Successful Tracing of an Electron or Memory of Blue LED in Japan
Everybody uses electricity that is a main feature of the contemporary civilization.
Without electricity, no TVs, no PCs, and no cellular phones are possible. You should live in an era before the Civil War, which might be not so bad for many.
But what is electricity? It is a flow of a tremendous number of electrons through a conductor such as a copper wire, which can be measured by ampere.
Then what is an electron? It is a very elemental particle far smaller than an atom. For example, one gram (0.03 ounces) of Gold consists of about 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (10**22) atoms of gold.
An electron is 100,000 times smaller than an atom.
Therefore, it is very difficult to monitor or measure a movement of a single electron. But, a Japanese research group has recently succeeded in doing so.
For the first time in human history, mankind can now measure movement of a single electron owing to hard and good work of a Japanese research group supported by NTT and other organizations.
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Another famous work in this field of applied solid physics is an invention of a blue light-emitting diode (LED), a long-time dream of industry for it was so useful but looked so impossible.
The invention was carried out by a Japanese company, Nichia Corporation, in 1993. But, an employee of the company, Mr. Shuji Nakamura, claimed that the patent right of the blue LED belongs to him.
The dispute was settled through an appeal court that admitted a big contribution of Mr. Shuji Nakamura to the invention and ordered the company to pay a large amount of money to the former employee, which was actually observed.
However, Nichia Corporation renounced the related patent, which Mr. Shuji Nakamura focused on in his claim, because a technology based on the patent is no use for industrial production of blue LEDs. Hence, Mr. Shuji Nakamura's contribution to the company's revenue might become almost nil.
Mr. Shuji Nakamura, before a blue LED was invented, had been sent to a U.S. university for related study on the company's account; he also had been allowed to use a total of about five million dollar R&D expenses of the company for the blue LED development.
According to announcements and reports of Nichia Corporation, there are some other engineers and scientists within the company that had well cooperated with Mr. Shuji Nakamura in the blue LED project, and some of them had actually invented a very ingenious way of fabricating a related material for the blue LED which Mr. Shuji Nakamura could not find out on his own, though he was a leader of those engineers.
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There are two important issues in these successful inventions. First, you alone cannot make a breakthrough invention nowadays in modern industrial and scientific environment where even your own unique idea is to the great extent based on, and supported by, various information and contribution from others.
Second, you alone should not claim a disproportional reward for your contribution, because such an eccentric behavior should destroy colleagues' moral fiber and thus damage future potential of sound development of an organization as well as an industrial society involving many citizens, voters, and tax payers.
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Both the above two great engineering achievements were done in Japan.
But, if a brilliant Japanese engineer is in the U.S. pursuing such a big challenge, a kind of brokers concerned with such an extraordinarily promising technology might come to him as a friend who would convince him that he is a hero and not a mere employee or a slave of a company, and thus he should claim a big money as much as possible or, say, a billion dollars for an invention he was involved in as a leader.
Americans might not like such a story, but if individualism and freedom in the U.S. are most advanced in this world, then such a story would most likely happen in the U.S. before it occurs in any other countries including Japan.
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For other peoples and Japanese, I would ask them to have a think about a fact that even one gram of Gold consists of about 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (10**22) atoms of gold.
One gold atom cannot make any sense to human beings as Gold.
No, it cannot, even if you can trace movement of an electron of one gold atom for a specific purpose, for example, to encourage many students and researchers to further study honestly and humbly with a true value sense in their work.
"AS A BIRD HOVERS OVER ITS NEST"