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.

Comments

The Nobel Prize Committee blew it

[Calibax]

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.

Re:The Nobel Prize Committee blew it

[geekmux]

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...

Re:The Nobel Prize Committee blew it

[Shinobi]

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)."

Re:The Nobel Prize Committee blew it

[silfen]

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...

Maybe

[perryizgr8]

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.

Not the first time: Cabibbo

[Roger W Moore]

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!