At least three different reporters on Tuesday asked John Clarke, one of this year’s Nobel Prize in physics laureates, how exactly we ended up with technology like the cellphone today from his obscure discovery of "macroscopic quantum tunneling and energy quantization” 40 years ago.
He never did give a straight answer. Perhaps because there isn’t one, no easy throughline to draw from the lab to our everyday lives. Often that line is a culmination of expertise that outweighs the contributions of one or a few scientists; it is an idea here, a breakthrough there and many failed experiments in between, sometimes over the course of decades.
The scientific Nobels announced this week underscore that point. All three awards — granted each year in physiology or medicine, physics and chemistry — honored achievements rooted in fundamental research from decades ago. Some experts interpret the selections by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences as representing the importance of slow, basic science, work pursued out of a desire to better understand the world.
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