"A personal story... a voyage through time.”
For Ahmed Zewail, awarded the 1999 chemistry prize, the Nobel Prize medal carried a deeper symbolic story which he traced in his banquet speech back to his early life and education in Egypt:
"The medal I received… was designed by Erik Lindberg in 1902 to represent Nature in the form of the Goddess Isis – or as the Egyptians would say, ‘Eeses’ the prominent ancient Egyptian Goddess of motherhood, nature, magic, healing and more. She emerges from the clouds, holding a cornucopia in her arms and the veil which covers her cold and austere face is held up by the genius of science*.
"Indeed, it is the genius of science which followed the race against time, from the beginning of astronomical calendars six millennia ago in the land of Eeses to the femtosecond time regime which you kindly honoured this evening.”
Ahmed Zewail was awarded the 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for showing that it is possible with rapid laser technique to study in slow motion how atoms in a molecule move during a chemical reaction. His 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.
Read his full banquet speech: https://bit.ly/3FJcbet