Veritasium
10 HN recommenders · recommended in 10 months, 2024–2026
33:45 · 57M views · Feb 8, 2024
Veritasium tells the story of how Shuji Nakamura and others made the blue LED, long thought nearly impossible. It covers the materials challenge of gallium nitride and the persistence it took.
HN recommends it as a gripping story of single-minded persistence against the herd, and as the back story behind modern LED lighting.
15 comments from Hacker News
>It is absolutely stupid to talk about this as edisons revenge. If Tesla had the modern high power transistors needed to get high voltage dc out of the ac produced from a spinning turbine he would be all for high voltage dc too. This! The soon people realized these facts the better. The pervasive high rise buildings did not happen before the invention of modern cranes. Exactly twenty years ago I was doing a novel research on GaN characterization, and my supervisors made a lot money with consulations around the world, and succesfully founded govt funded start-up company around the technology. Together with SiC, these are the two game changing power devices with wideband semiconductor technology that only maturing recently. Heck, even the Nobel price winning blue LED discovery was made feasible by GaN. Watch the excellent video made by Veritasium for this back story [1]. [1] Why It Was Almost Impossible to Make the Blue LED: this video
I (and my 6-year-old) really enjoyed this video from Veritasium about the invention of the blue LED. this video
I think that this is a general trend. Various fields tend to get into groupthink, and it is hard for people who buck the trend to pursue the usual academic path to research. But usually the herd has gone down a wrong turn, and it is up to a random rebel to make the next key discovery. For an extreme example, I recommend Veratasium's video on blue LEDs, this video . But despite how extreme that example is, it does seem to be a trend. The direction that the herd has gone has been generally well-explored simply because a herd of researchers have already gone there. If they've found nothing, you'll probably find nothing either. So you have to back up. Sadly, the way that academia is structured discourages this at every turn. :-(
Veritasium had this video about the history of sewing machines recently [1]. I remember watching it and ended up in awe of how something that we take for granted took a journey of several thousand years to be get invented. While I'm thinking about it, his recent video about the development of blue LEDs [2] is very interesting as well if you haven't seen it. [1] [LINK] [2] this video
The human race has benefited greatly from individual researchers who made their work the main source of value in their life, and from societies, patrons, and government institutions who gave these people the stability and financial support to pursue such a single minded focus. Two fascinating examples: [LINK] this video