"With Femtochemistry a new era of chemistry has been born. His work has given reality to the most central concept of chemistry -- how bonds are made and broken in real time." While Pauling pioneered the significance of geometry and shape (structure of the chemical bond), Zewail has pioneered the significance of time and motion (dynamics of the chemical bond), said one of his colleagues in Caltch. 

 "Most scientists, if they are lucky", says another colleague, "will do something that expands the store of knowledge in their field in a way somebody else cares about. A far rarer and much more valuable contribution is to change the way people think about a subject. Zewail is one of the few people who have achieved this in chemistry." 

"Being the Number One college in the country this year, according to U.S. News and World  Report, and having the year's Number One chemist makes it a really great time for Caltech,"  Baltimore said. 

Rudolph Marcus has said of Zewail, "By providing eight orders - of- magnitude increase in time resolution ..., Zewail's work has fundamentally changed the way scientists view chemical dynamics. The study of chemical, physical and biological events that occur on the femtosecond timescale is the ultimate achievement of over a century of effort by mankind, since Arrhenius (1903), to view dynamics of the chemical bond as it actually unfolds in real time". 

Egyptian  Foreign Minister Amr Moussa voiced his admiration of Dr. Zewail, describing this event as "great” and “ Zewail really deserves the prize", he said, describing it as a salute to the Egyptian people. 

Moussa told reporters that Zewail, who holds the Linus Pauling chair of chemistry at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadana, gives a model for Egyptians and Arabs and stimulates scientists to further scientific research. 

Zewail, who holds both Egyptian and U.S. citizenship and who works at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, was awarded the prize "for 
showing that it is possible with rapid laser technique to see how atoms in a molecule move during a chemical reaction," the academy said. 

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said "Zewail was being honored for a revolution in chemistry through his pioneering investigation of fundamental chemical reactions, using ultra-short laser flashes, on the time-scale on which 
the reactions actually occur." 

The academy said Zewail's work in the late 1980s led to the birth of femtochemistry, the use of high-speed cameras to monitor chemical reactions. 

“We have reached the end of the road. No chemical reactions take place faster than this," the academy said. 

"We can now see the movements of individual atoms as we imagine them. They are no longer invisible," the academy said of Zewail's work.