Since 1978, the Wolf Foundation has been granting $100,000 prizes for individual achievements in the fields of agriculture, chemistry, mathematics, medicine, physics, and the arts. This year, the prizes will be presented on May 16 by Israeli President Chaim Herzog at the Knesset building in Jerusalem.
Zewail is being honored for his contributions to the ultrafast study of chemical dynamics on femtosecond timescales (Kathryn Phillips, The Scientist, May 29, 1989, page 17). One femtosecond is equivalent to one thousandth-mil- lionth-millionth of a second. In femtochemistry, he says, "basically, you're photographing snapshots of the atoms and molecules in the intercourse of a chemical reaction in real time. This has to be done in femtoseconds using ultrafast, pulsating lasers and molecular beams." A summary of his work can be found in Science (A.H. Zewail, "Laser femtochemistry," 242[4885]: 1645-53, 1988).
The Caltech laboratory, staffed by about 20 graduate students and postdocs, has ...
