Do a Nobel experiment

Nobel-winning science sometimes touches on subjects as remote as the big bang and the weird world of quantum physics, but this year's Nobel Prize for physics celebrates breakthroughs that are as close as your cellphone and computer keyboard.

CCD discoveries

Two of the laureates, Willard Boyle and George Smith, will split half of the $1.4 million prize for their work 40 years ago on a little thing called the charged-coupled device, or CCD. Such devices are arrays of tiny solar cells that turn light into electricity. The trick that Smith and Boyle (no close relation to me, by the way) came up with was a way to read out the signals from all those cells in an orderly string, and then translate the strings of data into a picture.

The innovation opened up a new realm of digital imagery - a realm that you travel through every time you snap a picture with your cell-phone camera or click through a Flickr album. To get an idea how far that realm has come since 1969, click through this roundup of the latest camera crop.

Digital imagery from CCD-equipped spacecraft has opened up even more wondrous realms beyond Earth. The technology came into vogue too late for the Voyager and Viking spacecraft, which used TV-style cameras called vidicons. But NASA's Galileo probe to Jupiter, launched in 1989, pioneered CCD applications for robotic spacecraft.

Today, virtually every astronomical picture ever taken comes to us thanks to CCDs - ranging from the pictures sent back from Saturn as part of the $3.4 billion Cassini mission to the experimental near-space images that an MIT student team took for less than $150. Our latest roundup of the greatest space images puts the fruits of Boyle and Smith's labors on full display.

Here are some fast facts about CCDs from Inside Science News Service:

• Every major telescope in the world uses a CCD chip, including Hubble with three wide-field chips and one high-resolution planet imager.
• The fastest CCD video cameras can take 100,000 pictures per second.
• Medical equipment such as breast biopsy machines and dental X-ray machines use CCDs originally developed for astronomical imaging.
• The CCD makes use of a discovery that received the Nobel Prize back in 1921 - Albert Einstein's photoelectric effect.

For more about the workings of CCDs, check out this explanation from Cornell University's "Ask a Scientist" Web site. This HowStuffWorks article goes into the differences between CCDs and their electronic cousins, CMOS devices.

The fiber-optic frontier

The other half of the physics prize goes to Charles Kao, who laid the theoretical groundwork for high-speed, fiber-optic communication. Back in the 1960s, scientists were just beginning to experiment with transmitting light through glass fibers. Kao's analysis of glass's optical properties led him to conclude that ultra-pure glass could transmit pulses of light five times farther than ordinary glass could.

The trick was cutting down on the scattering and absorption of photons by the glass itself, by cutting down on the impurities. Traditionally, ingredients such as soda, potash and lime are added to molten glass to make it easier to work with. Other compounds are added to tweak the properties of the glass.

Kao and his colleagues were apparently the first scientists to figure out just how much light could be transmitted if all those impurities could be removed. As related in "City of Light," science writer Jeff Hecht's book on fiber optics, Kao worked with Corning Glass Works to develop a purer kind of glass that was well-suited for data transmission.

The first demonstration of the technology came in 1970, the first experiments with fiber-optic telephone lines took place in 1977, and the first trans-Atlantic fiber-optic cable was laid between Europe and North America in 1988. Today, fiber is ubiquitous.

You can see frivolous demonstrations of fiber optics in the form of toy flashlights, or you can conduct an experiment on your own computer. First, open up a command prompt. (If you're using Windows, here's how.) Type in the command ping vpn.cuhk.edu.hk, then hit the return key. The command measures how many milliseconds it takes for packets of data to make the round trip between wherever you are and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where Kao was once vice chancellor.

Typically it takes no more than a quarter-second for data to make the trip halfway around the world and back - which is a good thing for the global Internet. It's not much of a stretch to say that our wired world exists as it does today because of what Kao did 40 years ago.

Here are some of Inside Science's fast facts about fiber optics:

• Optical fiber is tough - it starts to lose structural integrity at 100,000 pounds per square inch.
• 186,000 miles of optical fiber cable sits at the bottom of the world's oceans, connecting 60 countries.
• The total length of optical fiber on the surface of the planet totals over 1 billion kilometers and could encircle the Earth 25,000 times.
• The current speed record for data sent over an optical fiber is 100 petabits per second per kilometer, the equivalent of sending 700 DVDs per second from Paris to Chicago.
• The U.S. company Corning, a glass manufacturer, is the largest producer of optical fiber in the world.

For more about the workings of optical fiber, check out this tutorial from HowStuffWorks.

Update for 8:20 p.m. ET: The estimable German space journalist Daniel Fischer points out (in a comment below) that CCD technology was pioneered on the European Space Agency's Giotto probe, launched toward Comet Halley in 1985. Funny how that wasn't mentioned in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's "Basics of Space Flight."

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