Bulletin Special Supplement on Prof. Charles K. Kao, Former Vice-Chancellor and Nobel Laureate The Love and Labour of a Laureate

Foreword 3 Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. T.S. Eliot, ‘Four Quartets’ Professor Charles K. Kao, former Vice-Chancellor of The Chinese University of Hong Kong, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics 2009 by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, for his visionary work on the transmission of light in optical fibers. H igh-speed Internet, inexpensive long-distance phone calls, video-conferencing. Communication as we know it would not exist without Professor Kao’s glass fiber cables. Not only did optical fibers revolutionize the way we connect with each other, they have changed our concept of time and space. ‘Information at your fingertips.’ ‘The world at your doorstep.’ ‘Real-time connections.’ In what to most people was the stuff of dreams half a century ago, Charles Kao saw the future. Other scientists and engineers contributed to the development of modern networks in the ensuing decades, but it was the ‘master of light’, as Kao is called by jury at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, who made us a gift of the impossible.