2014 Nobel Prize In Physics Awarded To the Inventors of the Blue LED 243
grouchomarxist writes with word that "The 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura, the inventors of the blue LED." From the organization's press release:
When Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura produced bright blue light beams from their semi-conductors in the early 1990s, they triggered a fundamental transformation of lighting technology. Red and green diodes had been around for a long time but without blue light, white lamps could not be created. Despite considerable efforts, both in the scientific community and in industry, the blue LED had remained a challenge for three decades. They succeeded where everyone else had failed. Akasaki worked together with Amano at the University of Nagoya, while Nakamura was employed at Nichia Chemicals, a small company in Tokushima. Their inventions were revolutionary. Incandescent light bulbs lit the 20th century; the 21st century will be lit by LED lamps. White LED lamps emit a bright white light, are long-lasting and energy-efficient. They are constantly improved, getting more efficient with higher luminous flux (measured in lumen) per unit electrical input power (measured in watt). The most recent record is just over 300 lm/W, which can be compared to 16 for regular light bulbs and close to 70 for fluorescent lamps. As about one fourth of world electricity consumption is used for lighting purposes, the LEDs contribute to saving the Earth's resources. Materials consumption is also diminished as LEDs last up to 100,000 hours, compared to 1,000 for incandescent bulbs and 10,000 hours for fluorescent lights. The LED lamp holds great promise for increasing the quality of life for over 1.5 billion people around the world who lack access to electricity grids: due to low power requirements it can be powered by cheap local solar power.
More of an "Engineering" Nobel (Score:2, Insightful)
But I'm ok with that.
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What is engineering but applied math and physics?
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Technically [wikipedia.org], the prize goes to "the person who shall have made the most important 'discovery' or 'invention' within the field of physics". Insofar as 'inventions' are considered engineering, they fall within the scope of the physics prize. The 1912 prize [nobelprize.org], for example, went to the inventor of an automatic regulator for lighthouses.
LED lighting (Score:2)
The bulbs need to come down in price a bit yet
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But they are much closer. You can get them under $10.00 now. Because of their long life, and low energy usage. That means you are saving overall.
If we could get our homes switched to DC, then we could have these without the extra electronics in them.
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You can get them under $10.00 now.
You can get them for under $3 now. That is the price on eBay, in lots of ten, shipped direct from China, with free shipping. The bulbs are identical to those at Home Depot, except for the logo. I have bought over a hundred. I converted my house, my parents, two siblings, and an office suite. Number of failures so far: 0.
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Do you have a particular seller to recommend? I've been slowly replacing the bulbs in my house with LED ones instead, buying on the low end of the price range in brick & mortar stores. For some reason, I still trust Amazon far more than I do eBay when it comes to dealing with errors or disappointing products, but a lot of cool things are on eBay and not Amazon.
So: do you have favoritess? Model numbers to search for?
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Do you have a particular seller to recommend?
I have bought from several sellers, and have no problems with any of them. Just look at their feedback. If they have over a thousand sales, with 99% positive feedback, then it is very unlikely that you will have a problem. Some of the sellers are based in Hong Kong, while others based in mainland China. The bulbs are the same, but the shipping will be a little faster from HK.
So: do you have favoritess? Model numbers to search for?
First, click on "Auction" (the "Buy it Now" prices are are a ripoff), then search for "led e27 warm 10pcs". Include the "warm" on
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I suggest you go to Alibaba.com
Sort by price, don't forget to add in a minimum order quantity (labeled MOQ)
Failing that (usually due to MOQ) try Aliexpress, which is more geared towards the end-user rather than retailers.
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Whoa whoa, hold on there! Does that make sense? At 15 cents per kWh, 12 hours per day lighting, these bulbs save $2.25/mo over incandescent lighting. That's over $25/year, minus the $10 to buy them. They tend to burn out within the year, though; CFLs have the same issue, and it never actually went away: tons of hours of run time, but not many cycles.
I have occupancy sensors. Some of my lights run 6 hours per day; the rest run rarely. My overall lighting savings is on the order of $2-$3/mo for my e
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300 lumens per watt for LED, versus a measly (typical) 50-ish for CFL and 100-ish for T5 flourescent.
And typical white LEDs right now are ~130 lumens per watt.
"LED savings over CFL bulbs is dubious"
Not with the math I just popped above.
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Sorry, but you do not get anywhere even remotely close to 300 lumens per watt in real-world LED lightbulbs, and I challenge you to demonstrate anywhere that you can.
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Sure. Cree is already producing them. 5150K 300+l/w 85C junction temp 350mA drive.
Next?
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Uh. 9W 800 lumen LED [amazon.com] vs 14W 800 lumen CFL [amazon.com]. That's 27 cents per month if the bulb is on 12 hours per day; with my 6 hour per day cycle on my longest-running bulbs, it's not even 1kWh difference.
The entire savings is overshadowed by how long a CFL ballast lasts versus an LED ballast.
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>implying LEDs use a ballast, which by definition is an HVT running pure AC, versus LEDs which typically (unless they use my tech) run with an AC-DC rectifier.
Get on my level. [youtube.com]
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If we could get our homes switched to DC, then we could have these without the extra electronics in them.
Nah. You'd still need a constant-current source, LEDs aren't Ohmic.
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Unlikely to happen as it would cost more.
Low voltage DC throughout the home would mean high-currents are required - take say, a 12W LED bulb. If you wanted to run it direct, that would mean around 3V at 4A. Wire 4 up in parallel and that's 16A, which means your cabling in the house is just as thick as it is now. Get 10 bulbs and that's 40A, which requires jumper-cable style thickness of wires.
Wire thick
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You still need the extra electronics for LEDs run off DC. They require a regulator circuit (basically a small switch mode power supply). You can't just put in a series resistor with a high powered LED otherwise it would be no more efficient than an incandescent bulb.
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"LED house "bulbs" do not have long life, they're deliberately capped around 9-10,000 hours"
Tell that to my LED lamps which have been running 16+ hours daily since 2008.
Shit, I just went 3x past your rated lifetime without thinking. My bad, you ignorant shill.
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"CREE is selling 60w bulbs for $9"
Wow, a 60w LED bulb - how many lumens does that put out?
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"CREE is selling 60w bulbs for $9"
Wow, a 60w LED bulb - how many lumens does that put out?
Feit electric has a similar 60W bulb for about $9 and it puts out 850 lumens. I bought a pile of them at Costco. With a $6 per bulb local utility company subsidy (Connecticut) they were $3 apiece. I like the color temperature a lot. I should have bought more. Also- I have been using 1 to 2 bulb "Y" adapters in any fixture where they will fit. Since LED's use so little power, there is no worry at all about exceeding the amperage limit of the wiring. Let it be bright!
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So it's not a 60 watt bulb. Its an "equivalent to an incandescent 60 watt bulb" bulb. I hate BS units of measurements. If something is a "60 watt bulb", then either its consumption or its output should be 60W. This is neither.
BTW, my largest LED light is 600W. No, not 600W-incandescent-equivalent, or even 600 "LED watts" (aka, 300 watts actual consumotion) - 600 watts actual consumption. It's like the freaking sun - on an alien planet where the sun is purple.
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It's not the 1990s, fix your LED support. It's ridiculous that you think red/blue monochromatic light is better than the natural sunlight everything evolved to work with and utilize.
Yes, I'm making fun of your sig. It's still the truth. You've been playing with OLD THEORETICAL tech based on a shitty 'logical' assumption.
I've got a 400w 5600K LED lamp that drops more lux/w and more PPFD/w than your monochromatic lamp - why? While we've got REALLY efficient blue LEDs, red LEDs still pale in comparison (radiom
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Obviously, he meant equivalent lumens to a 60W incandescent.
Fortunately, LED manufacturers seem to be more honest about these ratings. With CFLs, besides their other problems the manufacturers were calling 600 lumen bulbs "60W equivalent". Maybe a 130V rough service soft white that's blackened by a year of use!
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"Fortunately, LED manufacturers seem to be more honest about these ratings"
BULLSHIT.
Get yourself two items - a Kill-a-Watt, and a lumen/photon flux meter.
Most companies LIE about their specs.
I'm one of the few independent individual-run companies that gives you honest readings from real-life situations.
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I would prefer a car analogy.
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Seriously, LEDs already light an NFL venue in Arizona:
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/06682dfa85e44ab0a98f44001249ea09/sunday-night-lights-super-bowl-be-lit-leds [ap.org]
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Football fields or handegg [diebenow.com] fields?
It's a boring choice (Score:3)
Re:It's a boring choice (Score:4, Interesting)
Contrast this to the method they use for awarding the peace prize, and think which one is better.
Saving Earth's resources? (Score:3)
As about one fourth of world electricity consumption is used for lighting purposes, the LEDs contribute to saving the Earth's resources.
Efficiency does not mean lower consumption. Efficiency remains a useful goal but not "to save the planet's resources". The latter can happen only if overall consumption is reduced. What will happen is that as electricity used for lighting purposes is consumed less, it will get cheaper to direct it elsewhere.
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truly amazing (Score:2)
Attention Kmart shoppers (Score:4, Funny)
It's the first Nobel for a Blue Light Special!
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Mod up!
Solar cells are also diodes, they just work in reverse from LED's. Applying light creates a current, as opposed to a current creating light. All based on getting an electron state to jump from a semiconductor to another semiconductor that differs by one valence. The semiconductors in solar cells are two big discs, one on top of the other. (Experts please correct any of the preceding.)
Just like K-mart and Sears.
Wow, called it (Score:2)
Been waiting for this one for a while. Fully deserved.
"LEDs contribute to saving the Earth's resources" (Score:3)
Probably not. [wikipedia.org]
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The key part of the phrase which is so often overlooked in "laws/effects/rules" such as this is "tends to." I think that LEDs replacing CFLs is one of those cases that would clearly be an exception to this rule. I'm not going to light up my house like a Christmas tree because LEDs have some efficiency gains over CFLs.
The argument that an increase in lighting efficiency would increase the demand for lighting just doesn't make sense in a society where no one is deprived of lighting because it's outside of the
Inanimate Carbon Rod (Score:2)
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Misleading title, probable Western propaganda (Score:3)
These people are not inventors of the blue LED. This specific kind of blue LED was invented in Soviet Union in the 1960's by the team of Zhores I. Alferov (the winner of 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics). Nobody disputes the priority on the invention itself.
After that the issue was to develop the manufacturing process that would make the mass-production of such blue LEDs feasible. The Japanese team did exactly that: they came up with the technology that allows one to mass-manufacture the Alferov's device cheaply.
Re:As well they should. (Score:5, Interesting)
I've spent many a joyful hour gazing at the blue LED. My little blue pals.
It is a pity that their work inspired one of the most horrible trends in consumer electronics design... Seriously, the power light, on the front of the TV, where I'll be staring directly into it while trying to watch something?
Blue is pretty much necessary for LED illumination that doesn't look like some sort of emergency-power-failsafe-lighting scene; but damn is it ever overused...
Re:As well they should. (Score:4, Insightful)
because some designers decided blue is the new green - the future is blue [99percentinvisible.org] so let's make our product futuristic. Bah. Very overused.
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My external disk has a blue power LED. While covered with duct tape, it's still visible.
Yep.
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Even worse: The STANDBY LIGHT!!
Lights up your bedroom when you want to sleep at night. Oh yes, of course you could switch on the device to switch to the much darker gree power light....
Re:As well they should. (Score:5, Informative)
I've seen alarm clocks that supposedly have blue LEDs; I will never buy one.
Given that blue light has the strongest disruptive effect on circadian rhythm (no idea whether it's just because blue photons are relatively energetic, or whether we evolved to respond strongly to lights that look rather like the sky during the day, I have no idea; but that's what the research says), you'll really start to need the alarm function after a few nights trying to sleep with one of those....
Re:As well they should. (Score:4, Interesting)
That's not the reason for the eyestrain, though.
Blue light actually triggers/worsens macular degeneration. It's such a high-energy photon that it causes physical damage. Long-suspected, recently experimentally confirmed by researchers in Spain.
This is why all of my monochromatic blue/red LED panels come with an eye hazard warning and always have. As soon as you go past sun levels of luminous flux in the blue range, you start hitting levels of retinal damage from photon overexposure in the blue wavelengths.
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Utilize red/green instead of blue/green.
http://www.thinkspain.com/news... [thinkspain.com]
The University and Professor are named in the article. Finding the study itself shouldn't be too difficult, I can't find it this moment as I'm at work.
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Maybe instead of being a terror, my cat was actually trying to give me a better night's sleep by chewing through the cord rendering it useless.
Re:As well they should. (Score:4, Insightful)
We have the lowest concentration of blue sensitive photoreceptors in the fovea centralis, so reading blue lights (or things lit with blue light) is relatively difficult. Indeed, the localization of blue point sources is difficult, making bright blue LEDs look hazy and indistinct even while being blinding.
I can't wait for this trend to end either. I hope my green VFD and LCD alarm clocks hold out. So soothing and easily readable.
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There's about 1 blue receptor to every 60 of the others.
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That is used as a diagnostic device. Usually in the form of a blink code.
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Who diagnosis a DVD player these days beyond "it's broke, have another". Certainly not something a consumer would be doing.
And anyone stupid enough to need a light to tell them a device isn't plugged in deserves to pay for a service call.
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What if the device fails when you power it down and it runs its pre/post power diagnostic?
That's why it's on.
Useful but physics? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Useful but physics? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you can't see how this advances the science of physics (Auger effect is now fairly understood as a side effect of this) I can't help you.
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There is a fantasy that lives on and on that physics is only the search for the fundamental rules of how the universe works. Physics does include the search for the most fundamental theory...things like trying to detect the higgs boson or understand dark energy. But those two pretty nicely define 'irrelevance' to the everyday lives of humans. If physics is only about the search for fundamenta
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From Alfred Nobels will: "[...]which shall be apportioned as follows: one part to the person who shall have made the most important discovery or invention within the field of physics; [...]"
So, discovery or invention. Doesn't have to be fundamental science, and can indeed be a pure engineering achievement.
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More or less important than Invar?
Useful but physics? (Score:5, Informative)
This was a big breakthrough in condensed matter and optical physics. We learned a lot about how materials doping effects the bandgaps through the development of these GaN/InGaN diodes. The blue LEDs have also been used to build cheap 405nm solid-state lasers for quantum optics experiments without the need for frequency doublers. Nobel prizes in physics usually go to a discovering that generates a lot of follow-up research and shifts the field. Blue LEDs did that in both materials/condensed matter and optics.
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Why this isn't modded up is beyond me. It provides far more information than my little Auger effect post.
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Apparently the Nobel Prize in Physics also goes to inventions. See this comment: 'Nobel Prizes in physics often go to fundamental discoveries such as the Higgs Boson. But when the committee makes an award for an invention, "we really emphasize the usefulness of the invention," said Anne L'Huillier, an atomic physics professor at Lund University in Sweden, also speaking at the press conference. And the blue LED is nothing if not useful.' (From here [cnet.com].)
The Nobel Prize in Physics was previously awarded for the i
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"Plus I bet it really pisses off Nick Holynak (the non-nobeled inventor of the LED)."
Oleg Losev would like to have a word with you.
Holynak only helped making the commercial LED. Actual LEDs were known since the later 1920s.
Re:As well they should. (Score:5, Informative)
Blue LEDs exist, but true "white LEDs" do not. So-called "white LEDs" are blue LEDs with a phosphor over them. They're little more efficient at making "white" light than CFLs.
Red and blue LED light are great for plants, but human eyes are most sensitive to the middle of the visual spectrum, peaking around green. And unfortunately there's still no technology that produces an efficient green LED. That is what is really waiting for a prize. Such an invention could eliminate somewhere in the ballpark of 5% of human energy consumption.
Re:As well they should. (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, we do have true white LEDs. The problem is the efficiency isn't up there, and it's based on a new nano-material (I can't remember if it was selenium or tungsten-based.)
We've got remote phosphor tech that works great for producing green - otherwise Cree wouldn't be hitting 300+ lumens per watt (given the lumen is weighted at 550-555nm green)
Also, green light is great for plants. Don't let old science fool you. Why do you think an HPS lamp works so well despite about 80% of its visible light output being green and yellow?
Re:As well they should. (Score:5, Insightful)
LEDs are practically by definition monochromatic. They are pn junction diodes. The energy of the photons (aka color) corresponds to the bandgap, and are thus monochromatic. So I'd like to see what you're talking about.
Cree's lab demonstration is not a commercial product; lab demonstrations of all techs are way ahead of commercial realities. Many things you do in the lab simply *can't* be done in the real world at any price. For example, you could gain a couple percent efficiency on metal halide lights by omitting the UV shield, but then you'd be causing permanent vision damage to your consumers. Cree's best commercial LED is 200 lumens per watt, the XLamp XP-L. And FYI, Cree's lab announcement was said to both be "single LED" and "white", which means phosphor, not multiple LEDs of different wavelengths.
As far as I'm aware, the most efficient green LED today yield around 100 if driven nominally, up to around 130-140 if underdriven and well cooled. That's not a figure you'd get in an actual lamp, nor would you use such expensive LEDs in commercial lighting solutions anyway.
LED lightbulbs may very well someday well exceed CFLs. But that day is not today.
No, green light is not great for plants, and I don't know where you got this idea or that it's "old science". There's countless modern peer-reviewed research to support it. The reason plants appear green is because chlorophyl reflects green light. The fact that leaves look black under red or blue LED light is a very good thing. You usually get 2-3 times higher growth per input watt on LED compared to HID, including HPS. HPS has little green, it's mostly yellow, with green and red as the next biggest components. And the worst type of light that exists for growing plants is LPS, which is virtually all yellow. The effect of LPS on plants is terrible.
Yes, the long-term standard for commercial greenhouse light supplementation has been HID, but that's been changing as LEDs drop in price. I know the founder of a company that started a company that produces greens in stackable self-contained "farms". They evaluated different light sources and found [google.is] that LED gives by far the best bang for their buck. They're hardly the only ones, there's lots of companies switching over.
Side note: I raise a large number of tropicals in Iceland under supplimental lighting.
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Slashdot ate the last link.
pcp.oxfordjournals.org/content/50/4/684.full
Re:As well they should. (Score:4, Informative)
And the award for misinterpreting research goes to...
Did you actually read the paper? It's about the benefit of adding different kinds of light in strong white light and finds that green helps most in such a situation because the oversaturation of the outer chloroplasts from red and blue light. There are, of course, countless papers out there that show the main actually tested usage of light is poorer for green, including research that cites that paper [usu.edu] (the one I linked found that in some circumstances giving more green light can actually decrease growth - so hey if you like burning more energy to decrease your plants growth...)
home pot growers switching to LEDs in Colorado (Score:2)
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That said, maybe pot is different. I'm probably one of the few people on the planet doing non-commercial indoor plant growing under artificial lights that's *not* pot ;)
Re:As well they should. (Score:4, Informative)
No, that's an announcement for a project to try to invent a way to make one. An announcement most notably short on the "how" aspect.
Any particular reason you linked back to this very article yet gave it a different title that only appears on the internet in your comment?
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Any particular reason you linked back to this very article
He just messed up and made the link relative.
Green Light Drives Leaf Photosynthesis More Efficiently than Red Light in Strong White Light: Revisiting the Enigmatic Question of Why Leaves are Green [oxfordjournals.org]
IANAB, but I think the crux of this article is on the phrase "in strong white light".
Because green light can penetrate further into the leaf than red or blue light, in strong white light,
any additional green light absorbed by the lower chloroplasts would increase leaf photosynthesis to a
greater extent than would additional red or blue light.
So perhaps green light is more effective outdoors, but in an environment only lit by artificial light, green light is probably not the most effective (unless maybe you use both a powerful white light AND a green light?).
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No the OP is correct. Plants use red and blue light for photosynthesis, not green. Green does very little for the plants and in fact very little is absorbed by the plant, some more than others. That's why plants look, um, green. An HPS lamp may work because it puts out sufficient red wavelengths for the plant to absorb. The rest is completely wasted. So yes it works, but not very efficiently. Most of the light just bounces off the plant.
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Just to nuance my answer a bit more... not completely wasted. Fruit, flowers, and other things do absorb other wavelengths. And there are other things in a full spectrum light that probably help the plant too, such as UV, infrared. Light that does bounce off the plant, though, is "wasted" and that is most of the full spectrum light, or the HFS light.
There are several experiments in growing crops in green houses under magenta lighting with success. It's the most efficient way to artificially light plants.
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"There are several experiments in growing crops in green houses under magenta lighting with success. It's the most efficient way to artificially light plants."
No, it's not. Red and blue are more efficiently absorbed AT FIRST. You make the mistake of thinking green light is primarily reflected. What happens is it passes through the leaf tissue and is more efficiently absorbed by the inner chloroplasts.
You can somewhat determine this fluorescence for yourself experimentally. Get a test tube full of extracted
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Also, green light is great for plants. Don't let old science fool you. Why do you think an HPS lamp works so well despite about 80% of its visible light output being green and yellow?
When I GIS "photosynthesis spectrum", I see a million different curves, but they all peak in red and violet-through-blue-green. Even if you don't look at emission and absorption curves, just look at a plant. Its leaves are green. That means that it's reflecting more green light relative to other colors. That should be a clue that green light isn't the most efficient choice for feeding plants. (It's not conclusive, of course; nature's paths aren't always optimized for efficiency.)
Why do HPS lamps work so wel
500 lumen barrier for a while (Score:2)
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http://www.lednews.org/eu-rese... [lednews.org]
Sadly, they're way out of date with their math. We're hitting almost 50% with blue-based white LEDs right now.
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> Red and blue LED light are great for plants, but human eyes are most sensitive to the middle of the visual spectrum, peaking around green
Yellow. The color of the sun. Obviously.
> no technology that produces an efficient green LED
Sigh.
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Yellow. The color of the sun. Obviously.
If that's true, why is it obvious? It's not like we need to be especially sensitive to the colour of the sun. It's pretty hard to miss.
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According to this document [nobelprize.org] from the Nobel committee, white LEDs emit more than 300 lm/W, while CFLs are at 70 lm/W. This suggests white LEDs are more than 4 times as efficient than CFLs.
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To be fair, that 300 lm/w barrier only got breached a few months ago.
But it wouldn't have been possible without the blue LED helping us in figuring out the Auger effect, which is the biggest limitation on LED efficiency right now.
Re:APK is an idiot (Score:2)
What do you have against Android Application Packages?
Electric tape to the rescue (Score:2)
Re:Electric tape to the rescue (Score:5, Funny)
You don't get it: inciting impotent rage is a *feature*. When you feel rage, everything becomes clear. That's *so* much more satisfying than gnawing, existential doubt.
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Yeah, I've got a phone charger that gives a blue light whenever it's plugged in, no matter whether a phone is attached or not, and whether it's actually charging or not. I guess they're afraid I might not find the wall socket in the dark or something. It is utterly useless.
Same thing with a battery charger. I'd like it to indicate whether it's finished charging, but it just indicates that it's plugged in and there are batteries in it. I used to have one that switched between red and green depending on charg
Light pollution, period. (Score:3)
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You mean a LCD screen? The LEDs are the backlight.
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If they're practicing soniluminescence, I'm sure they are, assuming they haven't killed the thing with high-energy sound waves!
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yup, that's the big issue. People need to consume, so a led lamp that lives forever is just totally stupid to make
better put some poor electronics behind it that'll burn out a bit after the warranty expires.
Re:Worst physics nobel (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm just going to put this out there; you must be REALLY ignorant of what the blue LED has done for optics, solid-state lasers, understanding the Auger effect, crop production under artificial lighting, photobiology, understanding the circadian rhythm, and a whole slew of other things if you think this isn't worthy of a Nobel.
This invention SERIOUSLY helped humanity along.
Re:Worst physics nobel (Score:4, Interesting)
I haven't seen any LEDs dying in one or two years. My oldest LED lamp is now 7 years and still excellent. (Doesn't show the kind of degradation that fluorescents often do after a couple of years.) And the cost is dropping fast. A few years ago, I bought a couple of LED bulbs for about $3 each, and they give excellent light.
The really cool thing is that they don't have to be bulbs. LED strips are popular, and can be programmed for different colours or patterns. You can have flat or other surfaces that emit light. The only real problem is that there's no good standard for it yet, so you get lots of different custom solutions with wires all over the place, but I'm sure that problem will eventually be solved, and then we'll have real SciFi lighting in our homes.
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None of them were based out of Harvard.
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If you really want to save resources you have to find a way to reduce the number of people on the Earth.
We already know how to do that: education. Highly educated people tend to have less kids than people with little education. So we need to invest in more accessible education for everybody in the world.
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Can you point to a place where the Nobel site is incorrect? Note that the Prize is for "efficient blue light-emitting diodes", not the first. Also if you look at this document [nobelprize.org] is specifies that the work was in efficient blue LEDs and mentions earlier work on blue LEDs.