THE 2009 NOBEL PRIZE IN PHYSICS (II) CHARLES KAO, PIONEER IN OPTICAL FIBRES

摘要

The world is hanging on a tiny thread, a thread of glass. Optical fibre is vastly deployed all over the world, to carry our telephone conversations, computer data, TV signals, the internet with its exploding gamut of services, etc. Our economic, social and cultural activities would come to a standstill without the huge communication streams which the tiny silica glass fibre is able to carry. When Samuel Morse introduced the telegraph and Alexander Graham Bell the telephone, the world was dependent on copper wires. And still large parts of the communication networks are using copper, in particular the twisted-pair telephone linesrnand the coaxial cable CATV lines connecting the users' homes. Electrical signals get attenuated on the lossy copper lines, necessitating lots of amplifiers all over in the networks. The bandwidth of these lines is quite limited, and is running out of steam in view of the fast growing capacity needs of the internet. Moreover, as the world's resources are expiring, copper gets ever more expensive.