This year's Nobel Prize for Physics has gone to Willard Sterling Boyle and George Smith, inventors of the Charge-Coupled Device (or CCD), and Charles Kuen Kao, for his pioneering work on optical fibres. Boyle and Smith were working in Bell Labs in New Jersey when, in October 1969, they formulated the idea for the CCD. …

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Tuesday 6th October 2009 15:20 GMT Anonymous Coward

pedantry

The award was given half to optical fibres guy (Kao) and two-quarters to the CCD guys, so you seem to have written your article backwards wrt the Nobel committee ordering.

Note also that Hockham, one of Kao's original co-authors is (I hear) dead, otherwise he might have got a look in.

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Tuesday 6th October 2009 16:44 GMT Anonymous Coward

Purists might not like it

This is quite a significant change of direction for the Nobel committee - both recipients are engineers, inventors even, and have not pushed forward the boundary of pure Physics, of understanding.

I for one applaud the deliberations of our rotten fish eating Nobel Overlords.

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Wednesday 7th October 2009 09:18 GMT Anonymous Coward

And the IT angle?

C'mon - digital cameras and network cabling? These guys invented internet porn!

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Wednesday 7th October 2009 09:35 GMT Ken Hagan

Re: pedantry

"Note also that Hockham, one of Kao's original co-authors is (I hear) dead, otherwise he might have got a look in."

I believe there's a "no more than three winners" rule, so that wouldn't have been an option.

And as for any change of direction, I think new techniques have always been rewarded. An IBM trio got the prize for a kind of microscope (atomic force microscope?) some years ago. Sure, it's been used *since* to discover stuff, but the prize was just for getting the blinking thing working. Sometimes just being able to do the experiment is a greater triumph than the results.

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Wednesday 7th October 2009 12:03 GMT Anonymous Coward

hockham

... actually I'm not sure Hockham is dead -- he seems to have been alive last year. If he is dead, maybe the Nobel crowd were waiting for someone to die so they could fit the winners into their curious mix'n'match fibre/ccd prize. :-)

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Thursday 8th October 2009 00:08 GMT Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Not exactly up with the times are they...

This Nobel prize awarding lot.

This is about as meaningless as receiving a lifetime achievement award from the Brit awards committee.

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