Explaining why three British professors won the Noble prize for physics wasn’t rocket science. It was harder.

So yesterday the Nobel committee chose the medium of pastries to illustrate how David Thouless, Duncan Haldane and Michael Kosterlitz changed the world with their groundbreaking discoveries.

Holding aloft a cinnamon bun, a bagel and a pretzel Thors Hans Hansson, a member of the Nobel Committee for Physics, attempted to illustrate the baffling world of ‘topological phase transitions’

“The concept of topology may not be familiar to you," Prof Hansson told a press conference in Stockholm.

"I have a cinnamon bun, I have a bagel and a Swedish pretzel with two holes. Now for us these things are different, one is sweet one is salty, they are different shapes.

“But if you are a topologist there is only one thing that is really interesting with these things. This thing (the bun) has no holes, the bagel has one hole, the pretzel has two holes.

"The number of holes is what the topologist would call a topological invariant. I challenge you to imagine what is half a hole. You cannot have half a hole.”