I was recently talking to some friends about this year’s Nobel prize and why the award is so important for physics. These particular friends aren’t physicists and I quickly realized that they were wondering what I was on about. For them, the Nobel prize – even if they think about it at all – means literature or peace, which is not surprising given the huge media coverage given to recent recipients like Barack Obama, Malala Yousafzai and Bob Dylan.
My friends, who immediately started searching online, were surprised to find that there are in fact six Nobel prizes. Five have been awarded annually most years since 1901 – in physics, chemistry, literature, peace and physiology or medicine – as outlined in the will of the Swedish industrialist, inventor and arms manufacturer Alfred Nobel. The sixth prize, in economics, was added in 1968.
The Nobel Peace Prize has a controversial history, with winners including Mikhail Gorbachev, Shimon Peres, Menachem Begin, Yasser Arafat, Henry Kissinger and Aung San Suu Kyi – not all of whom have an entirely unblemished record. There have also been notable omissions, such as Mahatma Gandhi. Even Obama won the peace prize before he’d barely served a year as US president (though for me it was a fantastic move as it gave him credibility and a powerful mandate to live up to).
For physicists, of course, the Nobel prize is the ultimate accolade and a chance for them to join the elite. Just think of some of those who’ve won. Röntgen was the first in 1901 for discovering X-rays; others include Lorentz, Curie, Rayleigh, Michelson, Marconi, van der Waals, Bragg, Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Millikan, Hertz, de Broglie, Compton, Raman, Heisenberg, Dirac, Fermi, Bloch, Purcell, Shockley, Cherenkov, Feynman, Gabor, Higgs and Nakamura. I could go on, but the fact that I only used their surnames – and yet you all know who they are – underlines just how much impact Nobel laureates have had on physics.
Perhaps one reason my friends weren’t aware of the Nobel Prize for Physics is that it’s so rarely controversial. However, the prize has had far-reaching implications for society and business, especially when you think of the long-term impact of some of the early winners.
I am sure that when Marconi shared the 1909 prize with Karl Ferdinand Braun for developing wireless telegraphy, few could have envisaged the full commercial impact of the work. But these researchers transformed modern life, laying the foundations for everything from radio and TV to satellites and smart phones.
Of course all great inventions have a flip side – unintended consequences that reflect the darker side of human ingenuity. Some Nobel scholars even suggest – quite reasonably in my view – that Alfred Nobel’s decision to set up his prizes was his way of compensating for having developed dynamite. This substance may have revolutionized the mining industry as intended, but it had devastating effects when used inappropriately too.
On balance, though, I believe Nobel balanced the scales via his legacy of celebrating the more positive aspects of human ingenuity. After all, even if Nobel himself hadn’t invented dynamite, someone else would certainly have done so, given that all inventions build on the foundations of existing knowledge.
Recognizing success
The Institute of Physics (IOP), which publishes Physics World, has long had its own awards recognizing outstanding achievements in science, education and outreach. In recent years, it has also established prizes specifically honouring achievements in business. I think these IOP prizes are great, given that the impact of physics on society is so often overlooked and so hard to evaluate.
Just think about this year’s Nobel Prize for Physics: who knows how the discoveries will affect society in the future? One half of the prize went to Arthur Ashkin, who was born in 1922 and worked at Bell Laboratories and Lucent Technologies for much of his life. Ashkin began manipulating microparticles with laser light in the late 1960s – work that ultimately led him to invent “optical tweezers” in 1986.
This optical-trapping technique is now widely used to manipulate individual atoms, molecules, biological cells, bacteria and viruses. Indeed, optical tweezers, which are vital for medical science, are now standard equipment in many labs, where they are used to study DNA, individual proteins and other biological molecules as well as processes such as molecular motors in cells.
As for the other half of this year’s prize, it was jointly awarded to the French electrical and laser physicist Gérard Mourou and the Canadian optical physicist Donna Strickland for their technique of chirped pulse amplification (CPA). Mourou and Strickland found that stretching a laser pulse reduces its peak power, which could then be amplified and compressed to create ultrashort laser pulses.
CPA might sound interesting in abstract terms but it is immensely useful and commercially relevant. As the Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau himself acknowledged, Mourou and Strickland’s “innovative work can be found in applications including corrective eye surgery, and is expected to have a significant impact on cancer therapy and other physics research in the future”. CPA can also be used to create a laser pulse that lasts for only one attosecond, or 10–18 s. At these timescales, it becomes possible to study not only chemical reactions, but also events inside individual atoms.
The thing about things
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New businesses exploiting the discoveries have been set up and immense commercial value will be extracted from something that initially may have looked rather academic. The value of fundamental science and research is the foundation for the next generation of companies delivering huge commercial and societal benefits for – as Alfred Nobel put it – “the greatest benefit to mankind”.
I just wish I’d explained all this rather better to my friends.
