The Nobel prize in physics was just awarded today for the fundamental breakthroughs that led to two things you use just about every day. Fiber optics, the technology that allows light to carry gigabytes of information through optical fibers, allowing you to stream entire movies on your computer, or make a phone call to the other side of the world for pennies.
The other breakthrough was the development of the CCD, the charge coupled device, which you'll find in any camera phone, or digital camera. This discovery allowed us to convert tiny packets of light into electrical signals, which heralded digital photography. Once we started putting CCDs into telescopes like the Hubble, we could see incredibly feint objects billions of light years away, allowing us to peer at the universe as it existed billions of years ago.
NYT story on the physics nobel prizes
A great description of the discoveries from the Nobel Prize Committee
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