edited by Stig Lundqvist (Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden)

These volumes are collections of the Nobel Lectures delivered by the prizewinners, together with their biographies, portraits and the presentation speeches for the period 1971 – 1990. Each Nobel Lecture is based on the work that won the laureate his prize. New biographical data of the laureates, since they were awarded the Nobel Prize, are also included. These volumes of inspiring lectures by outstanding physicists should be on the bookshelf of every keen student, teacher and professor of physics as well as those in related fields.

Below is a list of the prizewinners during the period 1971–1980 with a description of the works which won them their prizes:

(1971) D GABOR — for his invention and development of the holographic method; (1972) J BARDEEN, L N COOPER & J R SCHRIEFFER — for their jointly developed theory of superconductivity, usually called the BCS-theory; (1973) L ESAKI & I GIAEVER — for their experimental discoveries regarding tunneling phenomena in semiconductors and superconductors, respectively; B D JOSEPHSON — for his theoretical predictions of the properties of a supercurrent through a tunnel barrier, in particular those phenomena which are generally known as the Josephson effects; (1974) M RYLE & A HEWISH — for their pioneering research in radio astrophysics: Ryle for his observations and inventions, in particular of the aperture synthesis technique, and Hewish for his decisive role in the discovery of pulsars; (1975) A BOHR, B MOTTELSON & J RAINWATER — for the discovery of the connection between collective motion and particle motion in atomic nuclei and the development of the theory of the structure of the atomic nucleus based on this connection; (1976) B RICHTER & S C C TING — for their pioneering work in the discovery of a heavy elementary particle of a new kind; (1977) P W ANDERSON, N F MOTT & J H VAN VLECK — for their fundamental theoretical investigations of the electronic structure of magnetic and disordered systems; (1978) P L KAPITSA — for his basic inventions and discoveries in the area of low-temperature physics; A A PENZIAS & R W WILSON — for their discoveries of cosmic microwave background radiation; (1979) S L GLASHOW, A SALAM & S WEINBERG — for their contributions to the theory of the unified weak and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles, including inter alia the prediction of the weak neutral current; (1980) J W CRONIN & V L FITCH — for the discovery of violations of fundamental symmetry principles in the decay of neutral K-mesons.