Awards Beyond the Lab

All too often the theoretical research of physicists and chemists is totally incomprehensible to laymen. Yet their theories frequently lead to discoveries that dramatically change the course of everyday life. That relationship between the abstract and the practical was emphasized last week by Sweden's Royal Academy of Sciences. It awarded the 1973 Nobel prizes in physics and chemistry, worth $120,000 apiece, to five scientists whose achievements not only have had a major impact on their fields of study but also are already producing practical fallout beyond the lab.

Half the physics prize is to be divided between Japanese-born Leo Esaki, 48, of IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in New York and Norwegian-born Ivar Giaever, 44, of G.E.'s Research and Development Center in Schenectady, N.Y. The other half goes to Welsh-born Brian D. Josephson, 33, of Cambridge University. In a series of brilliant experiments and calculations, the three scientists explored different aspects of a phenomenon that has become increasingly significant in modern electronics: electron "tunneling," the passage of electrons through insulating material that, according to classical physics, they should not be able to penetrate.

In 1957 Esaki, then a young researcher with the Sony Corp. in Tokyo, was working on semiconductors--crystalline substances that ordinarily are poor conductors of electricity unless impurities are added to them. After experimenting with various chemicals, Esaki was able to produce a sample with which he demonstrated that tunneling can occur in semiconductors--something that had been suspected but never proved. Esaki's tiny gadget, called a tunnel diode, quickly found use as a switching device in electronic applications, performing much faster than a vacuum tube or even a transistor.

Key Elements. The next step was taken by Giaever in 1960. A former mechanical engineer who was working on a doctorate in physics, he showed that tunneling can also take place in superconductors, materials that lose all resistance to electrical currents when chilled close to absolute zero. In 1962 Josephson, then a 22-year-old graduate student at Cambridge, applied the mathematics of modern quantum physics to predict two significant effects that now bear his name: 1) that electrons can tunnel back and forth through an insulator separating adjacent superconductors even when there is no voltage present--an idea totally at odds with the behavior of electricity at ordinary temperature; and 2) that if a voltage is applied across layers of superconductors and insulators, it will produce an ultrahigh-frequency alternating current. Devices based on the Josephson effects have already been used to measure natural phenomena like magnetic fields with unprecedented precision. In the future they may be the key elements in extremely high-speed supercooled computers (TIME, March 12).

The prize in chemistry went to Ernst Otto Fischer, 54, of Munich's Technical University and Geoffrey Wilkinson, 52, of London University's Imperial College of Science and Technology. Working independently, the two men explored organometallic compounds, a marriage of hydrocarbon compounds with metals like iron and chromium. Although such unusual combinations had long been known, it was Fischer and Wilkinson who first identified and explained the structure of a special class of organometallics, called sandwich compounds, that seemed to defy all known chemical rules. In these compounds, Fischer and Wilkinson found, the hydrocarbon molecules hold the metal atom between them, as if in a sandwich.

Unknown in nature, such man-made compounds are becoming increasingly important. They have already been used to manufacture a group of catalysts--substances that stimulate or retard chemical reactions in which they themselves remain unaltered--used in the production of new supertough plastics, the drug L-dopa (for treating Parkinson's disease), low-lead fuels and other materials of industrial importance. The prize is especially gratifying to Wilkinson, who did most of his research while he was a junior faculty member at Harvard from 1950 to 1954. Because his senior colleagues were apparently unimpressed by his results, his contract was not renewed. "I was fired," recalls Wilkinson, who then returned to England and continued his Nobel work.

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