Stefan W. Hell is a Romanian-born German physicist who won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2014 for his contribution to the development of microscope with super-resolution. His work, with two other scientists, Eric Betzig and William Moerner, helped scientists around the world to see tiny structure with much more detail than before. For more than a century the ability of a light microscope to discriminate two or more objects was limited to several hundreds of nanometer. Meaning that no mater how hard you try you will never be able to see a very small object with size of less than several hundreds of nanometer using your regular light microscope. The limitation was known for more than a century as Abbe’s diffraction limit. Ernst Abbe the German physicist formulated this law in 1873. This law was absolutely a limit to our understanding of many processes happened in very tiny object like biological cell.
Pada tanggal 3 Oktober 2017 Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne, dan Barry Barish diumumkan sebagai pemenang hadial Nobel di bidang fisika atas kontribusi mereka dalam pengembangan LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) dan pengamatan gelombang gravitasional. Rainer Weiss dianugerahi setengah dari hadiah Nobel sedangkan Kip Thorne dan Barry Barish sama-sama berbagi setengah hadiah nobel sisanya. Dua tahun sebelumnya, tepatnya pada tanggal 14 September 2015, 100 tahun setelah fisikawan Albert Einstein memublikasikan makalahnya tentang teori relativitas umum, dua obervatorium LIGO di Amerika Serikat berhasil menangkap sinyal gelombang gravitasional dari dua lubang hitang yang bertumbukan. Hadiah Nobel fisika 2017 merupakan buah dari perjuangan ilmuwan-ilmuwan di balik pengembangan LIGO yang sudah berlangsung selama kurang lebih 50 tahun yang lalu.
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