Donna Strickland and extremely powerful lasers

Discovery

BBC

Science, Technology

4.3 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 1 April 2019

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Donna Strickland tells Jim Al-Khalili why she wanted to work with lasers and what it feels like to be the first woman to win a Nobel Prize for Physics in 55 years. When the first laser was built in 1960, it was an invention looking for an application. Science fiction found uses for these phenomenally powerful beams of light long before real world applications were developed. Think Star Wars light sabres and people being sliced in half. Today lasers are used for everything from hair removal to state of the art weapons. Working with her supervisor Gerard Mourou in the 1980s, the Canadian physicist, Donna Strickland found a way to make laser pulses that were thousands of times more powerful than anything that had been made before. These rapid bursts of intense light energy have revolutionised laser eye surgery and, it's hoped, could open the doors to an exciting range of new applications from pushing old satellites out of earth's orbit to treatments for deep brain tumours. Producer: Anna Buckley

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's Doleepa, and I'm at your service.
0:04.7	Join me as I serve up personal conversations
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0:11.2	Technology doesn't want to be good or bad.
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0:16.7	It's not every day that I have the CEO of the world's biggest company in my living room.
0:20.6	If you're looking at your phone more than you're looking in someone's eyes, you're
0:24.7	doing the wrong thing.
0:25.9	Julie, at your service.
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0:31.6	This is Discovery from the BBC.
0:34.0	I'm Jim Lylelele and in today's programme I'm in conversation with a leading scientist about their life and research.
0:41.0	Welcome to the Life Scientific. Donna Strickland is the winner of the 2018
0:46.5	Nobel Prize for Physics together with Gerard Muru and Arthur Ashkin. She's the first woman
0:52.2	to get the Physics Nobel in 55 years and she won it for her
0:56.7	work on lasers. Lazers famously concentrate enormous amounts of light energy
1:02.2	into a very small area.
1:04.0	Donna found a way of making laser pulses that were a thousand times more powerful and
1:09.7	more precise than anything that had been created before. Once upon a time
1:14.0	lasers were an invention looking for an application. That's hardly the case today.
1:18.8	They're used for everything from hair removal to state-of-the-art weapons.
	...

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