Ahmed Zewail, a science adviser to President Obama who won the 1999 Nobel Prize for his work on the study of chemical reactions over immensely short time scales, died on Tuesday. He was 70.
Zewail’s death was announced by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, where he was Linus Pauling professor of chemistry and director of the Physical Biology Center for Ultrafast Science and Technology.
Zewail was born in Egypt and lived in San Marino, a wealthy suburb of Los Angeles. Caltech had no information on cause of death or where he died. Egyptian media reported that it was in the United States.
Over nearly 40 years at Caltech, Zewail and his students pioneered the field of femtochemistry, the use of lasers to monitor chemical reactions at a scale of a femtosecond, or a millionth of a billionth of a second.
Using Zewail’s techniques, scientists can observe the bonding and busting of molecules in real time. The research could lead to new ways of manipulating chemical or biological reactions as well as faster electronics and ultra-precise machinery.
“If you can understand the landscape of a chemical change or a biological change, you might be able to alter the landscape,” Zewail said after winning the Nobel Prize in chemistry. Zewail helped develop four-dimensional electron microscopy, which can capture a real-time series of images of such fleeting processes that can be assembled into a sort of digital movie.
Zewail was born in Damanhur, Egypt. He joined Caltech in 1976.
“I never ever believed that one day I would get a call from Sweden as a boy,” he said after receiving the Nobel. “I had passion about science. My mother said I was going to burn the house (with chemistry experiments).”

Source: Arab News