Sweden ? The effect is called giant magnetoresistance, but it enables amazing things at the miniature level.

Two European scientists won the 2007 Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for their discoveries of the phenomenon, which spurred some of computing’s most astonishing developments, from video-playing handheld devices to PCs whose storage capacity now seems all but limitless.

France’s Albert Fert and Germany’s Peter Gruenberg independently described giant magnetoresistance in 1988, then saw the electronics industry apply it in disks with incredible amounts of storage.

“I can hardly think of an application that has a bigger bang than the magnetic hard drive industry,” said Phil Schewe, a physicist and spokesman for the American Institute of Physics. “Every one of us probably owns three or four or five devices, probably more, that depend on billions of bits of information stored on something the size of a dime.”

Fert, 69, is scientific director of the Mixed Unit for Physics at CNRS/Thales in Orsay, France, while Gruenberg, 68, is a professor at the Institute of Solid State Research in Juelich, Germany. They will share the $1.5 million prize.