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"Father of Fiber Optics" Wins Nobel Prize

Posted by timothy on from the you-must-be-very-proud dept.

alphadogg writes "Charles Kao, whose work in the 1960s laid the foundation for today's long-distance fiber-optic networks, has won a share of this year's Nobel Prize in Physics (PDF). Kao, sometimes referred to as the 'father of fiber-optic communications,' was formally honored by the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm, Sweden 'for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication.' Kao's breakthrough discovery in 1966 was to determine how to transmit light over long distances using ultrapure optical glass fibers. This would extend the distance of such transmissions to 62 miles vs. the mere 65 feet allowed under previous technology held back by impurities. The first ultrapure fiber was created in 1970."

20 of 74 comments (clear)

  1. First Post by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    At least it would have been if I had a fiber optic network.

  2. No love for the inventors of the CCD? by viking099 · · Score: 5, Informative

    These guys also got the Nobel prize this year for their work on the CCD. That's worth a mention too, I think!

    1. Re:No love for the inventors of the CCD? by IWannaBeAnAC · · Score: 2, Informative

      Umm, the Nobel prizes are not all announced at the same time. The Medicine prize was announced yesterday. The Physics prize was announced today.

    2. Re:No love for the inventors of the CCD? by tool462 · · Score: 4, Funny

      Seriously. If it wasn't for them, we wouldn't have the glut of amateur porn that's available to us today.

      God bless you, sirs.

  3. 62 miles? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Come on guys. We are talking about Science here. Use the system used by any scientist and 95% of the world population. 100km!

  4. Why so long? by maxrate · · Score: 4, Interesting

    (Zero sarcasim) - Why does it take them so long to officially honor him? It was clear fiber optics were being used like crazy in the 80's.

    1. Re:Why so long? by Thanshin · · Score: 2, Funny

      Because, as we all know, the execs at AT&T and other companies are the ones who determine the receptors of Nobel prizes.

    2. Re:Why so long? by Chris+Mattern · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's a truism that you get your Nobel 20 to 30 years after the groundbreaking work that earned it. After all, they couldn't give it to you back then, 'cause back then it was going to the people who earned it 20 to 30 years before *that*.

    3. Re:Why so long? by sootman · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I imagine they also want some time to see if the discoveries prove to be truly useful in the long term. I'm sure there was plenty of neat stuff being done in the 60s/70s that was neat at the time but how much of it are we still using? (I know there's plenty, my point is there's also plenty that we aren't.) Also, they want to make sure they don't wind up giving the prize to the inventors of Thalidomide or anything.

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  5. Charles Kao != Father of Fiber Optics by AniVisual · · Score: 5, Interesting

    or so the comment in the article says

    "Father of Fiber Optics" is not Kao but Narinder Singh Kapany. http://www.explainthatstuff.com/fiberoptics.html http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=Father+of+Fiber+Optics&btnG=Google+Search&meta=&aq=f&oq= I can`t believe news didn`t name him

    From one of the linked articles,

    1950s: In London, England, Indian physicist Narinder Kapany (1927â") and British physicist Harold Hopkins (1918â"1994) managed to send a simple picture down a light pipe made from thousands of glass fibers. After publishing many scientific papers, Kapany earned a reputation as the "father of fiber optics."

    1960s: Chinese-born US physicist Charles Kao (1933â") figured out how to make a very pure fiber-optic cable that can carry telephone signals over long distances.

    1. Re:Charles Kao != Father of Fiber Optics by bwohlgemuth · · Score: 2, Interesting

      And don't forget what the British Post Office did back in the 1960s as well (which my stepfather was a part of). City of Light is a nice read about the history of Fiber Optics.

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  6. 62 miles in the 70's by weirdcrashingnoises · · Score: 5, Interesting

    That's pretty impressive. Anyone have a good link on what today's longest fiber's are capable of? I'm not talking about max distance with repeaters or anything. I'm talking about the max distance for a single fiber from beginning to end. Most of what Google gives is just information about the longest cables that presumably start and stop in many different locations/countries...

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    1. Re:62 miles in the 70's by olsmeister · · Score: 5, Informative
      The equipment I work with can do about 90 miles. Say 7 dBm transmit, -30 dBm receive. If you use around 0.25 dBm attenuation per kilometer at 1550 nanometers, that'll get you to around 150 km.

      This is at 2.5 Gbps.

      I don't know if that's a lot or not, but that's around where we max out.

    2. Re:62 miles in the 70's by weirdcrashingnoises · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Anyone have a good link on what today's longest fiber's are capable of?

      When I posted this I was thinking in my head "distance" but i failed to mention that.

      Other capabilities might be interesting as well, such as max bandwidth for a single optic cable, ect...

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  7. Transmission. by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 3, Funny

    Transmission through Purity, Purity through Physics!

  8. Fiber optics took about 20 years to arrive by Terje+Mathisen · · Score: 3, Informative

    I did my MSEE thesis in 1981, working on mono-mode optical fibers. This was still pretty cutting edge at the time, but the first semi-automatic splicing units had started to arrive.

    The most fascinating feature of very pure optical fibers is that they have two minima not too far apart:

    At around 1200 nm the frequency dispersion is very close to zero, which means that a single pulse traveling along the fiber will suffer minimum smearing, which maximizes the possible bandwidth.

    At around 1500 nm the optical damping (i.e. sum of scattering & absorption) has a minimum, which means that by using this frequency you can maximize the distance between repeaters.

    Anyway, it took about 20 years (i.e. around 2001) before mono-mode fibers become standard in all new installations here in Norway, it seems like this is the normal time to go from lab prototypes to SOP.

    Terje

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  9. Shares of the Nobel Prize by loufoque · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If this goes on, in a few years they'll be giving hundredth of the prize...
    Why not go back to the days where the prize was given to a single person that embodied a change?

    And maybe something modern as well instead of some 50 years old stuff...

    1. Re:Shares of the Nobel Prize by Late+Adopter · · Score: 3, Informative

      The Nobel Prize in Physics has never been awarded to more than 3 people, and that was first done in its third year, in 1903, to Becquerel and the Curies.

  10. Invented by aliens. by Sans_A_Cause · · Score: 2, Funny

    I'm pretty sure I heard on Art Bell that fiber optics weren't invented on Earth. They were discovered in the Roswell crash. Kao should return this prize.

  11. Re:Why 62 miles? by TheRaven64 · · Score: 2, Informative
    The quality of the cylinder. With a fibre-optic link, you have a tube of glass. You put a photon in one end, it travels along, and then it comes out the other end. If it is perfectly straight and you aim perfectly, then the photon travels straight through the glass. In this case, you could just use a laser and skip the whole glass thing. If you aim slightly off centre, or the path is curved, then the photon will hit the inside wall and, using the power of total internal reflection, bounce back. It may bounce quite a lot of times over the length. The next photon you send in may bounce a different number of times (because it went in at a very slightly different angle) and this is where the problems start. Both photons will be going at exactly the same speed, so if they have different paths with different distances, they will take different amounts of time to reach the far end. The longer the fibre, the greater this difference can be. This limits the transmission rate through the fibre, because you need to delay photons (or small groups of photons) sufficiently that you can tell the order in which they were sent. If you send one, then send the next one, and the second arrives before the first, then you have a problem. You could say this is to do with the speed of light: if it were infinite then this problem would not exist.

    The other problem is that total internal reflection relies on the photons hitting the inside of the glass at quite a sharp angle. Impurities in the manufacturing can result in places where photons fail to reflect and just leak out (you can see this by shining a light in one end of a drum of fibre optic cables in the dark and watching the entire length glow slightly). If you are sending individual photons this is a big problem, but you're probably sending little bursts of them. When you do that, some proportion will be lost over each unit length of the fibre and after a certain distance insufficient will be left to be detectable at the far end.

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