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LED Forty Years Older Than Thought
LED lover writes "The discovery of the LED is usually credited to four US groups in 1962, but an unrecognized Russian genius got there forty years before. Oleg Losev even filed a patent on using his device for long range communications, and wrote to Einstein to ask for help with the theory — but got no reply."
Nope.
Einstein *did* develop the quantum theory in question. He got his Nobel Prize for the photoelectric effect.
A lot! E.g. refrigeration, including Air Conditioning, was invented long time ago http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refrigeration#First_r efrigeration_systems/.
l y/object.php/ who had a vested interest in shipping ice to warm places instead of making the ice on the spot.
One of the first "modern" refrigeration systems was dismissed as blasphemy, and was trashed in the media by an ice merchant http://www.smithsonianmagazine.com/issues/2002/ju
Link to the Zheludev paper:
Zheludev, N.I. The life and times of the LED - a 100-year history. Nature Photonics 1(4), 189-192 (2007) pdf file (1.7MB)
There's a brand-spanking-new Wikipedia article on him but nothing in the Russian Wikipedia for " " or " ."
This article is in Russian and is a good place to start. Here's the English translation, which comes out as "Oleg Vladimirovich losev - pioneer of the semiconductor electronics (to the century from the birthday)."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
In 1922 diodes were vacuum tubes with two wires in them, one of them heated and capable of emitting electrons to pass a current. What he seems to have discovered is an inverse photoelectric effect, where electrons emit light when striking a metal target.
Although, come to think of it, there were Germanium diodes at the time, so it could have been something more semiconductor-related, but the article isn't clear.
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
Hey now, don't give him crap. He just doesn't know how to use google to actually look up the thing he is ranting about. Heck, the very first search page turns up Tesla Motors, the REVA, and freakin' Global Electric Motorcars, which is a Chrysler company, or even the upcoming Chevy Volt.
Maybe he thinks those electric cars suck (it's ok, a lot of other people think that too - but the Roadster and the Volt look pretty cool to me), he'd rather have a electric Civic or something like that. It's too bad there is a conspiracy to keep people from converting their existing cars to electricity. Oh, wait, no there isn't.
Google is the friend of the ranter... it keeps you from looking retarded.
He actually did make LEDs and measured some of the properties of them. He then used Einstein's theories to explain his observations. Not purely theoretical in the least. What he did is explained a little more fully here (pdf warning).
I have a Ph.D. in semiconductor physics. I worked in one of the labs mentioned in the article. I have to tell you that the description in Nature is really inaccurate. What the Russian likely did is luminesce off a trap in SiC, not off the full bandgap. SiC is not even a direct-bandgap crystal. Yes, it produces blue-green light. It is a point-contact diode, but it is NOT an LED. Nothing practical or useful existed until Nick Holonyak made the first visible LED, then the first visible LED laser a few months later. Bob Hall made the first LED laser. There were a bunch of guys with Ge infrared-emitting diodes before 1962, but history forgets these guys rightly. Both the SiC and Ge diodes are such poor light emitters, that they should not be considered LEDs. Another interesting moment I believe was in the 1960s. Researchers in America claimed to have a working, continuous, non-pulsed room temperature SiC laser. It looked like beautiful blue laser light, but it was a big bust. It was not a laser. Just like this Russian, there was nothing useful going on in SiC.
In a free market, people don't have to go to some venture capitalist or some state party chairman. They are free to go to family, friends, a private bank, or take a mortgage out on their house for funding.
Only if their family & friends are wealthy, their banker is into lending money to small business startups (9 out of 10 fail, remember), or they are stupid enough to want to take a big chance on losing their house. MOST people don't have those advantages in a free market- most people barely make enough to live on in a free market.
And your idea for a central AI is terrible. There is no way a central anything can effectivly allocate resources since there is no way for it to measure the subject value judgements of a society's participants. It has no way to objectively compute the utility of any allocation decision.
Tell it to Wal*Mart- who has effectively been using a central AI to make stocking decisions for it's stores for the past 5 years, based on a huge amount of sales data. It's possible, it's happening even in the "free market".
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.