October 06, 2009
Nobel Awarded for Advances in Harnessing Light
Kenneth Chang in the New York Times:
The mastery of light through technology was the theme of this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics as the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences honored breakthroughs in fiber optics and digital photography.
Half of the $1.4 million prize went to Charles K. Kao for insights in the mid-1960s about how to get light to travel long distances through glass strands, leading to a revolution in fiber optic cables. The other half of the prize was shared by two researchers at Bell Labs, Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith, for inventing the semiconductor sensor known as a charge-coupled device, or CCD for short. CCDs now fill digital cameras by the millions.
More here.
Posted by Abbas Raza at 11:45 AM | Permalink
Comments
Much thanks to them! Now all I need is a CCD that will make possible a camera for $100 or so that works as well as my eyes :-).
Posted by: JonJ | Oct 6, 2009 4:13:40 PM
Actually, your eyes don't work as well as you may imagine. For example, you can only really see a small area in sharp focus at any time. Our brain 'tricks' us into believing that we have a wide field of view. And of course, our CCDs (the rods and cones) are behind layers of wires (blood vessels) and cells, leading to a pretty blurry image that needs plenty of post processing. Not to mention that the data cable (optic nerve) that is also in front of our CCDs, causing our blind spot. And on top of that, a lot of our visual information is gleaned from context-based post processing, as optical illusions can easily demonstrate.
Posted by: Aatish | Oct 6, 2009 8:08:46 PM
finally some engineers! awesome!
Posted by: b | Oct 7, 2009 11:57:12 AM
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