Social networks were buzzing after the award of the Nobel Peace Prize, with reactions ranging from amazement to derision: was well-meaning Oslo trying to resolve the crisis over ceasefire violations at the Line of Control? The binary tokenism in the choice of Kailash Satyarthi and Malala Yousafzai is unprecedented: both are child activists, but one is an adult while the other was a child when she rejected a Taliban diktat. One is male and the other female. And, as the Nobel Prize website is happy to state explicitly, one is an Indian Hindu, the other a Pakistani Muslim. What are the odds that next year?s Peace laureate will be so obscure and identity-free that no meaning could possibly be read into the award?
Oslo?s Peace Prize was always political but in two other fields, physics and chemistry, Stockholm has made a break with the recent past. In physics, the previous three awards were for the postulation and confirmation of the Higgs boson, methods to measure and manipulate quantum systems and the observation that the expanding universe is accelerating. In chemistry, awards for 2013 and earlier went for the modelling of complex systems, the study of G protein-coupled receptors, which cells use to sense and react to the environment, and the discovery of quasicrystals. These will aid the pursuit of theoretical interests; only the study of cellular receptors is clearly of practical importance, promising a better understanding of immune and autoimmune disorders someday.
But there is a sense of practical immediacy in the awards for physics and chemistry this year. The work of Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano of Nagoya University, and Shuji Nakamura of the University of California at Santa Barbara, dates back to the early 1990s, when they innovated light-emitting diodes in the blue and white bands, suitable for bright, low energy illumination. The street sellers of Delhi, and the owners of expensive cars which hurtle down the same streets with their windows rolled up for fear of contagion, are direct beneficiary of the work of this year?s laureates in physics. Your friendly neighbourhood redhi-wallahs use bright white LED panels powered by cheap two-wheeler batteries to illuminate their piles of radishes, cheap sandals or whatever. And many high-end cars come equipped with LED light strips rather than bulbs to accommodate the ecological concerns of the prosperous. LEDs are also used in street signage and lighting, bicycle lamps, flashlights, camera flashes and backlit displays. They have become the only source of illumination for tens of millions of people in Asia, Africa and Central and South America, who do not have reliable access to the grid.
The first commercially viable LEDs were doped with gallium arsenide phosphide and emitted red light. They were released in 1968 by the Monsanto Company (not the GM foods group) and were adopted in the displays and indicators of calculators and consumer electronics. Yellow and green LEDs followed, plugging into the universal traffic signalling system, which has been in service since the railways innovated red, amber and green signs in the 1830s. But high-output blues and whites suitable for illumination were elusive until 1993 when Nakamura, then working at Japan?s Nichia Corp, doped a semiconductor with gallium nitride to start the technical revolution that would soon be joined by his fellow laureates.
The chemistry Nobel recognises a breakthrough in optics which has been inevitable since 1873, when Ernst Abbe, working with Carl Zeiss (both the man and his company), established the resolution limit of the microscope. This is the minimum distance between two objects at which the microscope can see them as separate, and not blobbed together. Objects sized less than half the wavelength of the light they reflect into the microscope?s eyepiece appear to clump together. From the 1980s, life processes have been studied at the molecular level, below this limit, by inferring physical events from chemical analysis. But, obviously, visualising structures at the molecular level directly would be truer to reality.
Eric Betzig, William Moerner and Stefan Hell won the 2014 Nobel for chemistry for developing the stratagem of fluorescence microscopy, which sidesteps Abbe?s limit. A rough analogy would be a helicopter seeking signs of human life in nightbound jungle below. Instead of bathing the tree cover with searchlights, the strategy of traditional optics, it looks for infrared radiation emitted by humans. It doesn?t light up the whole landscape, but makes infinitesimal targets light up instead. Hell innovated the STED (Stimulated Emission Depletion) method using lasers to stimulate nano-range molecules into lighting up. His work made cellular organelles like microfibrils visible at the molecular level, and now, no lower limit to human sight remains. While viruses were under Abbe?s limit, scientists can now even visualise the surface structures which they use to protect themselves, and seek clinical countermeasures. This technology will be instrumental in securing cures for the tiny mass murderers of the future, and its innovators completely deserved the Nobel.
pratik.kanjilal@expressindia.com