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No Nobel For Nick Holonyak Jr, Father of the LED
szotz writes Nick Holonyak Jr. doesn't want to go gently into that good night. Widely regarded as the father of the LED (for his work on early visible-light devices), he's been making strongly-worded comments about being passed over for the Nobel Prize. His wife said he'd given up on getting it. But, he says, this year's physics award, to inventors of the blue LED, was just plain 'insulting'. The history the LED goes beyond and back further than Holonyak (all the way to the beginning of the 20th century), but a number of his colleagues are disappointed and/or surprised by the snub.
It really is insulting to give a Nobel prize for an improvement to a revolutionary idea, and ignore the person who did the original work. Without Holonyak's original work there would be no basis for the improvement.
And where does the buck stop in this argument? Or should Nobels drift endlessly backwards to Newton, Leibniz, Aristotle, Plato ... Thales of Miletus. Thales of Miletus? All Nobels go to him?
That award has pretty much 0 to do with real achievement. It is a political power play. Up until Obama got the peace prize I though otherwise. How can you get the prize for having not DONE anything... At least at this point they could point at something and give him one...
It is true, attribution of credit is ridiculously subjective if not arbitrary at all levels, from authorship of papers, to how much money each person makes under any given economic system. There is no real solution to this, although some systems are better than others.
That award has pretty much 0 to do with real achievement. It is a political power play. Up until Obama got the peace prize I though otherwise. How can you get the prize for having not DONE anything... At least at this point they could point at something and give him one...
The gave the peace prize to f-ing Henry Kissinger. Where have you been ?
didn't arafat get one too? :(
It's not that I think you necessarily have to give the prize to the inventor of the "base" idea all the time, as opposed to someone who made it truly useful and beneficial for the masses. But as this article even states, the infrared LED was developed first. Holonyak simply made the first VISIBLE light LED. The infrared LED is a pretty cool invention in and of itself, but the ability to produce visible light with one is what really made people start using them in place of traditional incandescent bulbs.
In my mind, that's the primarily impact the LED has had on people, and therefore is most deserving of the Nobel.
The blue LED? That's a pretty cool innovation, but I don't see how you can award a prize like this for it when you ignored the research that made LEDs possible as visible light sources?
Well, Holonyak just made a red version of existing IR LEDs, so giving him the prize would be doing the same thing to the IR LED inventors.
Not to mention they gave the same prize to Arafat, but not to Gandhi.
Well Kissinger got the nobel peace price. What a joke, the greatest mass murder in modern history right after Stalin.
Kissinger should be rotting in a prison alongside his prize.
Kissinger had an actual body of work to show for it.
More accurately, he had an actual body count to show for it.
The fact that Obama hadn't killed anyone (yet) made him practically a shoe-in for it, by comparison.
Sure, but what if a red LED is a natural evolution while blue LED, once thought impossible is the true revolutionary idea?
Well, maybe they looked at impact. For decades, LEDs were only used for status lights, power lights, and some other things. Switching from mini-incandecent bulbs for these purposes didn't really change much in the grand view of things. Switching out household lighting from incandecent to blue/white LED saves thousands of megawatts of electricity, and enables many impoverished people to have electric light for the first time ever. I went to North Korea this year and even in very remote areas with clearly impoverished people, solar panels, batteries, and LED lighting were very common. Bringing light to the people like that would be a lot more difficult without LED lighting.
And if you think that inexpensive, efficient lighting is not a big deal, try living without it for a week. The availability of inexpensive lighting has become so embedded in Western society that we can't imagine life without it. Think about what that means to the billions of poor people all over the world who are getting, or have gotten it, for the first time.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
The Nobel Prize is an arbitrary award given by a committee with motivations unknown to the public. It is taken way too seriously by everyone.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Ah, but can you define "inventor of the LED"? H. J. Round for getting luminescence from silicon carbide in 1907? Oleg Losev for his demonstration in 1927? Rubin Braunstein who found infrared emission from gallium arsenide in 1955? Baird and Pittman for patenting an (infrared) "Semiconductor Radiant Diode" which was efficient in 1962? Holonyak for reporting the first visible red LED in 1962? Any recognition for M. George Craford for the first yellow LED and for bettering the efficiency by an order of magnitude in 1972? And for T. P. Pearsall for the first high brightness LEDs suitable for driving fiber optics in 1976? And whoever invented the first green LED? And of course the inventors of the blue LED?
I think Holonyak for first visible LED is certainly deserving, but the whole chain of discoveries and inventions was crucial to the LCD monitors and flatscreen TVs we enjoy today.
The same goes for the transistor. Lilienfeld filed for a patent on the FET in 1925, yet we all thought Bardeen, Shockley and Brattain were first in 1948. As it turned out, their bipolar transistor tech turned out in the long run to be completely eclipsed by the (MOS)FET.
Obama had nothing to do with his own prize -- it was a slap in the face to Bush.
Obama should have refused it because participating in such a political action by foreigners by playing their puppet in a play is beneath the Presidency.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Gandhi, or at least Mahatma Gandhi, never had political power beyond inspiring the fight for independence, so it's hard to talk about how he used it.
He's actually ramped down foreign deployments, not just planned to do it.
An act which alone started yet another foreign war:
http://classic.slashdot.org/su...
Which by the way, all of this "ramping down" was already something Bush had planned and was even done under his original timeline, so I'm not letting him off here, but Obama could have stopped it. Still, I'm not sure why you credit Obama for it in the first place.
He's proactively involved special forces in trouble spots before full scale deployments become necessary.
This is something every recent president has done. (And in many cases it gets us into trouble.) Do you have blind worship for this guy or something? I mean this statement alone suggests your nose is presently getting browner as we speak.
But, the machine that Obama represents, corrupt, inconsistent, and self-serving as it is, seems to be an improvement over the machine that Bush represented.
How the hell would that be, exactly? He appoints people to his cabinet who believe they can do whatever the fuck they want. I mean shit, his DOJ thinks it can throw whatever charges it wants even against people that have been found not guilty by a jury of their peers. If anything it's worse, yet somehow you believe it's an improvement?
It really is insulting to give a Nobel prize for an improvement to a revolutionary idea, and ignore the person who did the original work. Without Holonyak's original work there would be no basis for the improvement.
And where does the buck stop in this argument? Or should Nobels drift endlessly backwards to Newton, Leibniz, Aristotle, Plato ... Thales of Miletus. Thales of Miletus? All Nobels go to him?
Well, considering that Holonyak developed the first visible light LED, the buck should probably stop with him.
Of course, we are talking about an organization that gave Obama the Nobel Peace Prize shortly after he was elected president, so many already question their logic.
Obama had nothing to do with his own prize -- it was a slap in the face to Bush.
Not so much Bush himself but the power behind him, the minds in charge (Rumsfeld/Cheney etc.) and the mindset that, given the chance, allowed that regime with it's power structures and it's outlook to continue in power.
Obama should have refused it because participating in such a political action by foreigners by playing their puppet in a play is beneath the Presidency.
What Obama should have done was hang them. Behead them and place their severed heads on sticks in the public square. Not literally of course, but symbolically - perhaps through a process similar to South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation commission. That is the way the world saw the NeoCons - as evil as apartheid. Something to be confronted, discussed openly and honestly, dismantled completely, and then, and only then, left behind. And perhaps we viewed Obama as a form of apology, an acknowledgement of the wrongs done by the US, of failures of standard and behaviour.
So in a sense, the Nobel Peace Prize was an attempt at something of a detente, a chance to go back to the way things were. A lot of Iraqis died, and some explanation is/was owed as to why, and how such disasters will be avoided in the future. And a form of apology is/was owed. We were right, Bush and his supporters were wrong. Bad behaviour should be followed by an apology, even at the national level.
Instead what we got was a type of Bush-lite. No acknowledgement of the harm done. A change in language, but no obvious behavioural change. No strategy to prevent another disaster of bush/rumsfeld/cheney sized proportions. So you are right: if the Obama we see is the Obama that he intended to be in office, he should never have accepted it.
Wrong. The original intention of the Nobel Prize was to spur human progress through innovation and development. That's one of the main reasons why it is not awarded posthumously - it's too late to motivate someone who is already dead.
The Nobel Peace prize for Obama was in this spirit. It should not be understood as a reward for anything he did, but as a motivational calling to deliver. And a moral message to the President, a reminder of the impact his decisions can have on the whole world.