Physics Nobel for the pioneers of communication technology
07 Oct 2009
Charles K Kao of Standard Telecommunication Laboratories, Harlow, UK, and Chinese University of Hong Kong who made "groundbreaking achievement on the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication," will share the 2009 Nobel Prize for Physics with Willard S Boyle and George E Smith of Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, USA, woe are accredited with the "invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit - the CCD sensor".
Kao who made will take one half of the prize money with Boyle and Smith sharing the other half equally.
The awards committee said the award is for 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," a Nobel Foundation release said.
In 1966, Charles K Kao made a discovery that led to a breakthrough in fiber optics. He carefully calculated how to transmit light over long distances via optical glass fibers. With a fiber of purest glass it would be possible to transmit light signals over 100 kilometers, compared to only 20 meters for the fibers available in the 1960s. Kao's enthusiasm inspired other researchers to share his vision of the future potential of fiber optics. The first ultra pure fiber was successfully fabricated just four years later, in 1970.
Today optical fibers make up the circulatory system that nourishes our communication society. These low-loss glass fibers facilitate global broadband communication such as the Internet. Light flows in thin threads of glass, and it carries almost all of the telephony and data traffic in each and every direction. Text, music, images and video can be transferred around the globe in a split second.
If we were to unravel all of the glass fibers that wind around the globe, we would get a single thread over one billion kilometers long - which is enough to encircle the globe more than 25 000 times - and is increasing by thousands of kilometers every hour.
