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Scandinavia and Technology
Sat 9 Sep 2006 3:23 am
While the world keeps busy killing innocent people and spending billions of dollars on self proclaimed wars, the scandinavians keep busy inventing and appreciating technology - and giving honor to those who did something to help the mankind and humanity.
Yes, its the scandinavians who invented linux, bluetooth, IRC and yes nokia and ericsson are scandinavian companies. And yes nobel prize is given and started by scandinavians and yes the millenium technology award is also a scandinavian effort to admire and honor people and technology.
Tarja Halonen, the president of Finland, presented the 2006 Millennium Technology Prize to a Japanese Scientist, Shuji Nakamura, along with a 1 million euro prize and the "Peak" trophy, at a ceremony that took place yesterday in Helsinki, Finland.
What did Nakamura invented? Well.. he invented something that would change the life of humans forever, and even better, in a good way with high quality. He invented new sources of light. The blue, green and white light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and the blue laser diode. White LEDs could provide a sustainable, low-cost alternative to lightbulbs, especially in developing countries. Blue LEDs are used in flat-screen displays, while blue lasers are already being exploited in the next generation of DVD player.
  
Images show Nakamura, the blue laser, and the blue led. The first picture also shows the finnish president handing him the award.
 Professor Shuji Nakamura wrote: | | ”Using LEDs for lighting could halve the amount of electricity consumed for this purpose.” |
| ScienceWatch wrote: |
Blue light has the shortest wavelength of visible light. Build a blue laser diode, and you could quadruple the amount of data that could be read and stored on a compact disc, a CD-ROM, or a digital video disc (DVD) player. With red and green laser diodes already on the shelves, blue was the last of the primary colors left to tackle, and if that could be done, one could imagine a device that combined blue, red, and green and emitted white light, perhaps putting the light bulb as we know it out of business.
"I actually thought it looked very easy to make blue LEDs," says Shuji Nakamura of Nichia Chemical Industries Ltd., Tokushima, Japan. "I thought, blue means I just have to change the color—I just have to change the material."
For two decades, researchers working for the biggest players in the electronics industry, from RCA and Hewlett-Packard to Matsushita and Sony, tried their hands at the blue laser diode and failed. Nakamura, a self-described country boy, did it while working for Nichia Chemical Industries Ltd. in Tokushima, Japan. |
These are the good people and good efforts that are helping the entire human kind, for a long time to come. The Japanese - thats what I call technology with quality!
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