Canadian-born physicist Willard Boyle says he struggles to keep up with the pace of advancement in digital camera technology since his 1969 co-invention of the "electronic eye."
Credit: National Academy of Engineering
STOCKHOLM: Three physicists won the 2009 Nobel Prize on Tuesday for work on fibre optics and light sensing that helped unleash the Information Technology revolution.
Charles Kao, Willard Boyle and George Smith were hailed by the Nobel jury as "the masters of light" for transforming communications from copper-wire telephony and postal mail to the era of the Internet, email and instant messaging.
"This year's Nobel Prize in Physics is awarded for two scientific achievements that have helped to shape the foundations of today's networked societies… They have created many practical innovations for everyday life and provided new tools for scientific exploration," the jury said.
Shaped the foundations
One of them is the fibre-optic cable, which enables transmission of data at the speed of light, and the other is the digital sensor that is the digital camera's 'electronic eye'.
Kao, who has British and U.S. nationality but has been based in Hong Kong, was awarded half of the prize for groundbreaking achievements in the use of glass fibres for optical communication.
"If we were to unravel all of the glass fibres that wind around the globe, we would get a single thread over one billion kilometres long - which is enough to encircle the globe more than 25,000 times - and is increasing by thousands of kilometres every hour," the jury said.
The 1966 discovery by Kao, now 75, means that "text, music, images and video can be transferred around the globe in a split second," it added.
Split second transfers
Kao, whose curiosity for science began as a young boy when he mixed mud balls with red phosphorus powder and potassium chlorate and threw them to watch them explode, was vice-chancellor of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, but has been retired since 1996.
His Nobel win "is truly great news for all of us at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, in Hong Kong, in China, and indeed to all Chinese around the world," said current vice-chancellor Lawrence Lau.
Boyle, a Canadian-U.S. citizen, and Smith, a 79-year-old American, shared the other half of the prize for inventing an imaging semiconductor circuit - the charge-coupled device (CCD) sensor, found in some digital cameras.
The CCD, which converts light into electrical signals and was invented in 1969, was inspired by the photo-electric theory that earned Albert Einstein the 1921 Nobel. "It revolutionised photography, as light could be now captured electronically instead of on film," the committee said.
CCD technology is also used in many medical applications, such as imaging the inside of the human body, both for diagnostics and for microsurgery.
