Beams of Light

A Canadian woman was one of three scientists jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics this week, “for creating groundbreaking tools from beams of light.”

Not literally groundbreaking, you understand. At least, I don’t think so, but I can’t rule it out. Let’s take a quick look at what I do know: It’ll be quick because, as with all branches of Physics, what I know isn’t much.

Strickland’s collaborator, Gérard Mourou, a French physicist, shares their half of the monetary prize. The Guardian notes that their seminal paper came out 33 years ago, in 1985.

[Their] work . . . paved the way for the shortest, most intense laser beams ever created.
Their technique, named chirped pulse amplification,
is now used in laser machining and
enables doctors to perform millions of corrective laser eye surgeries every year.

The other half of the prize goes to American physicist Arthur Ashkin “for his development of “optical tweezers”, a tractor beam-like technology that allows scientists to grab atoms, viruses and bacteria in finger-like laser-beams.” He published his landmark paper 31 years ago, in 1987.

Now, I don’t typically hang on the Nobel Committee’s announcements, but some things come to mind.

First, as only the third woman in history to win the Physics prize (Marie Curie was the first, to give you an idea of the calibre of the duo that just became a trio), and as the only living female Nobel Laureate in Physics, Donna Strickland sounds like a Canadian National Treasure to me. So it is written; so let it be done.

In-jest experimental equipment set up.

Canada’s next female Nobel Laureate in Physics, experimenting with beams of light.

Second, Mourou might well be a French Trésor National and Ashkin definitely sounds like an American National Treasure — at 96, he’s still working on scientific papers — but someone else will have to take care of them. Ashkin might exhibit a slight tendency to grumpiness or self-promotion, but if saints (as made by God and recognized by the Church) don’t need to be saints (in the sense of easy to live with), why should Nobel Laureates be?

He [Ashkin] had previously complained
of being overlooked for the Nobel prize in 1997
when another Bell Labs researcher,
the US physicist Steven Chu,
shared the award for cooling and trapping atoms with lasers.
The Guardian

Third, it can take a while to see how sciencey things will turn out. For one thing, it appears that Ashkin worked for at least a decade on his optical tweezer thingy before he published his paper. For another, I’m guessing a lot of scientific papers appeared between 1985 and 1987. I expect most were worthy of being published, but not all of them reflected work that led to a Nobel.

Fourth, this award comes hard on the heels of a conversation on our recent trip to Ireland, where our program leader rattled off how many Irish Nobel Laureates there had been in Literature (four) and who they were (Heaney, Beckett, Shaw, Yeats), and I realized that I couldn’t do something comparable for Canada, although I had a vague sense that we do better in Physics than in Literature.

Fifth, although I haven’t heard of chirped pulse amplification, I have at least heard of corrective laser eye surgery. I’ve never heard of using finger-like lasers to grab and lift an atom, virus, or bacteria, or anything like it (I mean, tractor beams? Seriously?), and it looks as if they’ve been at it for half my lifetime.

So I’d say, “What will they think of next?” but given when this research was done, I’m wondering, maybe just a hair uneasily . . .

“What else have they already thought of?”

 

Postscript Pie Chart

Just in case you were wondering: Together, chemistry and physics account for half of the Nobel prizes won by Canadians; with medicine/physiology, that rises to almost 3 out of 4. See all 26 names, here. Pie chart showing distribution of Canadian Nobel Laureates

This entry was posted in Laughing Frequently, New Perspectives, Thinking Broadly and tagged . Bookmark the permalink.

6 Responses to Beams of Light

  1. Jim Taylor says:

    Given the apparent time delay in these awards, do you think you and I could share a Nobel for Literature, to the glory of Canada, after we’re dead?
    Maybe long after?
    Jim T

    • Isabel Gibson says:

      Jim – Boy, not sure about literature. Maybe we should lobby for a Nobel prize for blogging.

  2. I will vote for you for blogging and maybe you could dust off the Isabel for Senator bus and buttons to raise awareness? I cherish mine!

    • Isabel Gibson says:

      Laurna – OK, now I’ll definitely approach the Nobel Committee. 🙂 The bus crew have morphed into a video crew. Stay tuned . . .

  3. Tom Watson says:

    Isabel
    Chirped pulse amplification? Wow! I didn’t have a clue as to what that meant…so I looked it up.
    Chirped pulse amplification (CPA) is a technique for amplifying an ultrashort laser pulse up to the petawatt level with the laser pulse being stretched out temporally and spectrally prior to amplification.

    There, that’s clear now, right? I’m not even going to ask what a petawatt is.

    Not only do I get to read a good blog every week from you, Isabel, I also get to learn something new.

    Thanks!
    Tom

    • Isabel Gibson says:

      Tom – Well, I don’t think I operate at the petawatt level, but I do feel sort of stretched, temporally, from time to time. As it were. It’s amazing, the things we not only don’t know but have never heard of, no?

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