Posted on 05/23/2007 9:02:56 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
PARIS (AFP) - French Nobel laureate Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, a pioneer of the liquid crystal display (LCD) that is now a standard technology in today's consumer gadgetry, has died, his family said on Tuesday.
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De Gennes, who was 74, won the 1991 Nobel Prize for Physics for groundbreaking work in liquid crystals and polymers, for which some of the judges accorded him the accolade of "the Isaac Newton of our time." He died on Friday.
President Nicolas Sarkozy led tributes to de Gennes, describing him as "an exceptional physicist and one of our greatest scientists."
Prime Minister Francois Fillon praised de Gennes' "generous personality" and and a hallmark of excellence in French research.
Born in Paris in 1932, de Gennes graduated from the elite Ecole Normale Superieure school, working firstly in neutron scattering and magnetism before moving to the realm of supraconductors and later to liquid crystals.
His book "The Physics of Liquid Crystals", published in 1974, remains the benchmark work in this field, praised for its accessibility to the general public.
The arrangement of crystals, for instance, was compared to apples in a basket. If the "basket" were shaken, the crystals too were rearranged.
This transition from order to disorder underpinned de Gennes' work in liquid crystal displays, which are switched from a transparent to an opaque state by an electrical charge.
His other big area of success was in the 1980s, in the molecular chains of gels and polymers. He was fascinated by superglues.
"One day, we might be able to make aeroplanes with glue instead of rivets, but the problem is that we dont understand how glues interact on surfaces that receive them," he said at a conference in Scotland in 2002.
"De Gennes has succeeded in perceiving common features in order phenomena in very widely differing physical systems, and has been able to formulate rules for how such systems move from order to disorder," the Nobel Prize Committee said.
"Some of the systems de Gennes has treated have been so complicated that few physicists had earlier thought it possible to incorporate them at all in a general physical description."
De Gennes had an interest in many other fields, rounding up his career at the Institut Curie medical laboratory in Paris, where he worked on cellular adhesion and brain function.
He had a deep love of painting and drawing, was a fan of Japanese art and wrote a satirical book, "Petit Point" (Small Point), lampooning characters from the academic and industrial world.
In 1997, he even took part in a movie about Pierre and Marie Curie, playing the role of delivery man alongside French stars Isabelle Huppert and Philippe Noiret. The other delivery man was played George Charpak, the 1992 Nobel physics laureate.
Another Hero is laid to rest.....God Bless Him.
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