ON THE CUTTING EDGE: A Nobel That Matters
“Rarely has there been a Nobel Prize whose relevance to the ordinary person is as indisputable as this one,” proclaims The Washington Post’s David Brown about the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics shared by Charles K. Kao, Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith:
Four decades ago, the men produced key scientific insights that have led to fiber-optic data transmission and digital photography.
Those two technologies today exist side by side - or more precisely, one in front of the other - in the endoscopes that are ubiquitous in diagnostic medicine and surgery.
Or course, fiber-optic cable is responsible for carrying much of the information, voices and pictures that ceaselessly course around the planet. And "charge-coupled devices," or the guts of digital cameras, have changed the recording of images from a chemical process into an electronic one. …
"Taken together, these inventions may have had a greater impact on humanity than any others in the last half-century," said H. Frederick Dylla, director of the American Institute of Physics.
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