Bengt Nyman from Vaxholm, Sweden · CC BY 2.0

Spent his career at Bell Labs, where he built on the discovery that light exerts measurable pressure to invent the optical tweezer in 1986 — a tightly focused laser beam that can trap and move microscopic particles, including individual living cells, without ever touching them. The technique became a basic tool of biological research. Ashkin won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2018 at age 96, the oldest laureate at the time.