[LINK] "Nobel Prize in Physics Goes to 'Masters of Light'"

[rfmcdonald]

As an avid photographer, I'm especially pleased that a Canadian, Willard Boyle, along with his American partner George E. Smith, has won the Nobel Prize in Physics for the invention of the charge-coupled device.

Willard Boyle and George E. Smith, researchers at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, will each receive a quarter of the ten-million-Swedish-kronor (1.4-million-U.S. dollar) 2009 Nobel Prize in physics.

Canada-born Boyle and Smith, a U.S. native, invented a sensor for capturing digital images

[. . .]

Boyle and Smith say they invented the CCD in a flash of insight on October 19, 1969, sketching out the basic design quickly during a brainstorming session.

A CCD uses semiconductors—the same kind of materials as computer chips—to capture light and turn it into an electric signal.

This phenomenon, called the photoelectric effect, was first theorized by Albert Einstein, earning him the 1921 Nobel Prize in physics.

"We are the ones, I guess, who started this whole profusion of little cameras all over the world," Boyle said in a live online video this morning—a technology his Nobel Prize-winning physics discoveries helped make possible.

"They were actually trying to invent a new kind of [electronic] memory," said Joseph Nordgren, chairman of the Nobel Committee for physics, also in a live online video this morning.

"But in doing that, they soon realized that they had an image sensor that worked perfectly well."

I could blog about how Boyle left Canada in order to fulfill his promise and wonder about the health of Canada's indigenous science sector, but that's a discussion for another day.