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The Spectator
Nobel Prize Awarded to the Inventors of Camera Lens
by Yinghan Ding '12Science & Technology Writer
October 09, 2009
Do you enjoy snapping a digital photo and posting it on Facebook to share with your friends? If so, you should thank the three men who won the Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday. These brilliant scientists developed fiber-optic cable and invented the "eye" in digital cameras — technology that has given rise to film-free photography and high-speed Internet service. By doing so, they have revolutionized communications and science, as well as transformed the way we live, work and amuse ourselves.
Half of the $1.4 million prize went to Charles K. Kao, who provided insights in the mid-1960s about how to get light to travel long distances through glass strands, which led to a revolution in fiber optic cables. Dr. Kao's discovery led to fiber-optic communication networks that zip voice, video and high-speed Internet data worldwide in a split second. The other half of the prize was shared by two researchers at Bell Labs, Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith, who invented the semiconductor sensor known as a charge-coupled device (CCD). The CCD, a sensor that turns light into electrical signals, is widely used in millions of digital cameras around the world.
When Dr. Kao started working on fiber optics, fiber optic cables and lasers capable of sending pulses of light down them already existed. However, at that time, the light pulses could only travel about 20 meters through the glass fibers before 99 percent of the light had dissipated. Many researchers thought tiny imperfections, like holes or cracks in the fibers, were scattering the light. Realizing this, Dr. Kao tried to overcome the technical difficulties and aimed to extend the travel distance of the light pulses to one kilometer. In January 1966, Dr. Kao, then working at the Standard Telecommunication Laboratories in England, presented his findings. Surprisingly enough, it was not the manufacturing of the fiber that was at fault, but rather that the ingredient for the fiber, the glass, that was not pure enough for light pulses to travel a long distance. He suggested that a more pure glass made of fused quartz would be more transparent and allow the light to pass through more easily. In fact, in 1970, researchers at Corning Glass Works were able to produce an ultrapure optical fiber more than half a mile long based on Dr. Kao's idea. Today, according to the Academy in its prize announcement, the optical cables in use, if unraveled, would equal a fiber more than 600 million miles long. "Fiber optics has changed the world of information so much in these last 40 years. It certainly is due to the fiber optical networks that the news has traveled so fast," said Dr. Kao. "This is very, very unexpected."
A popular use of optical fibers, sending digital photos, was made possible by the other two award winners, Dr. Boyle and Dr. Smith, at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ in 1969. Their idea takes advantage of the photoelectric effect, which was explained by Albert Einstein and won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921. Einstein explained that when light hits a piece of silicon, it knocks out electrons; the brighter the light, the more electrons are knocked out.
The CCD was the result of Boyle and Smith's experiments. It captures those electrical signals in such a way that it is possible to create the pixel-by-pixel images and display those pixels on a screen. The technology was initially intended for a picture phone, but the project was canceled, yet the CCD technology continued to spread around the world. The 10-megapixel SONY camera I have, for example, contains 10 million CCDs. Besides consumer cameras, CCDs also made possible the cosmic panoramas from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Martian postcards taken by NASA landers.
Chemistry:
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas Steitz and Ada Yonath received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their research into ribosomes, the protein factories in cells. The trio succeeded in mapping the structure of the ribosome, which will help future scientists decode the mystery of how exactly a cell turns DNA into proteins. Their research also has medicinal applications; by studying the differences between ribosomes in human and bacterial cells, drugs can be developed to turn off bacterial ribosomes but not human ones and so be able to kill bacteria that may have developed a resistance to other drugs.
Physiology and Medicine:
Elizabeth Blackburn, Jack Szostak, and Carol Greider won the prize in medicine for their research into the cellular basis of aging. They focused on telomeres, long, meaningless sequences of DNA at the ends of chromosomes that protect the chromosomes as they divide, but slowly get shorter over time. They showed that when the telomeres are shortened, cells show signs of aging, but cell death can be delayed when the enzyme telomerase is produced. Manipulating telomerase levels could help slow aging and fight cancer, which the group suspects uses high levels of the enzyme to cause cells to reproduce at a rapid rate.
The recipients of the remaining prizes - Literature, Peace and Economics - will be announced later this week.