Nobel Science Prizes

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31209, 5 November 1966, Page 15

Nobel Science Prizes

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright) STOCKHOLM, Nov. 4. A Frenchman and an American won the 1966 Nobel prizes for physics and chemistry yesterday.

Professor Alfred Kastler, of the Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris, received the physics award from the Royal Swedish Academy of Science for his discovery and development of precision measurement through study of atoms. The chemistry award went to Professor Robert S. Mulliken, of the University of Chicago. He was honoured for fundamental work on chemical

bonds and the electronic structure of molecules by the molecular orbital method. A Science Academy spokesman said it was hardly possible to explain Professor Kastler’s work in layman’s terms. The discovery had no real practical use for the man in the street, but a by product was a convenient precision method of measuring a weak magnetic field such as that of the earth.

“It helps us to understand more about atoms and molecules and could be useful in space physics because Kastler has managed to make measurement of magnetic fields easier,” the spokesman said. Professor Kastler, who is in his mid-60s, was chosen over two other undisclosed

candidates at a 136-mlnute meeting—more than an hour longer than had been expected. This is the eighth Nobel physics award to go to France, and the first since 1929. The academy said Professor Mulliken's investigations had given a new understanding of the chemical bond of mole-

cules, “from which immediately interesting, qualitative conclusions about the molecular properties can be drawn.” The theory was also well suited for quantitative calculations.

His achievement opened the way for purely theoretical studies of small molecules which have been inaccessible to experiments. The awards, this year worth 300,000 crowns each (£20,000) will be presented to the laureates by King Gustaf Adolf at a ceremony in Stockholm on December 2 on the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, who founded the annual awards.