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UC Santa Barbara Scientist Shuji Nakamura Shares Nobel Prize For Physics
From heliocentrism to germ theory to cars to air travel, conventional wisdom has fought against countless great ideas. If conventional wisdom had been victorious, we wouldn’t have light bulbs, televisions, personal computers, or even coffee.
A recurrent theme when you analyze great discoveries and inventions is that they challenged conventional wisdom. This article shares an example of a discovery you use every day and yet almost didn’t exist thanks to conventional wisdom; white LED light.
Dr. Shuji Nakamura won the Nobel Prize “for the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes which has enabled bright and energy-saving white light sources.”
Why does a blue LED matter? Compared to making red and green light-emitting diodes—which you see at traffic lights, on bicycles, etc.—blue LEDs befuddled scientists for years. And with blue LEDs, we can make white LED light. Shockingly, white LEDs have only been available since 2006, even though other LEDs have been available since the early 1960s. As Popular Science notes, “LEDs last up to 100,000 hours, compared to 10,000 hours for fluorescent lights and 1,000 hours for incandescent bulbs. Switching more houses and buildings over to LEDs could significantly reduce the world’s electricity and materials consumption for lighting.” And if you’re concerned with sustainability, a 2015 US Department of Energy Report showed that “about 18% of U.S. electricity consumption and 6% of all U.S. energy consumption is used to provide indoor and outdoor lighting.” So yes, this is a very big deal.
Dr. Nakamura is currently Professor of Materials and Electrical & Computer Engineering Departments, Research Director for the Solid State Lighting & Energy Electronics Center, and the Cree Professor in Solid State Lighting & Displays at the University of California, Santa Barbara. But as he shared with me in a recent conversation, his journey to the Nobel Prize required fighting conventional wisdom at nearly every turn.
Conventional wisdom would suggest that Nobel-level scientists go to renowned schools and work at preeminent companies or universities. But Dr. Nakamura went to college at local state school, Tokushima University, where the lab he worked in was, to put it generously, not state-of-the-art. It’s been described as crammed with broken televisions and old radios, which could be cannibalized for spare parts, meaning students would have to learn soldering, cutting and joining glass, beating and welding sheet metal, and fashioning their own parts. After graduation, he was hired at Nichia, a small 200-person chemical company that made phosphors for color televisions and fluorescent lamps. Like his university, there was no fancy equipment. He scavenged parts, learned how to weld quartz, and at least a few times a month caused an explosion.
When he eventually turned his focus to creating blue LEDs, it wasn’t out of a desire for scientific glory; he wanted to give his employer a commercial product that would drastically transform the company’s future.
In the 1980s, there were two materials considered as possible candidates for creating blue LEDs; zinc selenide and gallium nitride. As Dr. Nakamura told me, “Basically, all scientists worked with zinc selenide. With zinc selenide, the dislocation density (the measure of defects in the crystalline solids) is less than ten to the third. But with gallium nitride, the dislocation density is over 10 to the ninth, so it’s six orders higher. At the time, conventional wisdom said that in order to make a good LED, dislocation density should be less than 10 to the third. When people learned I worked with gallium nitride, they told me I was crazy and a foolish scientist.”
A striking example of the popularity of zinc selenide compared to gallium nitride is the attendance of researchers at the most popular conference for applied physics in Japan. At the Japan Society of Applied Physics conference in 1992, there were approximately 500 individuals attending the zinc selenide sessions, but only about five people attended the gallium nitride sessions. “Not only was zinc selenide more popular at the time,” Dr. Nakamura told me, “but gallium nitride was actively discouraged with researchers stating ‘gallium nitride has no future’ and ‘gallium nitride people have to move to zinc selenide.'”
Why didn’t Dr. Nakamura accept the conventional wisdom that zinc selenide was the only way to create blue LEDs? First, he saw an opportunity in gallium nitride. “I saw that the zinc selenide field was publishing lots of papers,” he told me. “But in the gallium nitride field, only very few papers had been published, so I was confident that I could publish lots of papers.”
Taking the road less traveled is, of course, a recurrent theme when talking to Nobel Prize winners and other great innovators. Second, Dr. Nakamura believed that he could solve the defect issues with gallium nitride.
With his scrappy educational and professional experience—soldering, cutting, scavenging parts, welding quartz—Dr. Nakamura took an existing method for growing gallium nitride and literally invented a novel reactor design for growing high-quality and uniform gallium nitride. This was roll-up-the-sleeves work that many of his contemporaries were less equipped to perform. As he shared with me, “In the morning, I would go to work and modify the reactor. In the afternoon, I would perform a couple of growths and analyze the results.”
Part of what enabled Dr. Nakamura to challenge conventional wisdom was structural. He explained to me, “When I developed the blue LEDs, I talked with big semiconductor companies’ people, and they told me that ‘You are lucky because you worked to develop blue LEDs alone, but in our case, we worked for a big company, and we have meetings where we talk about which material to use, and out of ten scientists, nine scientists say we have to use zinc selenide, while only the one foolish guy says we should try gallium nitride.'”
But part of Dr. Nakamura’s opposition to conventional wisdom was his temperament. The upper managers of Dr. Nakamura’s firm heard a lecture advocating strongly for zinc selenide. When they got back to the office, they told Dr. Nakamura explicitly, “You have to stop the gallium nitride research immediately.” But as Dr. Nakamura explained to me, “I was desperate to try the blue LED research, so I ignored their directives because I got permission from the chairman and the founder of the company to do blue LED research. Although the managers said I should ignore gallium nitride, I ignored the order. If this is a big company, I would certainly be fired. But we were a small company, and I had approval from the founder and chairman. It was a risk, but I trusted that I would develop a blue LED, and one year later, I was proven right.”
Shortly thereafter, at a prominent gallium nitride conference in Saint Louis, Dr. Nakamura presented his blue LED. It was much dimmer than those presented by the zinc selenide researchers, but at the end of his talk, the audience gave Dr. Nakamura a standing ovation. Why? Even though the zinc selenide LEDs were brighter, their lifetime was about ten seconds. Dr. Nakamura’s gallium nitride LED, by contrast, had a lifetime of 1,000 hours.
Eventually, Dr. Nakamura’s LEDs became brighter, his legend grew, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize. But the journey wasn’t easy, conventional wisdom challenged him at every turn, and it took an extra dose of resilience to prevail. For current or future innovators, here’s something to remember: A recent Leadership IQ study asked managers to describe the characteristics of the most innovative employees. At the top of the list were characteristics like taking risks, challenging conventions, and being stubborn. And yet, when the managers were asked to describe their favorite employees, they selected the qualities of the least innovative employees, like dependable, team players and easy to get along with.

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