IEEE Spectrum: Who Deserves Credit for the Nobel-Prize-winning CCD?

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Who Deserves Credit for the Nobel-Prize-winning CCD?

Two Bell Labs contemporaries of Nobel Prize winners George Smith and Willard Boyle put some doubt into the accepted history.

News Editor Sam Moore discusses the controversy surrounding last week's announcement of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics. Like many media outlets, IEEE Spectrum published a news story about the winners, George Smith and Willard Boyle. Shortly after publication, Moore was contacted by Michael F. Tompsett and Eugene Gordon, who worked with Smith and Boyle at Bell Labs when the CCD was developed.

Explore the total coverage of the Nobel Prize and ensuing controversy (in chronological order):

Nobel Goes to Boyle and Smith for CCD Camera Chip

Long Live Bell Labs

Former Bell Labs Employee Says He Invented the CCD Imager

Who Deserves Credit for Inventing the CCD? (Interview with former Bell Labs Engineer Carlo Sequin)

History's First Draft

Eugene Gordon Claims He Gave Smith The Idea for the CCD

A Portrait of Bell Labs in the Mid-1960s

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Don McCallum 10.21.2009
It would appear that the Nobel folks in Stockholm have managed to discredit not only themselves, but the original purpose of the Nobel Prize. As I understand it, Nobel established the prize to assuage his conscience for having invented dynamite which like most other things is not inherently good or evil but can be used towards either end. As might a carpenters hammer or a golf club to name a couple of obvious examples. The Nobel committee should stick to the original agenda and not their own current political agenda. Giving Obama the peace prize (in advance of his actually producing any substative result) was an embarrassment even to him and to the rest of the world. It looked like a bribe for good behavior where good is as defined by the Nobel Committee. Oh well, nothing is new. I have come to expect nothing but mediocrity in anything issuing forth from a "committee" (of any kind) since a committee is by definition a political creature only able to come to agreement on the most banal items. Witness the BAUCUS committee's effort on health care reform..

Virgil Stokes 10.15.2009
It is time to examine the capabilities of members of the Nobel committe. For example, one might ask, do they have the knowledge and/or access to the information needed to award these prizes to the right people?.