The world's oldest Nobel Prize winner, a 96-year-old physicist, says his new invention will give everyone in the world clean, cheap energy

• At 96, Arthur Ashkin is the oldest person to ever be awarded a Nobel Prize.
• Ashkin won half the 2018 prize in physics for his role in developing technology that makes very small beings "levitate" using only light. He did that work at Bell Labs in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.
• His discovery spurred the invention of optical tweezers, which have been used to stretch DNA and invent a life-saving malaria test, among other medical uses.
• But the Nobel Laureate says he's not done inventing yet — his lifelong obsession with light has taken a recent turn toward solar energy.

RUMSON, NEW JERSEY — Arthur Ashkin, the world's oldest Nobel Prize winner, favors comfort over style. When I met him in his New Jersey home, he was sporting a fleece-lined zip-up, corduroy pants, and fuzz-lined Crocs.

The outfit makes sense for someone who spends a lot of time tinkering with new inventions in the basement. Ashkin, who's 96 years old, has turned the bottom floor of his house into a kind of laboratory where he's developing a solar-energy-harnessing device.

"I'm making cheap electricity," he said.

Ashkin's new invention uses geometry to capture and funnel light. Essentially, it relies on reflective concentrator tubes that intensify solar reflections, which could make existing solar panels more efficient or perhaps even replace them altogether with something cheaper and simpler. The tubes are "dirt cheap," Ashkin says — they cost just pennies to create — which is why he thinks they "will save the world."

He's even got his eye on a second Nobel Prize.

"And I'm gonna win too," he said.

Ashkin's lifelong fascination with light has already saved countless lives. He shared the 2018 Nobel Prize in physics for his role in inventing a tiny object-levitating technology called optical tweezers, which is essentially a powerful laser beam that can "catch very small things," as Ashkin describes it.

Optical tweezers can hold and stretch DNA, thereby helping us probe some of the biggest mysteries of life. The technique has been used in biology, nanotechnology, spectroscopy and more; it has helped researchers develop a malaria blood test and better understand how cholesterol-lowering drugs soften our red blood cells.

Arthur Ashkin (far left) won half of the 2018 Nobel Prize in physics. The other half was split between Gerard Mourou of France (center) and Donna Strickland of Canada (right), who became the third woman awarded the physics prize since 1901.

REUTERS/Brendan McDermid/Charles Platiau/Peter Power

But Ashkin is not interested in many Nobel celebrations. He's already laser-focused on his forthcoming light "concentrators."

How to levitate

When Ashkin got his fateful call from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm on October 2, he thought it was a scam.

That's because another scientist, former US Secretary of Energy Stephen Chu, had already shared the 1997 Nobel for some related research at Bell Labs, which was where Ashkin had worked when he developed the optical tweezers.

Chu's work built on Ashkin's, which had involved gathering pond scum, plopping the wiggly organisms under a microscope, and making them "levitate," as Ashkin describes it, using only a laser beam.

                                                                                                                                                                          Arthur Ashkin working with a laser at Bell Labs in 1970.

Nokia Bell Labs

"This light is shining on you, do you know that it's pushing you?" he asked me, pointing to a nearby lamp. "Most people don't. But it is because it's got energy. The only thing is, it's so small, you don't feel it."

Ashkin started researching these properties of light in order to improve communications technology for Bell.

"Light is a wave, right?" he said. "In physics, it's also a particle ... and it's sort of a mysterious particle."

But once Ashkin realized that pressure from photons — the fundamental particles of light — could pick up very small objects, he pivoted to focus on biology and 

started using optical tweezers to trap, lift, pull, and stretch things as small as DNA.

Bell Labs gave Ashkin license to explore the ways this technique might apply to living beings, and he figured out how to hold single-celled organisms hostage using light.

"You can tweeze them just like you would with tweezers," current Nokia Bell Labs President Marcus Weldon said "[Ashkin] could move nuclei around themselves, and they could do all these cool things."

Some of Ashkin's Bell Labs colleagues were dumbfounded when he caught critters in the light for the first time, he recalled.

"'Oh you got to see this, Ashkin's trapping bugs! He's trapping bugs!'" he remembers someone shouting.

"It surprised me. It would surprise anybody," Ashkin added. "I invented optical levitation."

But Ashkin doesn't linger much on those moments much anymore — after he realized that early-morning Nobel Prize call was real, he was mostly excited about the prospect that the notoriety might help get his latest research published

Nobel Laureate Arthur Ashkin with one of the microscopes he used when he was a researcher at Bell Labs. Ashkin won half of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work inventing optical tweezers at Bell in the late 1980s.

Hilary Brueck/Business Insider.