Chinese Nobel Winner 諾貝爾獎得主高錕

By BBC Science reporter Matt McGrath

媒體英語會帶大家一起學習BBC撰稿人在報道世界大事時常用到的單詞和短語。

今年的諾貝爾物理學獎授予了華人科學家高錕，以及兩名美國科學家韋拉德-博伊爾 (Willard Boyle) 和喬治-史密斯 (George Smith)。瑞典科學院說這三位科學家對光導纖維在通訊上應用的基本原理和半導體成像器件的研究奠定了發展當代網絡社會的基礎。

The Nobel Foundation said the work of all three of this year's physics laureates was groundbreaking. Without their research, modern communications technology including digital cameras and the internet might not exist.

Charles Kao was born in Shanghai but worked in Britain where in 1966 he developed the idea of transmitting light over long distances using optical glass fibres. Today these fibre cables carry much of the world's data and telephony traffic.

The other half of the prize has been shared between Willard Boyle and George Smith, who invented a device to capture images called a charge-coupled device or CCD. This has become the electronic eye of digital cameras and is used in many medical applications as well.

Willard Boyle explained how his invention had impacted him personally:

"I guess the most important part of our invention that affected me personally was when the Mars probe was on the surface of Mars and it used a camera like ours, and it would not have been possible without our invention. And we saw for the first time the surface of Mars.

I was sitting in my own little house and here I could move around on the surface of Mars and see the little stones there, and what it was all about. Very exciting."

The prizes will be awarded at a ceremony in Stockholm on December 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel's death in 1896.