STOCKHOLM - Charles K. Kao, Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith have won this year’s Nobel Prize for Physics for discoveries of importance for the internet and the digital camera, it was announced in Stockholm Tuesday.
Kao was cited “for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibres for optical communication” while Boyle and Smith were cited for inventing the CCD sensor, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.
Kao, a British and US citizen, was awarded half the prize worth 10 million kronor ($1.4 million).
Boyle - who has US and Canadian citizenship - and Smith, an American, shared the other half of the prize for their invention of the CCD. The CCD is likened to a “digital camera’s electronic eye”.
“We are the ones that I guess started this profusion of little small cameras working all over the world,” Boyle told reporters at the Academy’s headquarters over a loudspeaker phone from Canada where he was born 1924.
“The most important part of our invention that affected me personally was when the Mars probe was on the surface of Mars and used a camera like ours, and it would not have been possible without our invention,” Boyle added. “We saw for the first time the surface of Mars. … It was very exciting”.
It has also been of importance for astronomy and “without CCD we would not have seen the astonishing images of space taken by the Hubble space telescope,” the Academy statement said.
Kao’s discovery was made in 1966. Born 1933 in Shanghai he calculated how to transmit light over long distances via optical glass fibres.
These fibres are key for today’s communications and “text, music, images and video can be transferred around the globe in a split second,” the Academy said.
Kao retired in 1996. In 1965 he was awarded a PhD in electrical engineering from Imperial College, London, and before retiring was vice chancellor at Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Boyle retired in 1979 and has a PhD in physics from McGill University, Canada. Smith, born in 1930, has a PhD in physics from the University of Chicago and was former head of VLSI Device Department of Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, US. He retired in 1986.
The physics prize was the second of this year’s Nobel Prizes to be announced following the prize for medicine announced Monday.
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