3 Americans share 2009 Nobel physics prize

STOCKHOLM – Three Americans who created the technology behind digital photography and helped link the world through fibre-optic networks shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in physics yersterday.

Charles K Kao, 75, was cited for discovering how to transmit light signals over long distances through glass fibres as thin as a human hair. His 1966 breakthrough led to the creation of modern fibre-optic communication networks that carry voice, video and high-speed Internet data around the world.’What the wheel did for transport, the optical fiber did for telecommunications,’ said Richard Epworth, who worked with Kao at Standard Telecommunications Laboratories in Harlow, England in the 1960s. ‘Optical fibre enables you to transmit information with little energy over long distances and to transmit information at very high rates.’Willard S. Boyle, 85, and George E Smith, 79, were honoured for inventing the eye of the digital camera, a sensor able to transform light into a large number of pixels, the tiny points of color that are the building blocks of every digital image.Their charged-coupled device, or CCD, is found today in devices ranging from the cheapest point-and-shoot digital camera to robotic medical instruments equipped with video cameras that let surgeons perform delicate operations deep inside the human body. It also revolutionised astronomy by letting satellites equipped with digital cameras take images from previously unseen regions of outer space and transmit them back to earth.The work of the three men is ‘something that has really changed our lives,’ said Joseph Nordgren, chair of the academy’s physics committee. ‘The impact on science is enormous.’- Nampa-AP

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