A Tribute to Those Who Changed the World: The Global Energy Prize

By Irina Belasheva

Physicists, chemists, engineers, geologists—though the scientists featured within the pages of this book are different from each other in many ways, there is something they all share. They are energy scientists who made breakthrough discoveries in atomic energy, thermal engineering, semiconductors, and renewable and non-conventional energy. With a shared passion for scientific exploration, dedication to the process of research, and the desire to change our lives, their discoveries are not just scientific advances, but cornerstones of brand new technologies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 7, 2019
• ISBN: 9781543989052

Book preview

year.

ABOUT THE INTERNATIONAL GLOBAL ENERGY PRIZE

In this book you will find 37 stories about scientists – scientists who, over the past 16 years, have become laureates of the Global Energy Prize, awarded for outstanding scientific discoveries that have benefited all of humanity.

The Global Energy Prize was first announced by Russian President Vladimir Putin at the 2002 European Union summit. Today the Global Energy Prize is very well known, recognized and respected worldwide.

Today, the Global Energy Prize is one of only several projects of similar scope in the world that have achieved worldwide fame, respect and prestige.

According to the IREG Observatory on Academic Ranking and Excellence, the Global Energy Prize is one of the world’s top 99 most prestigious and important awards. The prize is also included in the official list of the ICDA (International Congress of Distinguished Awards). The ICDA Prestige Rating lists the Global Energy Prize in its Mega category, on account of its noble goals, exemplary practices and overall prize fund.

The prize’s nomination, selection and awarding process is absolutely transparent and unbiased. No self-nominations are allowed; only members of the nominating pool have the right to put forward candidates for the prize.

After the nominees are reviewed by an expert panel, the International Award Committee, consisting of 20 of the world’s top scientists, makes the final decision about the new laureates. The neutrality of the awarding process is recognized worldwide.

The Global Energy Prize is not restricted by international borders, or limited to certain scientific disciplines. Thermophysics and nuclear physics, geology and non-conventional energy sources, pulsed energy, electrical conductivity, power plant design. This is exactly why the prize is rightly called global – it honors the best scientists, the most exciting discoveries, and the newest technologies all over the world.

For example, the lithium-ion batteries of Akira Yoshino now provide power to every mobile phone. Ashot Sarkisov and Lars Gunnar Larsson’s achievements in cleaning The Arctic of nuclear waste are internationally recognized, Valentin Parmon’s developments with catalyzers are having a colossal economic effect. Martin Green, over the course of nearly three decades, has made a revolutionary contribution to silicon photovoltaics, and for many years has been the world’s leading specialist on monocrystal and polycrystal silicon elements of solar panels. The sale of solar panels using elements of PERC invented by Martin Green exceeded 10 million US dollars by the end of 2017.

And who could forget Arthur Rosenfeld, the guru of energy conservation and energy efficiency. No one could understand why a leading nuclear scientist would leave physics and take up energy conservation. Today his ideas are saving the world over 100 billion dollars a year. Or Jayant Baliga, whose insulated-gate bipolar transistor is used almost everywhere: in controls for household appliances, in robotics, in electric cars and high-speed trains.

The Russian laureate and physicist Philipp Rutberg’s academic institute sells, not nuclear reactors, not spacecraft, but technology for factories that recycle garbage, i.e. trash that’s literally just kicking around. His academic colleagues used to joke about him. Philipp, you’re playing with garbage. It’s disgraceful! But he managed to transform garbage into a new energy source – synthesis gas – which can be used to generate electricity or as a fuel for cars. Thanks to Philipp Rutberg’s technology, a small city of 30,000 people can supply half of its own electricity needs, simply by recycling garbage!

For Shuji Nakamura, a Japanese scientist living and working in the USA, the path to scientific success and glory was a rocky one. He was misunderstood and rejected, and criticized for being stubborn. But he prevailed, and succeeded in creating the blue LED. His invention earned him worldwide recognition – thanks to this very development, an energy-efficient white LED light appeared in the world.

A similar story can be told about each laureate of the Global Energy Prize. Read about them in detail in our book, which has been appropriately titled A Tribute to Those Who Changed the World.

GENNADY MESYATS

Global Energy Prize Laureate 2003

THE MAN WHO COMPRESSED ENERGY

Gennady Mesyats tamed the lightning bolt

Almost once a year, according to statistics, lightning hits a passenger airplane in midflight, and it hardly ever leads to an accident. Today’s aircraft take such incidents quite easily, as they are well equipped to handle atmospheric electricity: each aircraft is tested for the ability to withstand lightning strikes as part of production testing. But for such tests a controlled and domesticated lightning is needed. It was Dr. Gennady Andreevich Mesyats, one of the Global Energy Prize laureates, who tamed the lightning bolt. It’s no coincidence that he mentioned that very application of his invention at the awards ceremony.

The family history of the future laureate and academician should have been deemed irreproachable in Soviet times: they lived in the Chernigov Region of present-day Ukraine; his grandparents worked for local landowners and then at the mines of Donbass. In 1908, they left for Siberia, settling in the village of Varlamov-Padun in the Tomsk Governorate. However, in 1938, when Gennady was only two years old, his father Andrey Romanovich fell victim to political repressions and toiled in labor camps in the Far East until the end of WWII.

Thus, the future scientist spent his formative years with his mother only. Those were hard times: the family was deprived of housing for being related to an enemy of the people, and Gennady’s mother lost her job. She had to raise her kids alone during wartime… This defined the boy’s character, making him strive to be stronger and better than everyone else. Dr. Mesyats recalls his younger years as follows:

My life was hard. When I was six, I was the main breadwinner for the family. I knew that I had to bring bread home, even if I had to stand the whole day in a queue to get it. …As a political prisoner’s son was perceived as a pariah, I tried to prove that I was the best. Both at school and at the university, I earned only the top grades. The fact that he had to struggle to survive since childhood left a mark on the character of the future physicist. When he was already an academician, his son Vadim was studying in the physics department at Tomsk University and got hooked on poetry. He was writing, not reading. Mesyats the elder asked journalist Valentin Lukyanin to review his son’s verse thoroughly. I wanted someone to review his writing and knock some sense into him. So the literate men reviewed Vadim’s poems and delivered their verdict: the guy had talent, and his poetry was to be published. However, his father set down a condition: You will work, defend a thesis, and graduate from the department, and then you can decide yourself what to do. Clearly, he thought that his son needed a stable profession, and never thought that a mediocre writer could earn a decent living. The son took after the father, met the condition, and became both a PhD and a man of letters.

Looking ahead, it’s worth saying that the academician’s son Vadim Gennadievich has been a success in the field of literature. He has been honored with many literary awards, such as the Bazhov Prize (2002, for the novel Electrotherapy), the Bunin Prize (2005, for the short story collection Vok-Vok); a Russian Booker Award (2002, for the novel Electrotherapy), the prize of the Union of Russian Writers (2011, for the book of poetry Gypsy Bread), the New Voices in Poetry and Prose Award (United States), and others. His works were highly appreciated by Joseph Brodsky, Alexander Zinoviev, and academicians Mikhail Gasparov and Vyacheslav Ivanov.

When Gennady’s father reunited with the family after his imprisonment, life became much easier. First, the war ended, and life got better for everyone in the country. Second, he got a job, and this helped the family a lot. If not for his father, or better to say, if not for his father’s record of convictions, Mesyats would not have become the man he is now. In his younger years, Gennady dreamed of becoming a radio mechanic. He entered the Radio Engineering Faculty of the Tomsk Polytechnic University and studied for nearly two years there…

And then he was simply expelled, as the son of a political prisoner, even though his father had been rehabilitated in 1954. The reason was that the Radio Engineering Faculty was becoming more and more involved in classified areas, and while Mesyats was studying there it acquired the status of a sensitive facility with special operational procedures. Fortunately, the Rector of the Tomsk University, Alexander Vorobyev, as he himself said, took the talented student under his wings, and according to the documents, Mesyats simply relocated to the Energy Faculty where Vorobyev had his laboratory. Without this intervention Mesyats would not have become a physicist because the university was only preparing future energy engineers. After the university, it would have been possible to get a job at a power plant or electrical grid, but not in fundamental science. Everything changed in his fourth year.

In the late 1950s, Grigory Vorobyev, a young teacher with only a Candidate of Sciences degree stopped by the dormitory at Tomsk Polytechnic University where Mesyats and the other fourth-year students lived. At the time, Vorobyev was already working with electric pulses as the head of a laboratory at the university’s Nuclear Physics Institute. He realized that the institute needed employees who were young, who could grow into their profession. So, right there in the dormitory, he offered students the chance to write their undergraduate thesis not on an academic topic, but on a truly scientific one. The offer presented both opportunity and risk: on the one hand, it was a chance to plunge into real science, but on the other hand, if the research failed, they would risk not having any undergraduate thesis at all, which at that time could have had especially negative consequences.

Mesyats took the risk, choosing as his research topic the generation of high-capacity nanosecond electric pulses. As Gennady Andreevich recalled later, that offer decided my fate. Who could have known that a brand new area of physics would grow from a student’s paper… Anyhow, when asked about the beginning of his scientific career, Mesyats honestly responds that it was his undergraduate thesis in his fourth year that provided the first visible result.

Years later, Academician Mesyats described his university work like this: It was dedicated to the problem of obtaining powerful nanosecond pulses, i.e. high-voltage and heavy current pulses, with a very small duration of about one billionth of a second. Again, a light beam passes thirty centimeters per one nanosecond. The task was to measure to a high degree of precision the speed of development of an electrical discharge in solid-state dielectrics. It is worth mentioning that this student’s work from the end of the 1950s is still studied with great interest by professors and students at the University of Texas almost a half-century later. Very few term papers ever receive such an honor.

And so, starting from his fourth year at university, the young physicist began working at the forefront of science, and sometimes beyond it.

He managed to complete his undergraduate thesis while undertaking pre-graduation practical training, working at four different scientific research centers over two months. There he obtained new knowledge and ideas, and gained important experience doing experimental work with high currents and plasm. However, as Dr. Mesyats recalled later, it could only provide a general direction of thought and some experience of working with his hands. His field of research was brand new, which meant that researchers had to be theorists and designers of unusual devices for themselves, like physicists of an earlier era.

This practical work grew into a graduate thesis, which gave rise to a new theory of high-voltage nanosecond pulses. The power of such pulses, due to the release of large amounts of energy in a short time, can exceed the capacity of all the power plants in the world. As Dr. Mesyats jokes today, he was the first who started working with nanotechnologies, but it was nanoseconds, not nanometers.

His graduate work was soon followed by two genuine and indisputable discoveries, which were officially registered. Even mature scientists can hardly ever boast such an achievement. The phenomenon of explosive electronic emission – an avalanche-type increase of electron emission as a result of anode explosion – is now called the Mesyats Effect. He was able to see in detail what happens when a discharge occurs between a cathode and an anode. It turned out that before a disruptive discharge such as a bolt of lightning, there occur micro-explosions of minor irregularities that always exist in a cathode, and metal fuses, explodes, and throws out fused drops. Thus, physicists saw for the first time how a man-made bolt of lightning strikes, and succeeded in controlling it. By using a special treatment of the irregularities on a cathode, they were able to obtain much more powerful nanosecond pulses.

So thanks to his non-standard vision of things, the young physicist succeeded in something nobody else could. The experiment came to be the ultimate evidence that an electric arc is a fractional process caused by explosions of fluxes of liquid metal. (…) Why had nobody succeeded before? They had all worked in a classic style: thermal emission, auto-emission, sublimation. And indeed, there was no solid body there. There was a liquid body, liquid metal, Gennady Andreevich explains.

At the age of 24, Mesyats was a full-fledged co-author of a monograph written in cooperation with Grigory Vorobyev. At 25, he defended his thesis, titled Development and research of high-voltage nanosecond pulse devices with arc-and-spark stands, and presented his PhD. At the age of 30, he received his next academic degree, a Doctor of Science in Physics (the equivalent of Doctor habilitatus in Germany). Both the thesis and the monograph became the foundation of a new scientific field.

It often happens that when you make a step in some unknown direction, a new world opens for you, and results follow one after the other.

Today, the developments of Dr. Mesyats are used in a great number of technical devices, including electron accelerators, compact mobile devices for cancer treatment that can fit in a travel bag, powerful sources of energy, communication tools, X-ray devices, lasers, devices for testing thunderstorm resistance (for passenger and military airplanes), power transmission lines, e-beam (electron beam) treatment of potable water and chimneys, sterilization of healthcare products and pharmaceutical substances, and sources of energy for powerful lasers. They may even apply to controlled nuclear fusion technologies in the future…

According to Dr. Mesyats, the explosive emission of electrons makes it possible to resolve another important problem related to Russia’s defense capabilities: nuclear testing. Using devices operating on the Mesyats Effect, it is possible to simulate the conditions of nuclear explosions not only on computers, but also in reality, and without any radioactive contamination. They also provide the ability to deactivate a potential enemy’s electronics, as the same principle is used there.

In addition, it turns out that even the storage of gems and precious metals is impossible without electronic emissions. For the State Depositary for Precious Metals, Dr. Mesyats and his colleagues developed a device that flashes at a mineral with a short ebeam, making it luminesce. This makes it possible to identify a rock or mineral by its spectrum. We could even flash at a diamond and identify exactly where it was mined, says Gennady Andreevich. Although, he jokes, the former Head of the State Depositary for Precious Metals said that it was not his job to identify the origin of diamonds, and recommended to apply to customs officers.

Not surprisingly, at the age of 30, in 1966, shortly before defending his doctoral thesis, he was offered a position as head of the division of high-voltage nanosecond pulse technologies at his research institute, which became the first large scientific institution to develop this topic. They say, that the Communist Party’s coordinators were furious to see such a young man, who had been until only recently a Komsomolets (a Young Communist League member), appointed to lead such an extended area of works. According to rumors, it was Egor Kuzmich Ligachev, the Head of the Regional CP Committee, who saved the situation by saying: Mesyats discovered that area, let him lead it. In December of the same year he brilliantly defended his doctoral thesis, and as the new head of the division he was now at the same level as many of his subordinates.

Later, a new and no less important chapter in the life of Gennady Andreevich started, showing an equally brilliant side of his talent: Mesyats as a science facilitator. He likes to say: Scientists work more productively at a young age. Who are the authors of current theoretical physics? Thirty-year-old Bor, Heisenberg, and Landau. If this is the case, it is necessary to provide for the inclusion of young people into science. And so he did.

The career of Dr. Mesyats as science facilitator is no less impressive than his career as a scientist. Already in 1977, he founded a new research institute in Tomsk, the Institute of High-Current Electronics of the Siberian Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences. He’d been leading it for nine years, and then moved to Ekaterinburg, which was then called Sverdlovsk. It should be said that he was really unwilling to relocate. The academician recalls that at the time he realized that he had overstayed in Tomsk, and there was a need to develop the Urals Scientific Center in Sverdlovsk. Furthermore, it was the inventor of the laser, Alexander Prokhorov, a Nobel Laureate, who brought Mesyats to Sverdlovsk and introduced him to the local scientific community.

This is why there was hardly any local resistance, although there were concerns about possible sabotage by the Siberian outsider. Dr. Mesyats thought that the main thing was to engage everybody with new projects, and he got busy. As a result, in 1986 the Urals Scientific Center became the Urals Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences, with Mesyats in charge of it. Since 1987, he’d been the Vice President of the Soviet Academy of Sciences (later the Russian Academy of Sciences) for more than twenty years. Up until 2004 Gennady Andreevich developed and nourished the sciences in Sverdlovsk, establishing another research institute there, the Institute of Electrophysics of the Urals Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Today, both institutes continue to develop the scientific field discovered by Dr. Mesyats, under his guidance.

This is what Gennady Andreevich says in a recent report about one of the institutes: Over the course of many years, every time we summarize our scientific outcomes we hear about the achievements of the Institute of Electrophysics. Each year, we record several new achievements: a power record, a coherence record, an ebeam interval record, etc.

This is also a good example of a harmonious combination of fundamental and applied science. For instance, there is the Civil Aviation Plant in Ekaterinburg that uses the achievements of fundamental research at the Institute of Electrophysics. And it is not only that plant that makes use of our achievements; we know many such enterprises in the Urals."

After Siberia and the Urals, Gennady Andreevich assumed the leadership of the largest and the oldest physics institute in our country, the famous Institute of Physics of the Academy of Sciences. He headed it for eleven years. Dr. Mesyats likes to trace its history not from 1934, according to official records, but from the opening of the legendary physics laboratory in Kunstkamera in 1714, and considers himself to be the twenty-fifth director, not the sixth.

The situation with the Institute of Physics of the Academy of Sciences turned out to be radically different from the two other institutes that he headed; the latter he had founded from point zero and selected the team himself. In this case, the Institute of Physics of the Academy of Sciences was formerly headed by great scientists, starting with Sergey Vavilov. Mesyats did not conceal the fact that his decision to become the Director was based not only on scientific interest.

I don’t want to conceal that there is a personal motivation, too. The institute in Ekaterinburg is very special to me, as it is the largest scientific establishment founded in the post-Soviet era – 20 thousand square meters, perfectly equipped – but I have lived in Moscow for seven years already, and it is not easy to be a remote director. Being a director means day-to-day, regular work, the Vice President of the Russian Academy of Sciences admitted. Although, the most important thing was to bring youth to the institute and update the equipment stock; before him, there had been no procurement activities for about six years.

The area he supervised covers almost the entire Universe: the radar telescope Radioastron, which still operated was developed here and it was nearly the only successful scientific space project in post-Soviet Russia.

Needless to say, there were endless activities in the Academy of Sciences, including efforts to keep it from breaking down – a risk that threatened every single scientific enterprise in post-Soviet Russia. Mesyats sincerely considered the Academy of Sciences the main achievement of the vanished Soviet Union. For that, he was prepared to hold tough public discussions with anyone. Even with his colleagues, for instance Evgeniy Velikhov, an RAS (the Russian Academy of Sciences) Academician, a former Vice President of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and a laureate of the Global Energy Prize. He had another public dispute with Minister of Education and Science Dmitry Livanov.

In addition to discussions and crisis management, there is routine work. There are so many current positions of this energetic man of action that they just can’t be numbered: he is a member of the Presidium of RAS; a member of the Presidium of the Urals Branch of RAS; the Research Advisor of the Institute of Electrophysics of the Urals Branch of RAS; the head of the Physical Electronics Laboratory of the Institute of Electrophysics of the Urals Branch of RAS, a member of the Directorate of RAS Scientific Publishing Council; a member of RAS Expert Panel for awarding the Vavilov Golden Medal and more.

Each of these duties requires time and effort, which is why Dr. Mesyats still does not spend much time on exchanging greetings or conducting small talk for diplomatic purposes, and just proceeds to the case.

Surprisingly for a present-day science facilitator, scientific research remains his top priority. He has a clear understanding of what happens to scientists who become administrators only:

If a scientist plunges into an administrative job and breaks off with science, first of all he ceases to understand what’s going on. Second, he risks ending up in the position of a lame duck: when your administrative career ends, you are not wanted anymore...

Maybe that is why Gennady Mesyats is proud of his extended scientific monograph Pulse Power and Electronics, about his latest scientific research, published at the peak of his administrative career. It was named book of the year at a large international exhibition. Whether jokingly or seriously, he says that the monograph describes briefly, in seven hundred pages, why he received the Global Energy Prize.

Gennady Mesyats was awarded the Global Energy Prize in 2003 for the development of pulse power engineering and fundamental research in this field. All of his works have been repeatedly praised by the international scientific community, and he is the holder of many prestigious awards.

NICK HOLONYAK

Global Energy Prize Laureate 2003

THE MAGIC ONE AND ITS ORIGINATOR

Nick Holonyak’s light emitting diode is a perfect example of how one person’s talent and curiosity can change the entire world

When we switch on the coffee machine in the morning, check our email on our phones, push a button for an elevator, or look at street ads on our way to work – we see this great invention everywhere and use it in our everyday life. The light we see is so familiar to us that most people do not even stop for a second to think about what is actually glowing there?

Light emitting diodes, or LEDs, are a perfect example of how one person’s talent and curiosity can change the entire world. It was only fifty-five years ago, in the hands of Professor Nick Holonyak, that this brand new light source first flashed.

RAS Academician Boris Zakharchenya recalls his first meeting with Dr. Holonyak: A crisp white shirt, a bow tie, his hair cut short as they did in the 1960s and, finally, the athletic physique of Mr. Holonyak (he lifted weights) made him look typically American. This impression grew even stronger when Nick was speaking his native American English. But then he would suddenly switch to the language of his father, and in no time there was nothing left of the American gentleman. It was not the Russian language, but an unusual mixture of Russian and Rusyn languages (close to Ukrainian), sprinkled with salty miner’s jokes and earthy farmers’ expressions that he got from his parents. In the meantime, Professor Holonyak could laugh contagiously and by the minute turned into a regular Rusyn guy.

Dr. Holonyak is often called the man who converted science into light. He is the inventor of the LED and the holder of more than thirty patents. Among them are the semiconductor red-light laser usually called the laser diode (used in CD and DVD players and cell phones), the quantum semiconductor laser (used in fiber optics), and the short-circuited emitter p-n-p-n switch (for light dimmers and power tools).

For his breakthrough inventions, Dr. Nick Holonyak has received awards from US Presidents George Bush Sr. and his son George W. Bush, Emperor Akihito of Japan and Russian President Vladimir Putin. In 2003, Nick Holonyak became one of the first three Global Energy Prize laureates for inventing the first semiconductor light diode of visible light and for contributing to the creation of silicon power electronics.

Incidentally, Nick and his sister were the first people in their family to receive a regular school education.

Nick’s parents emigrated to the USA from Transcarpathia, and when he thinks about them, it is always surprising to him that they were born in the same part of the world but met each other thousands of miles away in a different country.

The Holonyaks were poor. Nick’s father worked at a coal mine and his mother managed the household. They were both uneducated, but were unanimous in their belief in the importance of study for children. In the coal mining region of Southern Illinois, those who managed to study to become a school teacher, lawyer or clergyman were lucky. Nick’s father even wanted to send him on holidays to Russia to study the Russian language with a priest.

Since childhood, Nick has always been attracted to science. The books he chose to read were all connected in some way to scientific research; physics, mathematics and natural sciences seemed absolutely logical and natural. Just like real life, where something is being created every minute. Throughout the day, he watched his father doing different things with his own hands. In the yard, he was always repairing something, putting something together, taking something apart, sawing, pounding nails, or mending tools.

You know, this is a physical world: to make things out of wood, rubber, iron, anything, he explained many years later. Those were poor people, they never hired a carpenter or anyone else. They did everything for themselves. So, just take a hammer, nails and other tools for repair – and do it yourself.

At the age of six, Dad gave Nick a penknife and said: If you want anything, just do it. Holonyak laughs when he says how he cut nearly all of his fingers with it, but has remembered those words throughout his life.

I have been striving to create since childhood, because I knew that you create and build what you need and want, he reflects. You conceive it. You see it. You understand it. You find a way to do it and you do it.

Given the desperate financial situation of his parents, Nick felt he had no right to spend their money and tried to make as much as he could. He collected garbage, waste paper, mowed the lawn at a nearby country club, and at the age of fifteen, he even lied about his age and tried to join the military, but he failed the test.

Railroads were not strictly monitored, and workers were needed badly, so Nick was hired for three summers in a row – in 1944, 1945 and 1946. Ten hours a day, six days a week, at sixty-five cents per hour.

One year a flood washed out the road, and workers had to work for thirty-three hours straight without a lunch break, in fact without any break at all. Nick came home deadly tired and realized that this was not life, only survival, and that it was not something he wanted from his life.

So he began to think seriously about the University of Illinois, at the exact time that it opened its doors in a town close by. The young man spent all the money he had saved on education, but it was still not enough, and during his first years of study he had to make extra money working at a foundry and helping his father repair neighboring houses.

At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Nick faced severe competition. Classes were overcrowded and so were the waiting lists. If you did not comply with certain standards or failed to keep up with the pace, in no time someone else would take your place. However, Nick passed all the tests successfully, and when he got the opportunity to become the first postgraduate student of John Bardeen (a future two-time Nobel Prize winner), he never mistrusted his own powers. Besides, he believed that it would be immensely useful for him to learn from the inventor of the transistor, since it was precisely the segment of science he wanted to work in.

Practical classes in our group did not cause any difficulty, he recalled later. So, when it turned out that I could move over to Bardeen’s laboratory, I had no apprehension about it. He needed people with research skills and laboratory experience, because we were going to do strange things. Indeed, we started in an empty room. We had to build everything: stands, all the equipment. We started from scratch.

John Bardeen was a great boss, with an informal paternal manner, and Holonyak found it very easy to work with him. He used to come to the lab every day to see what we were thinking, what we were doing, Dr. Holonyak recalls. He wanted to know what idea we were working on, if it made any sense, if was of any value, what problems we were trying to solve, if we had enough funds, if we had assistants, and if we had received all the requested materials.

In spite of the fact that Bardeen was a theoretician, he understood that the world does not consist of symbols and ideas; he never disregarded facts and research, and this fitted perfectly together with Holonyak’s ability for laboratory work.

When Nick got his masters degree in 1951, the University of Illinois launched ILLIAC (an early computer, designed under a contract with the Ballistic Research Laboratory of the US Army), and he was invited to work with this computer. At that moment he made his final choice in favor of the physics of electronic devices, and stayed in Bardeen’s laboratory.

It resembles a piece of wood. And you are a woodcarver, Dr. Holonyak speaks poetically of his work. And you see something in this piece of wood that other people do not see; you see the thing you are going to carve out of it. When I got involved in the work with semiconductors, I thought this was the place where I could do something new, that there was a chance here to do research, and that it was a great opportunity.

Nick Holonyak graduated from the university with honors and received three job offers: from Texas Instruments, General Electric, and Bell Labs. He deliberated for several days, changing his mind a few times, and finally decided in favor of Bell Labs.

In all of his interviews, Dr. Holonyak calls this decision the most correct one in his life. It’s here that his work with silicon started. Before that, Nick Holonyak had worked for two years with germanium at Bardeen’s laboratory; silicon was a new material, and new methods and technologies were needed for dealing with it. Creativity is what attracted him most, the creation of something new and better. Here he began working with John L. Moll, whom he calls a hero and who was one of the pioneers and forefathers of today’s Silicon Valley.

John Moll was the captain, the scientist recalls. He said: It should be silicon, we can do it, we will develop it."

Under Moll’s guidance, the group worked on one project, but each specialist had his own job to do. The research was really rewarding, and many things were done for the first time in history. However, the researchers made a mistake by not publishing a major portion of their lab tricks. They were so focused on the subject of research, Dr. Holonyak says, and did not think about it: Now I am sure people will publish a large portion of what we did not publish at that time. And then, you see what someone else is doing, and you say: Wait a minute, we’ve been down that road already."

In the company garden, not everything was rosy either. When he was a student, Nick was concerned that in his future work he would have to study something he would not consider essential or important, but something more promising in terms of corporate business. And now he came face to face with it. Jack Morton, his new boss, turned out to be a difficult person who believed his opinion was the only correct one just because of his exalted position in the company: We never had this in our interaction with Bardeen. Bardeen’s reaction was: ‘Let’s see what we can get done,’ he would never enter the room and say: ‘Stop what you’re doing.’. Jack could say in this situation: ‘Stop working on that. I want this.’ "

Despite the fact that John Moll managed to successfully fight for his project then, when young Holonyak came back from the army in 1957, he joined a different team of researchers, at General Electric.

The new boss was a nice man, but he had nothing to do with science, which for Nick was a cause for concern for the first few months. He panicked that he had to work with someone who knew so much less than himself about the subject. The young researcher feared he had made a great mistake by moving to the new job. However, the boss turned out to be a talented