Dennis Gabor

Nobel Prize-winning physicist and inventor of holography

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Fame65.5
Momentum16.6
Scientists rank#158
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Lived 1900–1979, aged 79

ScientistsScientist

Wikipedia
80 languages
Cross-language footprint
Era
1900–1979
Aged 79
Awards
8
recognised works

Summary

Updated 2026-06-08

The physicist who taught light to remember depth — holography, the method that captures three-dimensional information on flat film, earned him a Nobel in 1971.

Biography

About

Born in Hungary in 1900, Dennis Gabor arrived at the insight that would define his career: a way to record not just brightness but the full wavefront of light, preserving dimension itself. The work on holography came decades before lasers made it practical, a theory waiting for its technology. He became a British citizen in 1946 and spent most of his working years in England, where the Nobel committee found him in 1971. He died in 1979, eight years after Stockholm confirmed what the physics already knew.

Voice

In their own words

Sourced, dated quotes from Dennis Gabor

Dennis Gabor

said1963

I do not know of anything in modern poetry as violently hostile to contemporary life as was the poetry of T. S.

— p. 18

Dennis Gabor

said1963

It would be pleasant to believe that the age of pessimism is now coming to a close, and that its end is marked by the same author who marked its beginning: Aldous Huxley.

— p. 18-19

Dennis Gabor

said1963

The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented. It was man's ability to invent which has made human society what it is.

— p. 161

Dennis Gabor

said1952

Incomplete knowledge of the future, and also of the past of the transmitter from which the future might be constructed, is at the very basis of the concept of information.

— "Optical transmission" in Information Theory : Papers Read at a Symposium on Information Theory (1952), as cited in Living Systems (1978)

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