Oregon seventh-grader William Yuan's research project is genuinely laudable -- in *exactly* the way that so many of his underinformed critics here *are not* -- but the honest answer to the honest question "How do people that young get access to tools to build these things?" is "He didn't build anything physical."
Specifically, his work exemplifies the meticulous and methodical way *real science* is done in the real world. This is decidely *not* the Hollywood image of the lone scientist's sudden "Flash of Genius" light bulb but more as Edison himself wryly defined genius: "1% inspiration and 99% perspiration." It is what another intellectual giant, Isaac Newton humbly acknowledged: "If I have seen further, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants."
William Yuan did not claim to "invent the 3D solar cell" nor did he plagiarize others' work any more than I did by citing the above quotes. He fully researched, credited and (most essentially and most admirably) "stood on the shoulders" of older carbon nanotube solar cell researchers at Georgia Tech[1], Notre Dame[2], U.C. Berkeley's Lawrence Laboratories[3], and elsewhere. As they and other honest scientists have done for centuries.
What William's would-be detractors have *not* done, in most cases apparently, is to look the lists of "prior art" and patents in any of the 7,428,757 U.S. patents[4] (as of Wednesday, 24 September 2008) or to grasp the basic purpose of the patent as set forth in the first U.S. Patent Act (1790) by our first Secretary of State, inventor of the dumbwaiter, copying pantograph and many others (notably all unpatented,) and architect of his home, Monticello.
"Gentleman, I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House" quipped John F. Kennedy, at an April 29, 1962, dinner for all living American Nobel Prize winners, "-- with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."
In drafting the new U.S. Constitution, Jefferson wrote "to promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts" -- what we now call 'technology'-- Congress was given the power to grant limited the limited monopolies called patents "by securing, for limited Times, to Authors and Inventors, the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.â The categories of patentable subject matter specifically enumerated were âoeany useful art, manufacture, engine, machine, or device, *or any improvement therein* not before known or usedâ so long as they be âoesufficiently useful and important.â [Italics mine.]
William Yuan, using the research tools of [his] 21st Century, meticulously and extensively researched what had already been accomplished, compared, correlated, and conceived of *a sufficiently useful and important improvement therein.* Did he then pop downstairs to his ultra-clean-room semiconductor fabrication lab, slip a micropattern-etched iron-on-silicon wafer into his 1050-Kelvin oven for hydrocarbon gas deposition to create arrays of carbon nanotubes, merrily induce deposition of the highly toxic, properly p- and n-doped Cadmium-Sulfide and -Telluride photovoltaic layers, delicately coat them with Niobium-Tin Oxide as the transparent second conductor, and finally fire up one of the world's two-dozen high-precision Molecular Beam Epitaxy systems to lay down underlayers of carefully graduated alloys of Indium Gallium Nitride to capture the full range of solar electromagnetic radiation impingent on the enhance surface, including ultraviolet wavelength ranges A and B?
Sorry, Hollywood: No. But he *did* have a computer and he *did* know how to download and use some of the amazing open-source and other incredible software to *simulate* his concepts and *virtually investigate* what *might* be possible if his synthesis and augmentation of the published "prior art" really worked as imagined.
If you don't think that's *real* science, you might ask physicist Tim Berners-Lee[5], who invented the worldwide web (at age 35) fo
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Oregon seventh-grader William Yuan's research project is genuinely laudable -- in *exactly* the way that so many of his underinformed critics here *are not* -- but the honest answer to the honest question "How do people that young get access to tools to build these things?" is "He didn't build anything physical." Specifically, his work exemplifies the meticulous and methodical way *real science* is done in the real world. This is decidely *not* the Hollywood image of the lone scientist's sudden "Flash of Genius" light bulb but more as Edison himself wryly defined genius: "1% inspiration and 99% perspiration." It is what another intellectual giant, Isaac Newton humbly acknowledged: "If I have seen further, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants." William Yuan did not claim to "invent the 3D solar cell" nor did he plagiarize others' work any more than I did by citing the above quotes. He fully researched, credited and (most essentially and most admirably) "stood on the shoulders" of older carbon nanotube solar cell researchers at Georgia Tech[1], Notre Dame[2], U .C. Berkeley's Lawrence Laboratories[3], and elsewhere. As they and other honest scientists have done for centuries.
What William's would-be detractors have *not* done, in most cases apparently, is to look the lists of "prior art" and patents in any of the 7,428,757 U.S. patents[4] (as of Wednesday, 24 September 2008) or to grasp the basic purpose of the patent as set forth in the first U.S. Patent Act (1790) by our first Secretary of State, inventor of the dumbwaiter, copying pantograph and many others (notably all unpatented,) and architect of his home, Monticello.
"Gentleman, I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House" quipped John F. Kennedy, at an April 29, 1962, dinner for all living American Nobel Prize winners, "-- with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."
In drafting the new U.S. Constitution, Jefferson wrote "to promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts" -- what we now call 'technology'-- Congress was given the power to grant limited the limited monopolies called patents "by securing, for limited Times, to Authors and Inventors, the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.â The categories of patentable subject matter specifically enumerated were âoeany useful art, manufacture, engine, machine, or device, *or any improvement therein* not before known or usedâ so long as they be âoesufficiently useful and important.â [Italics mine.]
William Yuan, using the research tools of [his] 21st Century, meticulously and extensively researched what had already been accomplished, compared, correlated, and conceived of *a sufficiently useful and important improvement therein.* Did he then pop downstairs to his ultra-clean-room semiconductor fabrication lab, slip a micropattern-etched iron-on-silicon wafer into his 1050-Kelvin oven for hydrocarbon gas deposition to create arrays of carbon nanotubes, merrily induce deposition of the highly toxic, properly p- and n-doped Cadmium-Sulfide and -Telluride photovoltaic layers, delicately coat them with Niobium-Tin Oxide as the transparent second conductor, and finally fire up one of the world's two-dozen high-precision Molecular Beam Epitaxy systems to lay down underlayers of carefully graduated alloys of Indium Gallium Nitride to capture the full range of solar electromagnetic radiation impingent on the enhance surface, including ultraviolet wavelength ranges A and B?
Sorry, Hollywood: No. But he *did* have a computer and he *did* know how to download and use some of the amazing open-source and other incredible software to *simulate* his concepts and *virtually investigate* what *might* be possible if his synthesis and augmentation of the published "prior art" really worked as imagined.
If you don't think that's *real* science, you might ask physicist Tim Berners-Lee[5], who invented the worldwide web (at age 35) fo