Three scientists whose work hastened the transmission of information and gave birth to digital cameras won this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics.
Charles K Kao, who worked at Standard Telecommunications Laboratories in Harlow, UK, and taught at the Chinese University in Hong Kong, will share the 10 million-kronor ($1.4 million) prize with Willard S Boyle and George E Smith of Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, the Nobel Assembly said today in Stockholm. Kao will get half of amount, while Boyle and Smith split the remainder.
Kao, 75, in 1966 calculated how to transmit light over long distances through optical glass fibres, a breakthrough that means people today can exchange text, music and images around the world within seconds. Three years later, Boyle, 85, and Smith designed the first imaging technology using a digital sensor, leading to the creation of the digital camera.
The research “helped to shape the foundation of today’s networked societies,” the Nobel committee said in a statement. “They have created many practical innovations for everyday life and provided new tools for scientific exploration.”
The technology created by Boyle and Smith is also used in diagnostic machines and micro-surgery. Kao, who has British and US citizenship, was born in Shanghai in 1933. Boyle, a Canadian and US citizen, was born in Amherst in Canada’s Nova Scotia province in 1924. He is 85. Smith, a US citizen, was born in White Plains, New York, in 1930. He is 79. All three scientists are now retired.
PURITY OF GLASS
Kao’s discovery in fibre optics set the stage for the technological revolution that underpins today’s global communication systems, powering broadband internet connections and carrying data transmissions around the world. In 1966, he figured out how to transmit light for more than 100 kilometers using optical glass fibres, five times the length of the most advanced fibres then available, the Nobel committee said.
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The key was the purity of the glass, Kao found. The first ultra-pure fibres were made just four years after his discovery, in 1970. Now the glass fibres snake throughout the world in utility and computer cables, and the light that flows through the thin threads instantaneously transmit text, music, pictures and video globally.
“If we were to unravel all of the glass fibres that wind around the globe, we would get a single thread over one billion kilometers long,” the committee said in a statement that dubbed Kao “the master of light.”
UNIVERSE AND X-RAYS
Last year’s physics prize went to Yoichiro Nambu of the US, and Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa of Japan for showing how subatomic particles that are supposed to act similarly sometimes don’t, leading to a better explanation of how the universe was formed.
Annual prizes for achievements in physics, chemistry, medicine, peace and literature were established in the will of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite, who died in 1896. The Nobel Foundation was established in 1900 and the prizes were first handed out the following year.
In 1901 the first Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Wilhelm Roentgen for his discovery of X-rays. The physics prize has since been awarded for discoveries and inventions, according to the Nobel Prize website.
Yesterday, Elizabeth Blackburn, 60, a professor at the University of California in San Francisco; Carol Greider, 48, a professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore; and Jack Szostak, 56, a professor at Harvard Medical School in Boston, won the Nobel Prize in medicine for research on cell division and the “immortality enzyme” that can help them multiply without damage.