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The Transistor's 60th Birthday
Apple Acolyte sends in a Forbes piece noting the 60th birthday of the transistor on Dec, 16. For the occasion the AP provides the obligatory Moore's-Law-is-ending, no-it-isn't article. From Forbes: "Sixty years ago, on Dec. 16, 1947, three physicists at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., built the world's first transistor. William Shockley, John Bardeen and William Brattain had been looking for a semiconductor amplifier to take the place of the vacuum tubes that made radios and other electronics so impossibly bulky, hot and power hungry."
That has absolutely no bearing on the invention of the transistor itself and it demeans his co-inventors who had nothing to do with Shockleys beliefs. Also, please consider that racism was much less frowned upon in the 50's of the previous century and that plenty of those oldies just never saw the error of their ways, which is unfortunate but understandable if you look at it from a slightly different perspective. If someone has been behaving in a certain way for a good portion of their lives it becomes a direct onslaught to their identity to ask of them to change. Many religious people have similar issues, they've been living the lie for too long to let go of it, but we don't have as much of a problem with that as we do with racism (even though the number of people afflicted and the damage levels are probably comparable).
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From that to this? Far out, man.
We rock!
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Why do some mathamatically challenged individuals insist the the difference between the dates of 1947 and 2007 is 60 years when it is really 59 years.
Maybe you didn't either, because the sentence just prior to the one you quoted is However, Shockley's views about the genetic superiority of whites over blacks brought the Repository for Germinal Choice notable negative publicity and discouraged other Nobel Prize winners from donating sperm.
Patrick
The worst part of being athiest.... You don't have anyone to talk to during orgasm!
While this may be true, how many other racist Nobel laureates of that era can you name? How many left such a bad aftertaste in the mouth of history? Maybe a lot of them held those beliefs in private, but Shockley became more famous for his racism than for his Nobel. He was almost like the Barry Bonds of Nobel Prizewinners- he didn't just win a Nobel, he proceeded to tack a big fat asterisk on it. At least Barry needed his asterisk injected in his butt to get his baseball in the first place. Shockley didn't even have that excuse.
Having won a Nobel Prize myself as far as you know, let me tell you how this works.
You will be amazed at how these things change your life- I highly recommend picking one up. Usually it means you're set for life. You get automatic Respect with a capital "R" wherever you go. You're invited to all the banquets and dinners, people want to be photographed standing next to you, anything associated with you gets lavishly funded, and you can pocket a few grand a night by reading crap speeches at podiums. You get your picture taken at Google headquarters (if you have time), and then Larry and Sergey will brag about meeting YOU- not the other way around. As John Cockcroft put it (Physics, 51), "When I look round this great hall I feel that I have been transported into a magical world by the genie of Alfred Nobel." And it really feels like that. Of course, the euphoria never lasts, but whether the Respect remains is up to you. It turns out that winning a Nobel Prize comes with its own list of DOs and DON'Ts.