an adjective such as “amazing,” “remarkable,” or one of their synonyms would be fitting. The term became associated with Roger Bacon, a 13th-century English Franciscan friar and philosopher who was interested in theology and natural philosophy. Bacon emphasized observation in studying nature and is considered one of the early advocates of the modern scientific method. He strongly championed the use of experiment over pure reason for understanding how the world works. He is credited with being the first Westerner to specify how gunpowder is made, and was an early adherent of the use of optical lenses for improving eyesight. He was recognized as a “wonderful teacher” by having the descriptive scholastic accolade Doctor Mirabilis conferred upon him.

When mirabilis is connected to a year, the term annus mirabilis refers to a year of especially significant events or accomplishments. The years 1665 and 1666 certainly deserved to be singled out as anni mirabiles. In 1665, the bubonic epidemic known as the Great Plague broke out in London and lasted for two years. During that time, the city streets were prowled by frontline stalwarts, some wearing bird-billed masks concealing herbs, spices, and perfumes to counter the prevailing stench of rotting flesh. These so-called plague doctors also carried a stick with which to examine bodies without having to touch them with their hands. The job was dangerous and had been so for centuries. During the Black Death pandemic that struck Italy some three centuries earlier, more than a third of the country’s population had perished by 1348, and in Venice five of the 18 registered plague doctors died in that year alone.

Among those who lived through the plague years of 1665–1666 in England was the poet John Dryden. He had been a teenager during most of the English Civil War between the Parliamentarians and the Royalists. His parents sided with the former, but he would be among the poets to welcome the restoration of Charles II to the throne in 1660. Dryden studied at Trinity College Cambridge, having graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1654. By 1660 his verse, which was characterized by classical and scientific references, was attracting attention, and he became known as a poet of some talent. This fame ensured a readership for his 1667 historical poem Annus Mirabilis, which commemorates two disparate events of the year 1666: naval victories of the English over the Dutch, and the Great Fire of London. His favorable treatment of the monarch in the poem no doubt helped secure his subsequent appointments as poet laureate and royal historiographer. He was such a dominant figure in the literary universe of his time that the period came to be known as the Age of Dryden.

The Great Fire seemed hardly something to celebrate in a poem subtitled “The Year of Wonders.” The conflagration began on a Sunday night in a bakery on Pudding Lane in central London and continued to rage through the following Thursday. Dryden’s poem describes how, on the first night, the streets were “thronged and busy as by day,” as Londoners ran around with buckets and hand-pumped “fire engines” that spewed water on the spreading flames. The destruction died out only after the king ordered that houses be taken down by hand and with gunpowder to create fire breaks. The fire’s toll included more than 13,000 houses (leaving 70,000 homeless); 87 parish churches as well as St. Paul’s Cathedral; and most of the city’s offices. Two centuries afterward, the writer Samuel Johnson explained that Dryden considered the year of the fire an annus mirabilis “because it was a wonder that things were not worse.”

Rising from the Ashes

Whether or not Dryden thought the Great Plague also could have been worse, he did not wax poetic about it, because like many other Londoners who had the means to do so, Dryden had escaped the city. He fled to the village of Charlton in North Wiltshire, which put him about 90 miles due west of London. During this retreat, he wrote productively and composed his acclaimed work Of Dramatick Poesie (which was published in 1668). Other city dwellers relocated to the countryside north of London, some to Cambridgeshire. In the town of Cambridge, 60 miles away from the densely populated plague city, the university shut down as a precaution, leading some of its residents to flee even farther from the epicenter of the scourge.

Among those who left Cambridge was 23-year-old Isaac Newton. Like Dryden, he had been a student at Trinity College, graduating about a decade after the poet. Following his undergraduate studies, Newton began teaching at his alma mater and would continue to be associated with Trinity for his entire academic career. However, when the plague struck, he was driven to spend much of the next couple of years in and around his native hamlet of Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth, located about 50 miles northwest of Cambridge. He was in the prime of his intellectual life and, according to his own recollection, those years proved to be his most fruitful and creative. Indeed, according to historian of science Robert Palter, Newton during his sojourn in Lincolnshire figured out that the Moon is held in orbit by Earth’s gravity, proved that light is composed of particles, and developed the integral calculus. As most of this outburst of genius occurred in the single year 1666, scholars understandably refer to it as Newton’s annus mirabilis.

In 1667 Newton returned to Cambridge as a Fellow of Trinity College, and he was granted a master’s degree the following year. Beginning in 1669 and into the next century, he held the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics, a professorship that was founded in 1663 by the clergyman and politician Henry Lucas, who from 1639 to 1640 served as the university’s Member of the House of Commons. The Lucasian professorship, which was subsequently held by the likes of Charles Babbage, George Stokes, Paul Dirac, and Stephen Hawking, is considered worldwide to be among the most prestigious of academic appointments.

Many of the scientific advancements Newton made during his time in seclusion at Woolsthorpe were not immediately made public, which explains why Dryden did not include Newton’s achievements in his annus mirabilis poem. That is not to say that those achievements were unknown among scientists and engineers, some of whom wished to know more. Indeed, in 1684 Newton was visited by three fellow members of the Royal Society: the second Astronomer Royal Edmund Halley, who had cataloged stars in the Southern Hemisphere; astronomer and architect Christopher Wren, who was responsible for the planning and redesign of much of burned-out London, including St. Paul’s Cathedral; and Robert Hooke, who by means of the then-novel instrument known as a microscope observed the cellular nature of matter and microorganisms and, on a macro scale, articulated the relationship between the force on a spring and its extension. The visitors wished to discuss Newton’s theories of planetary motion, so Newton showed them his relevant calculations. It was Halley who pushed Newton to publish the natural extensions of his work and offered to cover all production costs, including editing and proofreading, which Halley would do himself. Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica was published in Latin in 1687 and soon translated into many languages. Newton’s Optiks: Or, a Treatise on the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections and Colours of Light, was published in 1704.

Like many scientists and engineers who achieve great fame in their lifetime, Newton the public figure became involved in politics, both professional and governmental. He had been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1672 and served as its president from 1703 to 1727, the year of his death. He served as the Member of Parliament from Cambridge in 1689–90 and again in 1701–02. He became Warden of the Mint in 1696 and Master of the Mint three years later. He was knighted in 1705. Upon his death, he was buried in Westminster Abbey.

In 1966, Palter organized a conference on Newtonian studies that was held at the University of Texas at Austin to commemorate the tricentenary of the year so closely associated with the natural philosopher. To achieve a perspective on the subject beyond that which Newton scholars could bring to the discussion, Palter invited “general historians of ideas, of science, of art, of philosophy and religion,” along with “philosophers of science and practicing physicists.” They all “contributed evaluations of Newton’s world within the framework of modern science.” Subsequently, Palter edited The Annus Mirabilis of Sir Isaac Newton: 1666–1966, a collection of papers associated with that meeting along with critical commentary on the scholarship and the conference discussions. Although scholars have questioned the precision of dating Newton’s accomplishments to a single annus mirabilis, Palter believed the year “may surely be taken as symbolic of a decisive turning point in the history of human thought.”

Picture This

Newton is not the only scientist said to have experienced a miraculous year of breakthroughs. Albert Einstein was 26 years old in 1905, when—while working as a patent office clerk in Bern, Switzerland, a job that he later said gave him time for thought experiments—he published four papers of major significance in the journal Annalen der Physik. They dealt with space, time, mass, and energy, topics that were central to the foundations of modern physics. In order of publication, the papers were about the photoelectric effect (with a translated title of “On a Heuristic Point of View Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light”); Brownian motion (“On the Movement of Small Particles Suspended in Stationary Liquids Required by the Molecular-Kinetic Theory of Heat”); special relativity (“On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”); and the equation E=mc² (“Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?”).

Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein are among the scientists who experienced their own annus mirabilis, a miraculous year of breakthroughs.

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It was the first of those four papers that was cited when Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1921 “for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.” Collectively, the 1905 papers plus his ideas on quantum mechanics formed the basis for Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which was published in 1915 and provided the model for the modern theory of gravitation. Einstein did not receive a Nobel Prize for that work, presumably because he did not fully embrace quantum theory.

Exceptional Rewards

As I have argued for some time, the Nobel Prizes—at least as shaped by the trustees of Alfred Nobel’s estate and institutionalized by the Nobel Foundation—were not established in complete compliance with Alfred Nobel’s will. Nobel intended the prizes to provide more immediate recognition of achievement, in contrast to the interval of many years that has typically elapsed between the doing of prizeworthy work and the awarding of a Nobel Prize. Also, Nobel’s own achievements were industrial, and his intention had been to focus chiefly on rewarding applied science (including engineering) rather than pure science. Although the Nobel Foundation has occasionally recognized an engineering achievement—notably for the integrated circuit in 2000 and “for the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes which has enabled bright and energy-saving white light sources” in 2014—engineering and many other seemingly neglected fields have seen fit to establish their own “Nobels” in recognition of less widely known anni mirabiles and their practical consequences.

There is no Nobel Prize given expressly for achievements in mathematics or engineering. However, the mathematics community considers the Abel Prize, which was established in 2001 by the Norwegian government, to be effectively a “Nobel Prize for Mathematics.” The idea for such a prize dates from a century earlier, when the Nobels sans mathematics were in their infancy. In 1902, the year after the first Nobel Prizes were awarded, King Oscar II of Sweden and Norway proposed a mathematics prize to be awarded by Norway. The political separation of Norway from Sweden in 1905 ended discussion of such a prize, and it was not until the centenary of the Nobels that it was successfully revived.

As computer science did not exist in Nobel’s time, he cannot be said to have deliberately omitted a prize for achievements in that field. Nevertheless, the omission was corrected in 1966, when the Association for Computing Machinery established its A. M. Turing Award for achievements “of lasting and major technical importance to the computer field.” It comes with an honorarium of $1 million, which puts it on a par with the Nobels.

The so-called Nobel Prize in Economics is not really one. What goes by that name is officially the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, and semiofficially is the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. It was not one of the original prizes endowed by Nobel; it was established in 1968 in connection with a donation to the Nobel Foundation from Sverges Riksbank—Sweden’s central bank—in commemoration of the bank’s tercentenary.

In the field of engineering, no prize was considered to be even close to a Nobel until 1969, when the U.S. National Academy of Engineering awarded its first Charles Stark Draper Prize. Draper, known for his work in inertial navigation, was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and founder of the Draper Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Since the establishment of the Draper, two additional high-profile prizes have been established by the Academy. The Fritz J. and Dolores H. Russ Prize, first awarded in 2001, is for a bioengineering achievement that “has had a significant impact on society and has contributed to the advancement of the human condition through widespread use.” Fritz Russ, the founder of Systems Research Laboratories, was an alumnus of Ohio University, which instigated the award. The Bernard M. Gordon Prize for Innovation in Engineering and Technology Education, named for “the father of high-speed analog-to-digital conversion,” was first awarded in 2002. Each of these three prizes comes with a $500,000 award. Before the turn of the century, the Draper Prize was considered the Nobel in engineering. Now, all three of these engineering prizes are touted as being Nobel-like.

Across the pond, an international award recognizing “ground-breaking engineering innovation which is of global benefit to humanity” was instituted in 2013 as the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. Also known as the QEPrize, It comes with an award of £500,000 and is presented at Buckingham Palace.

Winners of Nobel prizes, both real and ersatz, may be said to experience a second miracle year when they receive their award, because they likely were far less recognized for their achievement at the time of their first annus mirabilis. However, the adage “better late than never” applies here, as it does in so many circumstances of recognition, and the whole world—or at least the world encompassed by the field of the award—can share in the satisfaction that significant achievement has indeed been recognized in the end. Any such occasion for global joy has certainly been welcome in this time of a pandemic. The entire world had an annus horribilis in the year 2020, which stretched into 2021 and lingers as an extended annus miserabilis. Who knows what miraculous literary or scientific achievements are being made during this period of adversity and reclusion? Perhaps the whole world will learn of them when they are eventually recognized in happier times.