One half of the Nobel Prize in physics for 2009 goes to Chinese-British physicist Charles K. Kao "for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication", and the other half is divided between Canadian Willard S. Boyle and American George E. Smith "for the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit – the CCD sensor".

With this award, the Nobel Prize committee to some extent reprises the theme ofthe 2007 and 2000 awards, i.e. to award the Prize to researchers whose discoveries and inventions have crucially contributed to the development of the modern digital age. Glass fibres form the backbone of the the internet -- today the copper cables of old serve at most as the last mile to the consumer. As noted by the Nobel Prize committee in their background notes, the data rates expected from the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN could not be manages without the high throughput that fibre optics enable. CCDs (charge-coupled devices) have completely revolutionised photography -- there most likely is one in that mobile phone in your pocket. Modern astronomy, including the Hubble space telescope,
would also be quite unthinkable without CCDs.

More information from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences is here; a more technical version is here.