The Joy of Condensed Matter

Yeah, I've witnessed this myself. The amount of money that goes into materials projects with "medical imaging" or similar supposed applications is crazy. Most of these "novel" materials are created by some process the authors don't fully understand. They usually have some electrical or optical properties that are unusual, but given the range of possible materials almost anything can turn out to be unusual in some way. Anyway, you combine such materials with a few big names, and you keep the grant snowball rolling rolling rolling, and you publish in Nature XYZ on a monthly basis. Meanwhile I see professors doing good and serious fundamental work in condensed matter (and many other areas) losing their jobs.

> This article attributes the transistor to Shockley, but this is incorrect.

The article does not claim such thing. John writes

" After many further developments, in 1948 the physicist William Schockley patented transistors that use both holes and electrons to form a kind of switch. "

Which it is correct as you can easily check here: https://patents.google.com/patent/US2569347

This not the case of a PHB robbing all the limelight from the engineers. Shockley was kinda of an asshole and had a big ego but he was a great scientist. And the junction transistor he individually designed and patented (see above) went on to be more successful than the point-contact transistor developed by Brattain and Bardeen. The Nobel prize was fairly awarded to the three of them.

Eh, I don’t think this is true. People want to discredit Shockley because he was a big racist, but he was a legitimate scientist. PBS does this kind of smear to a lot of people who were morally questionable, like Henry Ford.

Bardeen and Brattain have discovered experimentally the point-contact transistor, without really understanding how it functions.

Shockley has really invented the bipolar junction transistor and the junction field-effect transistor, which are far more important electronic devices and which are still used today, unlike the point-contact transistor.

Shockley has published theories of how his transistors function, which enabled the design of such devices.

No matter what defects had Shockley as a human being, his legacy is much more important than that of Bardeen and Brattain.

Even the fact that he was an awful manager had very positive results for everybody else, because he initially gathered together the best of the best in his company, who, after fleeing from him, founded then the most important semiconductor manufacturing companies in SV.

Also, the first inventor of transistors was Lilienfeld, who invented a kind of metal-semiconductor FET in 1925 and a kind of depletion-mode metal-insulator-semiconductor FET in 1928.

The Lilienfeld patents had very little influence at that time because the technology to make such transistors did not exist yet, but nevertheless his patents were a source of inspiration for the Bell team, who actually attempted to make FET transistors similar to those proposed by Lilienfeld, when they discovered by accident the point-contact transistor.

The point-contact transistor was not a really useful device, but its great historical importance is that it triggered a lot of research in semiconductor devices and that the efforts made by Shockley to understand how the point-transistor can function lead him to the invention of the BJT and then of the JFET.

The initial theories of transistors published by Shockley were extremely approximate, but they were usable in practice and their study enabled the appearance of an entire generation of electronics engineers specialized in semiconductor devices.

The contributions of Bardeen and Brattain are not negligible, but they remain quite small compared to the huge contribution of Shockley.

Someone could be a mass murderer, but nonetheless he/she could also publish some theory worth of a Nobel prize. Such qualities are unrelated and any theory or discovery must be judged only on its own merits, not on whether the inventor is a nice human or not.

John is fantastic, not only a nice person with absolutely zero ego, he has brain and heart and he has such a deep love for science, a funny writer too. Anything that he writes (TWIMP,his diary,his blog Azimuth, n-category cafe, his book ) is highly recommended.

This is a must read for the aspiring mathematician or physicist:

https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/books.html

Bonus points for being the nephew of Joan Baez.

I feel like there will be some new and powerful materials and chemical synthesis mechanisms that are derived from our growing understanding of genetic transcription/translation. Could be an interesting century in human history.

What does this mean?

There are still some use cases where light-based computation could work very well without miniaturization, just don't expect it to replace general-purpose chips.

One possible application is in the amplification stages of optical communication links. If you could do error correction in pure optical circuits, you could avoid the optical -> electrical -> optical conversion, and save lots of energy -- something quite relevant for submarine cables, for example.