Lauded at Last

Like the Nobel medicine prizes awarded in October, the chemistry and physics awards announced last week were both belated and well deserved. But they were given for achievement so esoteric that few laymen could even begin to understand it. Said a Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences spokesman in announcing the prizes: "It would be almost impossible to explain the works of these two scientists to people other than scientists."

The chemistry prize went to University of Chicago Chemical Physicist Robert Mulliken, 70, for his molecular orbital theory, first published in 1928. With that theory Mulliken forever destroyed an established scientific concept: that atoms retain their original identity when they form molecules. Instead, he argued, the balance of particles within atoms changes when they become part of molecules; electrons may take up orbital paths around the entire molecule instead of remaining in orbit around atomic nuclei. Virtually all of the significant work in molecular structure that has been done since has been based on Mulliken's theory.

French Physicist Alfred Kastler's prizewinning work, on the optical resonance of atoms, was published more recently--in 1950. It explained his technique for irradiating an atom to make it emit radiation of its own, thereby revealing the nature of its structure. Because Kastler, now 64, paved the way for the later development of the maser--which earned U.S. Physicist

Charles Townes and Russian Physicists Aleksandr Prochorov and Nikolai Basov Nobel Prizes in 1964--his colleagues have long felt that he was overlooked by the Nobel committee. Kastler's award, said Paris' Le Monde test week, was "the repair of an injustice."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.