The 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics

> I'm still on the hedge about it. Yes, it's more relate-able and inspiring, but it isn't really a contribution to physics as much as engineering.

You need to understand a bit more of the context then, which is: the Nobel prize is paid from the interest accumulated by Alfred Nobel's fortune, which is invested in bonds. Alfred Nobel got his fortune by, among other investments, inventing dynamite. Dynamite was not a breakthrough "new idea" -- the explosive in it was nitroglycerin. The short version of the story is that a nitroglycerin explosion killed Alfred Nobel's brother, and it was being banned everywhere in general due to accidents, because explosion can be triggered by physical shocks. Nobel reasoned that it could be made much safer if it couldn't move around so much, and so he ordered a bunch of a locally-abundant porous rock substance and soaked that in the nitroglycerin (we would now say that the "diatomaceous earth" acts as a "stabilizer"). He patented that combination and sold it as stronger and safer than gunpowder for blasting, and it sold like hotcakes.

Due in part to this history, the Nobel in physics is seldom awarded for a theoretical breakthrough alone. Hawking's work on black hole radiation has changed theoretical physics and cosmology immensely, but we haven't observed it coming off of a known black hole, so he's widely viewed as ineligible for a Nobel prize.

Similarly the discovery of graphene was not issued for the work done on it in the 1940s, 50s, 60s and 70s -- it was given for work done in the early 2000s which allowed a lot of graphene to be made cheaply: it turns out you can use scotch tape on a block of graphite to tear off a bunch of stuff, some of which is individual layers of graphene; it helps to fold the tape on itself over and over to try to get more and more little "islands" of it since individual monolayer chunks are super-rare. The key aspect of their work, less-reported in the news but essential, is that those "islands" of graphene have a certain iridescence to them when they're on the right sort of backdrop (a sheet of 300nm-thick silicon dioxide), so that you can see them with an optical microscope.

There's two parts to it: game-changing technology. It's not enough to be theoretically right. In Einstein's Nobel presentation speech, they breeze through relativity with "this pertains essentially to epistemology," and they make a little mention to his huge contribution to the burgeoning field of colloid chemistry (which ultimately proves that atoms really exist and gives you a way to measure how big they are). Instead they go straight to his quantum work: his explanation of the photoelectric effect and his explanation of why the specific heat of metals is about 3R, where R is the gas constant. He wins because he kicked off the field of quantum photochemistry, which was suddenly making lots and lots of strides in understanding the world; and because his photoelectric laws were "extremely rigorously tested by the American Millikan and his pupils and passed the test brilliantly".

Seen in that light, the Blue-LED discovery (how to grow GaN crystals) which opens the way to all colors of LEDs and all sorts of gallium nitride tech, is actually pretty much exactly a Nobel discovery. For example, in my Master's program we would talk about experiments on a 2-dimensional electron gas (2DEG), and the physics thereof. The stock example was AlGaAs/GaAs (the LED material for red/green LEDs, gallium arsenide with a layer of aluminum-gallium arsenide) where they were first observed. But, there was a bit of interesting discussion as well about doing the same with AlGaN/GaN, which has a higher band-gap and, if I recall correctly, needs less (no?) doping to do interesting things.

OK, so it is usable on some level in scientific experiments. It's a bit much to claim it on the same level as a scanning-tunneling microscope though, a device designed, built and used exclusively in a scientific setting. Blue LEDs are a product, not a novel instrument. Again: I don't intend to belittle the achievements made, they're revolutionary in their own right, but they are not as scientific in intention as an STM and don't contribute nearly as much to the base line.

Urban legend? I had heard that while most of the industry struggled to develop a blue LED, someone eventually asked this guy to look in to the problem and he had a solution rather quickly. Like they just had to ask the guy with the right background to solve the problem an viola. Is there any truth to that?

No, I think it's a more interesting history. Nakamura basically lived in the lab for months, cooking different materias in a special oven until he came up with the blue led. Then did the same for the green led.

"They have no taste" applied in spades to most every consumer electronics company, with one exception that I noticed (yes, Apple).

I had a 2007 laptop festooned with about ten of those eye-piercing blue spots, but it's hardly fair to blame the inventor for the poor use of his work.

Alfred Nobel had it worse - he did make an explosive ...