The Nobel prize in Physics this year was granted on this last Tuesday for two fundamental discoveries for the current society of the information, that gave the bases for the communication for the internet and for the digital picture.

To Real Swedish Academy of Sciences recognized Charles Kao works. Kao, British-north-American of Chinese origin, for his conquests in the transmission of the light in fibers for the optical communication; and for the North Americans Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith, inventors of a the Charge-Coupled Device, CCD sensor.

Kao is with half of the prize of ten million Swedish (US$ 1,4 million) crowns, while Boyle and Smith divide the rest of the amount.

The discovery of Kao made way for the development of the fiber optic net that nowadays almost sustains the whole traffic of data, phone communication and the internet.

The CCD sensor revolutionized the picture and gave passage for the era of the digital transfer of images when allowing the capture of the light in an electronic way.And its applications extend to the medicine, facilitating the diagnoses and the microsurgery; to the astronomy and the oceanography, among other sciences.

His “enthusiasm” inspired other researchers and it took, in 1970, to the creation of the first “super pure” fiber optic .The initial objective of the sensor of images that Smith and Boyle sketched in 1969 was not to be for photographic images, but to create an improved electronic memory, an use now forgotten.

The advantages of the sensor electronic of images soon were evident. Just one year after their invention, Smith and Boyle they used CCD for the first time in a video camera. Without CCD, the development of the digital cameras would have been much slower and we could not have seen the images from the space done by the Hubbletelescope or the one of the red desert of Mars.

Via: Digital Photography Review.