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No Nobel For Nick Holonyak Jr, Father of the LED

Posted by timothy on from the only-the-blue-baby-gets-the-prize dept.

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.

5 of 276 comments (clear)

  1. Re:The Nobel Prize Committee blew it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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...

  2. Re:The Nobel Prize Committee blew it by ceoyoyo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. Pointless arguments year after year by paiute · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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  4. Re:The Nobel Prize Committee blew it by fnj · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. Re:The Nobel Prize Committee blew it by Impy+the+Impiuos+Imp · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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