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Albert Fert, Peter Grunberg

iPods and Laptops Owe their Allegiance to Nobel Prize Winners



Many in the world take the fact that their little iPod or laptop is capable of holding "just so much" music or information. They don't really take all that much notice of the fact that, inside such a small device, is the technological know-how and ingenuity of a decade's worth of technological progress.

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Tuesday saw the Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to two scientists directly responsible for your iPods storage. Albert Fert, a Frenchman, and Peter Grunberg, a German, were jointly awarded the honor -- including 10 million Swedish kronor ($1.5 million USD) -- for their independent discoveries of giant magnetoresistance (GMR) in 1988. GMR is the technology that has been instrumental in the continued shrinking of storage devices, from the massive and clunky hard drives of the 80s and 90s, to the drives that, while sometimes prohibitively expensive, we have today. The most recently publicized such device would be the new iPod Classic, capable of holding up to 160 gigabytes of music or video. Put that against my first laptop, back in 2007 with its 512 megabyte hard drive, a hard drive I'll add no one thought we could fill, we can tell how far we've come in such a short amount of time. The GMR system manifests itself as a significant decrease in electrical resistance when in the absence of a weak change in the magnetic field. This is the perfect method for designing digital memory systems, and with the continued advances in the field of quantum mechanics, the smaller the devices can be while simultaneously increasing their storage capacity. Physicists were fully behind the recipients of the award, noting that it was richly deserved, and saying that GMR was one of those discoveries that impacted everyday life very obviously. Professor Jim Al-Khalili, of the University of Surrey, said: "It's no good having hard drives that can store gigabytes of information if we can't access it. The technology that has appeared thanks to GMR has allowed hard disk sensors to read and write much more data, allowing for bigger memory, cheaper and more reliable computers. GMR is one of those wonderful phenomena from the weird world of quantum physics that has been put to use very quickly. It involves very thin layers of different magnetic materials and the way they allow tiny electric currents to pass through them." Two other Nobel Prizes have so far been awarded for the year 2007, including Mario R. Capecchi, Martin J. Evans and Oliver Smithies for 'producing specific genetic alterations in mice', and to Gerhard Erti for 'opening up the hidden world of surface chemistry to investigation'. The awards in Literature, Peace and Economics will be awarded on the 11th, 12th and 15th of October respectively. Joshua Hill, a Geek’s-Geek from Melbourne, Australia, Josh is an aspiring author with dreams of publishing his epic fantasy, currently in the works, sometime in the next 5 years. A techie, nerd, sci-fi nut and bookworm.


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Guest Column Joshua Hill -- Bio and Archives

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