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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.

9 of 276 comments (clear)

  1. The Nobel Prize Committee blew it by Calibax · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:The Nobel Prize Committee blew it by geekmux · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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?

      If you're still alive to receive the prize and can feel the sting of the slap in the face when you are passed over, then I'd say that's the litmus test.

      If you're dead, well you probably didn't get the email...

    2. Re:The Nobel Prize Committee blew it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The Nobel prize in literature is fairly political, too. It was awarded to Winston Churchill, for example, and the award to William Golding was perhaps a deliberate snub to Graham Greene.

    3. Re:The Nobel Prize Committee blew it by Shinobi · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The red visible light LED was just a small progression from the infrared LED. The blue LED required MASSIVE fundamental physics research to even lay the foundation for it being possible.

      You can read the scientific background on the Nobel Prize website.

      Someone on StackExchange also summed it up like this:
      "The invention of MOCVD technology for growing crystals (early 1970s);
      Finding the right recipe to grow good GaN by MOCVD (i.e., use a sapphire substrate, start with a low temperature step then switch to high temperature, etc.) (mid-1980s);
      Finding the right recipe to grow p-type GaN (what dopant to use (Mg), in what concentration, and what annealing / treating recipe to use to make the Mg dopants actually work and reduce the number of unintended n-type dopants that were canceling it out) (early 1990s);
      Once all that was in place, find good structures to make LEDs (e.g. if you can also grow InGaN then you can make quantum wells) (early-to-mid 1990s)."

    4. Re:The Nobel Prize Committee blew it by silfen · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Holonyak didn't invent the LED, he created the first visible light LED. As such, his contribution is of the same kind as the inventors of the blue LED: he changed the emission frequency of an existing device.

      Going from infrared to yellow was also a much simpler step than going from yellow to blue; the latter required different and more complex physics. Since the price is for contributions to physics, I think it makes sense that they honored this. From a practical standpoint, before blue LEDs, LEDs were just instrument lights; afterwards, they became a usable light source and display technology, so that was really the critical step.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

    5. Re:The Nobel Prize Committee blew it by JoeMerchant · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

      Lately I've seen a lot of flak about excessive use of drones, etc. etc. etc. So, sure, even Jimmy Carter tried to use the Seals, and it's always the CinC's fault when something goes wrong. Pulled out too early? That's why we've got ISIS. Pulled out too late? Fathered another Vietnam. Nuked 'em all? Oh dear, can't do that. Well, then, what are all the damn submarines and waste plutonium for?

      In whatever year it was that Obama was elected, the USA had a choice, and we chose the less warmongering of the two parties... it's really the US voters who got that peace prize, the committee just needed a single person to award it to.

  2. Maybe by perryizgr8 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I don't know enough about the specific circumstances in which both these people invented their respective devices, but I think there can be a scenario where the inventor of the base invention does not get the prize but the inventor of an improvement does. For example, maybe when Holonyak invented the LED, various technologies had reached a point where anybody in his position would inevitably make an LED. But, maybe the inventors of the blue LED did a huge amount of original research and invented a device well ahead of its time. Of course all this might be bullshit and Holonyak might be right.

    --
    Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
  3. Not the first time: Cabibbo by Roger+W+Moore · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Sure, but what if a red LED is a natural evolution while blue LED, once thought impossible is the true revolutionary idea?

    Apparently it still doesn't matter. A few years ago they awarded the prize to Kobayashi and Maskawa for the 3x3 quark mixing matrix and yet ignored Cabibbo who did the groundbreaking work to show that quarks mixed for the first time. The extension to 3 generations was a direct extension of that work and the matrix is even called the 'CKM' matrix after all three of them...but no Nobel for Cabibbo.

    While questionable decisions are always part of any award process the Nobel prize is running into some real issues with modern physics. For a start it is almost impossible to award a prize for any recent experimental particle physics result (the recent Higgs prize was for the theory, not the experimental discovery) simply because we work in large groups and you generally can not point to three, or fewer, people and say that they did it. The only exception I can think of to this would be the SNO solar neutrino result.

    However it is not just particle physics: 'Big Science' is spreading to other areas as well with the addition of accelerator-based light sources for some condensed matter physics, large scale plasma and fusion experiments etc. The part of the experimental field to which a Nobel prize can be awarded in physics is continuously shrinking making the prize less and less relevant...although it still has a long way to go before it gets knocked off its perch!

    1. Re:Not the first time: Cabibbo by Alomex · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Again, I'm no expert but I understand that pushing existing infrared LEDs into the visible part of the spectrum as done by Nick Holonyak was considered evolutionary engineering, whereas people thought (incorrectly as we know now) that there were theoretical limits forbidding blue LEDs. This is why their work is considered revolutionary and Nobel-prize worthy.