Nobel Prize commemorates laureate, femtosecond flash inventor Ahmed Zewail

CAIRO – 3 August 2020: On his fourth anniversary of death, Nobel Prize commemorated Sunday the life of late scientist and laureate Ahmed Zewail on its Facebook page highlighting his achievements and contributions to human knowledge.

<b> The post reads: </b>

"Remembering Nobel Laureate Ahmed Zewail.

In the late 1980s Zewail developed methods for studying chemical reactions in detail. Chemical reactions in which molecules held together by atoms meet and reorganise into new compounds are one of nature's most fundamental processes.

However this transition happens too quickly for us to easily see - in a matter of femtoseconds. One femtosecond is 0.000000000000001 seconds, which is to a second as a second is to 32 million years.

By using laser technology to produce flashes of light just a few femtoseconds long, Zewail was able to visualise these reactions in slow motion - and to see what actually happens when chemical bonds break and new ones are created.

Zewail's experiments led to the birth of the research area called femtochemistry, which enables us to understand why certain chemical reactions take place but not others."

Zewail was born on February 26, 1946 in Damanhour, and raised in Alexandria. He had earned his bachelor's degree in physics from the University of Alexandria before joining a PhD program at the University of Pennsylvania. The scientist later worked at the University of California, Berkely but moved to the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena in 1976.