A correction

[fpb]

In my brief entry about the candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize who were passed over for President Obama, I made a mistake. I said that the Nobel Prize for Physics had been awarded to "the man who invented fibre optics". I now looked it up, and it is not quite right. Professor Charles Kuen Kao (pinyin Gao Kun) only got half the prize (the other half went to two Americans, "for the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit - the CCD sensor"), and he did not literally invent fibre optics. His main contribution, in a life full of achievement (and started from the improbable point of an Electrical Engineering degree from what was then a Polytechnic - the lowest form of academic life in Britain), was to show how fibre optics could be made to work practically, by proving that the unreliability that had plagued it arose from impurities in the glass used and not from any weakness in the basic principle. This, alone, would make him a major figure, but he also has an impressive record both as a scientific entrepreneur and as a promoter of learning and research in Hong Kong and elsewhere, moving easily and repeatedly from the corporate to the academic field: and in spite of his entrepreneurial bent, he seems to have had a great deal of impact simply by his personal intellectual generosity, visiting several competing fibre optics laboratories and freely discussing principles, procedures and improvements. He has recently started to show the symptoms of Alzheimer's Disease - apparently a family curse - so this was probably the last opportunity that a prize to his distinguished and valuable career could actually be awarded so as to make him enjoy the honour.

This is the kind of person who ordinarily gets a Nobel Prize.