Science Alert: Arthur Ashkin, the world’s oldest Nobel Prize winner, favours comfort over style. When I met him in his New Jersey home, he was sporting a fleece-lined zip-up, corduroy pants, and fuzz-lined Crocs.
The outfit makes sense for someone who spends a lot of time tinkering with new inventions in the basement. Ashkin, who’s 96 years old, has turned the bottom floor of his house into a kind of laboratory where he’s developing a solar-energy-harnessing device.
“I’m making cheap electricity,” he said.
Ashkin’s new invention uses geometry to capture and funnel light. Essentially, it relies on reflective concentrator tubes that intensify solar reflections, which could make existing solar panels more efficient or perhaps even replace them altogether with something cheaper and simpler.
The tubes are “dirt cheap,” Ashkin says – they cost just pennies to create – which is why he thinks they “will save the world.” He’s even got his eye on a second Nobel Prize. “And I’m gonna win too,” he said.
Ashkin’s lifelong fascination with light has already saved countless lives. He shared the 2018 Nobel Prize in physics for his role in inventing a tiny object-levitating technology called optical tweezers, which is essentially a powerful laser beam that can “catch very small things,” as Ashkin describes it.
Optical tweezers can hold and stretch DNA, thereby helping us probe some of the biggest mysteries of life.
The technique has been used in biology, nanotechnology, spectroscopy and more; it has helped researchers develop a malaria blood test and better understand how cholesterol-lowering drugs soften our red blood cells.
But Ashkin is not interested in many Nobel celebrations.
He’s already laser-focused on his forthcoming light “concentrators.”
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