physics

the 2009 nobel prize in physics goes to charles kao for "groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication," and to for willard boyle and george smith for "the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit – the CCD sensor." while the practical implications of last year's physics nobel for broken symmetry were not immediately apparent, the applications for this year's split award are obvious.

wikipedia tells me that george kao's great contribution to fiber optics came back in the 1960s with the realization that the high-loss of existing fiber optics arose from impurities in the glass, rather than from an underlying problem with the technology itself.

boyle and smith earned their half of the prize, while working at bell labs, for developing the charge-coupled device (CCD). ccd's are chips which are used in imaging devices, including digital cameras. the actual workings of a ccd involves more second semester physics (and probably well beyond that) than i'm comfortable with. as best as i can understand it, a ccd is made up of an array of capacitors. an image is projected onto the array, and each capacitor receives an electrical signal proportional to the light intensity at its location. once the array is charged, each capacitor then transfers its electrical charge to its neighboring capacitor. the last capacitor in the array dumps its charge into an amplifier which converts the charge into a voltage. by repeating this process, all the information from the array is converted into a sequence of voltages, which can be stored, accessed, and converted back into an image. basically, the ccd converts the light that enters a digital camera into a store-able form (thanks again to wikipedia for much of this description).

this image is of an array of 30 ccd's used on the sloan digital skys Survey telescope at apache point observatory in new mexico.


it seems obvious that both fiber optics and charge-coupled devices have proved to be very important discoveries. they probably also required a massive amount of physics knowledge and know-how. however, i can't help feeling that this year's physics prize is sort of a populist one. i'd be curious to know what a physicist thinks of this award when compared to last year's award for broken symmetry, or 2006's award for for the discovery of "the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation." is a discovery that is important for its applications, as nobel-worthy as one that is important for its pure scientific merit? is it more worthy? who knows?