Jim writes:

> The Nobel prize for physics was awarded to Jack St. Clair Kilby:
>
>  http://www.ti.com/corp/docs/kilbyctr/jackstclair.shtml
>
>  Who invented:
>
>  "the monolithic integrated circuit - the microchip - some 30 years ago at
>  Texas Instruments (TI) laid the conceptual and technical foundation for the
>  entire field of modern microelectronics. It was this breakthrough that made
>  possible the sophisticated high-speed computers and large-capacity
>  semiconductor memories of today's information age. "

Robert Noyce, the co-founder of Intel, would certainly have been honored too
if he had not have died in 1990. Nobel Prizes are never awarded posthumously.

Nonetheless, the idea of giving the Nobel Prize to an engineer isn't sitting
well among many physicists. Today's NY Times reports the following:

=======================================

The focus on what some physicists regard as engineering rather than pure
science sparked widely differing reactions among scientists.

Unlike the particle discoveries often honored by the Nobels, said Dr. Carver
Mead, an emeritus professor of engineering and applied science at the
California Institute of Technology, "Each of these innovations has made the
world a much better place and changed a lot of people's lives. So I think
it's about time we got centered back on the stuff that really matters to real
people."

But Dr. Michael Riordan, a physicist at the Stanford Linear Accelerator
Center and the co-author of "Crystal Fire" (W. W. Norton), a history of the
transistor, called the integrated circuit "an engineering feat, not a
scientific one," involving a rearrangement of known elements.

By contrast, he said, the invention of the transistor itself, for which a
Nobel Prize was awarded in 1956, required an intimate understanding of how
electrons behave in semiconducting materials like silicon.

Mr. Kilby disputed that assessment, saying that the writers of the news
release accompanying the award "did choose to point out the fact that there
was some new physics involved."

Dr. Anders Barany, a professor of physics at Stockholm University and the
secretary of the Nobel Committee for Physics, which recommends winners to the
full Swedish Academy, admitted that this year's award was "not in line with
the other prizes" in recent times and is of a more applied nature.

"Whether this marks a new direction is still a question," he said. The theme,
however, is clear, he said. "If you really think about it, what are these
three inventions doing? They are the three inventions that are driving the
Internet."

Even some scientists involved in semiconductor research found the turn of
events surprising. "I frankly didn't think it would go in this direction,"
said Dr. Nick Holonyak Jr., a professor of electrical and computer
engineering and physics at the Urbana-Champaign campus of the University of
Illinois.

Scientists in other fields were more critical. This year's physics prize,
said Dr. John Learned, a particle astrophysicist at the University of Hawaii,
has "little to do with fundamental science. I guess it is the tilt of our
commercial era."

========================================

As it occurs however, other Nobel Prizes have been given before in
engineering. It's just that they haven't come so close to stepping on
physicists' toes before (or at least recently).

In 1979, Hounsfield and Cormack were given the Nobel Prize in Physiology and
Medicine for their development of the CAT scan device (When I used to teach a
graduate class in 2-D signal processing and went over the various CT
algorithms, I used to say at the beginning of the section, "What I want to
demonstrate is that there's more than one way to scan a cat." That's the only
thing that anybody ever seem to remember from the class, as I best I could
tell :-).

As an interesting aside, the Beetles funded the development of the CT
scanner, albeit not directly. EMI, the company where Hounsfield worked, was
also the organization that published the Beetles' music, and because of that,
they became so wealthy that they could dabble a little in fundamental
research.

There are other similar inventions that have also received the Nobel Prize as
well, beginning with the discovery and use of X-rays and ending more recently
with the scanning electron microscope, but they have generally not been given
in physics itself.

Wirt Atmar