Is There Ever a Right Time for It?

Many believe the Nobel committee overlooked an Indian-born, US-based scientist—who, in fact, created the field of fibre optics—for this year’s award in physics.

The Physics Nobel Prize this year was awarded to Charles Kao, Willard Boyle and George Smith ‘for ground-breaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibres for optical communication’. But many believe the Nobel committee overlooked an Indian-born, US-based scientist who, in fact, created the field of fibre optics. Not a new experience for Dr Narinder Singh Kapany, who, in 1999, was named as one of seven ‘Unsung Heroes’ by Fortune magazine in its ‘Businessmen of the Century’ issue. Kapany is routinely referred to as ‘the man who bent light’.

Fibre optics is the technology behind devices from endoscopy to high-capacity telephone lines. Without fibre optics, much of the high-speed data transmission would not be possible. Kapany’s research and inventions have encompassed fibre-optic communications, lasers, biomedical instrumentation, solar energy and pollution monitoring. He has over 150 patents and was a member of the National Inventors Council in the US. He has lived in the US for the last 50 years.

Is there a pattern here? After all, Subramaniam Chandrasekhar got the Nobel five decades after he computed the Chandrasekhar Limit, the basis of modern astrophysics, and two decades after two of his students won.

fibre opticsNarinder Singh KapanyNobel Prize