Image from Nobel Week Lights 2024. Photo: Benoît Derrier, Artist: Les Atelier BK

The dual nature of light

For centuries, scientists struggled to prove whether visible light behaves like a particle or a wave, until they concluded that it behaves like both. Light, as well as other forms of electromagnetic radiation, can move like waves and carry photons with different amounts of energy. Through the years, the Nobel Committees have celebrated many different discoveries and functions that helped to illuminate the nature of light.

Reflections on light

Albert Einstein. Photo: Wikipedia

Although famed for his theories of relativity, it was his law about light, the photoelectric effect, that gave Albert Einstein his Nobel Prize in Physics.

Einstein explained the effect by proposing that light consists of small particles, or quanta, called photons, which carry energy that is proportional to the frequency of light. Read more 

Light in life

Blue LEDs. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Despite the high stakes and great efforts undertaken in the research community as well as in industry, blue light remained a challenge for decades.

During the 1980s and 1990s Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano, and Shuji Nakamura successfully used the difficult-to-handle semiconductor gallium nitride to create efficient blue LEDs, a more long-lasting and more efficient alternative to older light sources. Read more

Life from light

Find out how a protein structure helped explain arguably the most important chemical reaction on earth – photosynthesis – a discovery awarded the 1988 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Read more

Photo: Jon Sullivan, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Electrons in pulses of light 

Anne L'Huillier. Photo Courtesy of the European Research Council

The faster the event, the faster the picture needs to be taken to capture it – a principle which applies to all the methods used to measure or depict rapid processes.

The 2023 physics laureates Anne L’Huillier, Pierre Agostini and Ferenc Krausz managed to create flashes of light that are short enough to take snapshots of electrons’ extremely rapid movements, a discovery useful in areas such as electronics and medicine. Watch the crash course

Han Kang. Photo: Anna Svanberg

“A thread that emanates light” 

When sorting out her storeroom, 2024 literature laureate Han Kang found a poem from her childhood: 

Where is love? It is inside my thump-thumping beating chest. 

What is love? It is the gold thread connecting between our hearts. 

She took a photo of it and explained why: “I did this out of a sense that there was a continuity between some of the words I had written then and who I now was. Inside my chest, in my beating heart. Between our hearts. The golden thread that joins – a thread that emanates light.” Read Han Kang's Nobel Prize lecture Light and Thread

Monthly quiz

Who selects the laureates?

Do you know the number of prize-awarding institutions that select the Nobel Prize laureates? Make a guess and click to submit your answer. 

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