Ten Nobel Laureates in Order of Prize Year, From 1902 to 2013

Fischer won the 1902 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on sugar and purine synthesis. In 1894 he found that each enzyme acted on only one of a near-identical pair of sugar stereoisomers, which led him to propose the lock and key fit between an enzyme and its substrate.

Rayleigh noticed that nitrogen from air was about half a percent denser than nitrogen made from chemical compounds, a small but reproducible gap. Chasing it with William Ramsay led to argon, and he took the 1904 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Ramsay shared the discovery of argon with Rayleigh in 1894, then found helium on Earth in 1895 and neon, krypton and xenon in 1898. His 1904 Nobel Prize in Chemistry came the same year as Rayleigh's prize in physics for the same underlying discovery.

In 1928 Raman showed that a small fraction of light scattered by a transparent medium changes wavelength in a way that reveals the vibrational structure of its molecules. The 1930 Nobel Prize in Physics made him the first Asian to win a Nobel Prize in a science.

With William Arthur Johnson, Krebs worked out the citric acid cycle in 1937 at Sheffield, after earlier finding the urea cycle with Kurt Henseleit. He shared the 1953 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Fritz Lipmann.

From 1964 Penzias and Robert Wilson found a faint, uniform microwave signal from every direction that they could not explain as instrument noise, not even pigeon droppings in the antenna. It was identified as the cosmic microwave background, and he shared the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Wilson worked with Penzias at Bell Labs in Holmdel with a sensitive horn antenna, and the signal they found indicated a temperature of about 3 kelvins. The nearby Princeton group that had predicted such radiation helped identify it as a remnant of the big bang.

Chandrasekhar calculated on the ship from India to England in 1930 the maximum mass of a white dwarf, about 1.44 times the mass of the Sun. He shared the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics for this and later work on stellar structure.

Higgs proposed the mechanism that bears his name in 1964, after a first paper was rejected, and it predicted a particle that took 48 years to observe directly. The 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics followed the 2012 confirmation.

Englert and Robert Brout proposed the same mass-generating mechanism in 1964, independently of Higgs. Brout died in 2011 and the prize is never awarded posthumously, so Englert shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics with Higgs.