Nobel Prize 2018 Special!

So, as you probably already know by now, the Nobel Prize in Physics 2018 was awarded to another trio: Gérard Mourou, Arthur Ashkin and Donna Strickland, "for groundbreaking inventions in the field of laser physics". Specifically, Arthur Ashkin was awarded the prize ""for the invention of optical tweezers and their application to biological systems" and Mourou and Strickland were awarded the prize for developing chirped pulse amplification, a method of generating very short but very high-intensity pulses of light with lasers.

In this episode, we'll describe how they made these groundbreaking discoveries, and what they meant for science and physics in the years that followed.

But as dismal as the world might seem sometimes, there's still so much joy to be found in the world of science, the world of physics, and the glorious intricacies of the vast, complex, beautiful and mysterious universe we all live in. And the human ingenuity that has gone into allowing us to discover that, to even make strides towards understanding it, is one of the best parts of our species. Both of these discoveries, chirped pulse amplification and optical tweezers, represent clever tools that we have developed to allow us to probe and explore and understand nature, and there can be few greater undertakings than that. So here's to the scientists who won the Nobel Prize in 2018, for giving us the tools that can help in many more discoveries to come.

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