The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded on Tuesday to Charles K. Kao, Willard Boyle and George Smith.
Kao, who will receive one half of the $1.4 million award, paved the way for the development of fiber optics and the telecommunications revolution. His breakthrough in 1966 made possible the vast network of fiber optic cables we use to transfer information almost instantaneously today.
Boyle and Smith will each receive one quarter of the award. They worked together in 1969-1970 to invent charge coupled devices (CCDs) which allow everything from the Hubble Space Telescope to your basic point and shoot digital camera to store images as digital information.
Kao, born in Shanghai, China, was a researcher at the Standard Telecommunications Laboratory in Harlow, England in the 1960s. At the time, engineers were already experimenting with sending laser pulses through thin glass fibers. However, only one percent of the light signal remained in the fiber after 20 meters.
It was thought that holes and cracks in the glass fibers - imperfections in the manufacturing - were the culprit that allowed light to dissipate. Kao believed the key to preserving the signal over long distances was not manufacturing the fibers in a different way, but simply making the fibers out of much purer glass. Impurities in the glass such as metal ions scattered the laser pulse.
After several years of experimentation, Kao presented a detailed method by which very pure fibers could be made out of a specific type of glass called fused silica.
"I think it was a very respectable bit of detective work as well as good theory and good fundamentals," Kao said in an interview with the IEEE Global History Network last October. "It was really proving that the theory was correct. We [said], 'Okay, we did our best to investigate everything, and the rest is engineering.'"
Engineering pulled through. Four years later, Corning Glass Works followed Kao's specifications to create a kilometer-long fiber through which light could travel with only a minimal loss of intensity. In 1988, the first fiber optic cable was laid across the Atlantic Ocean and there are an estimated 600 million miles of fiber cables in use today.
Optical fibers today are about the diameter of a human hair and use pulses of infrared light to transmit information. Thanks to fiber optics, you can check your e-mail in lecture, place a call to China and send text messages on your phone.
If Kao's breakthrough eventually allowed you to spend countless hours surfing cat macro sites and watching Youtube videos of dogs skateboarding, then Boyle and Smith's invention is responsible for the creation of those images and videos in the first place. Boyle and Smith worked together at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey in the '60s and '70s.
"[Willard] Boyle and I got together one afternoon," Smith said in an interview with Nobelprize.org just after the announcement of the prize. "It was actually a one-afternoon shot and, well, we had a habit of batting things back and forth. We have a couple of other patents together too, around about, I don't know, 30 or 40-something overall. And, you know, things just happened to get together." The two researchers were originally trying to develop a new form of electronic memory but soon realized their idea applied to imaging technology as well. CCDs, charge coupled devices or so-called electronic eyes, derive their existence from the photoelectric effect that Einstein described.
Light hits the photocells in each well of a CCD device, displacing the electrons in the photocell. The voltage generated is then transformed into digital information, storing an entire image as a string of ones and zeros. For instance, producing a ten megapixel picture takes the work of 10 million individual photocells.
Like Kao's work in fiber optics, Boyle's and Smith's work sparked a massive boom in the field of digital image capture. By 1975, a digital video camera that could take images for television had been developed.
CCDs can detect light from a wide range of wavelengths, from X-rays to infrared light. They are now used in doctors' offices in X-ray imaging devices, in NASA's landers on Mars and in countless digital cameras and recorders.
In the category of chemistry, the Nobel Prize was awarded to three scientists for their discovery of the structure and functions of ribosomes, the molecular factories of the cell. Venkatraman Ramakrishnan of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Thomas Steitz of Yale University and Ada Yonath of the Weizmann Institute of Science will share the award.
Before proteins can be made, the genetic information in DNA is first transcribed into messenger RNA (mRNA), which can be easily transported out of the nucleus and into the cytoplasm of the cell, where the ribosomes are located. The mRNA is then fed through the ribosome, which reads the mRNA and translates every three bases into its corresponding amino acid.
As more and more of the mRNA passes through the ribosome, the ribosome attaches each amino acid to the last, forming a growing chain. The chain, known as a polypeptide, can then fold and bind to other polypeptides to form complete proteins.
Although the function of the ribosome is clear, the Nobel laureates determined how that function was made possible by the structure of the ribosome. Since a ribosome is only 20 nanometers wide, current forms of microscopy do not have high enough resolutions to provide any meaningful information about its structure.
Using X-ray crystallography, the scientists observed the diffraction patterns that the ribosomes generated when beams of X-rays were shot through them. From this, they were able to determine the structure of the ribosome.
Furthermore, all three laureates generated three-dimensional models to study how antibiotics bind to ribosomes. This has helped many scientists understand how antibiotics fight off bacteria by blocking their ribosomes.
All of the Nobel laureates, with the exception of the winner for the Peace award, will be honored at a ceremony in Stockholm on Dec. 10.
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