This year’s physics prize has been awarded to Charles Kao, Willard Boyle and George Smith.

Kao takes half the prize for “groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibres for optical communication”. Boyle and Smith share the other half for inventing the CCD sensor.

“This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics is awarded for two scientific achievements that have helped to shape the foundations of today’s networked societies,” says the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the prizes. “They have created many practical innovations for everyday life and provided new tools for scientific exploration.”

Kao, who works at Standard Telecommunication Laboratories, Harlow, UK, and at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, discovered how light can be transmitted over optical glass fibres, paving the way for today’s information to flow through fibre optic cables.

Boyle and Smith, both of Bell Laboratories, in New Jersey, USA, invented the Charge-Coupled Device, a digital sensor found in just about every digital camera you might care to examine.

Collectively, the Nobel press release has dubbed them ‘the masters of light’.

The scores so far:

By country of residence

USA – 5

China – 1/2

UK – 1/2

By country of birth

USA – 2

UK – 1

Australia – 1

China – 1

Canada – 1

By journal paper

Cell – 2

Nature – 1

Proceedings of the Institution of Electrical Engineers-London – 1

Bell System Technical Journal – 1

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