Shuji Nakamura, the researcher who developed the blue light LED, was
awarded Finland's Millennium Technology Prize. He certainly deserves it! See:
http://www.millenniumprize.fi/index.php?m=2&s=10&id=730
"The Millennium Technology Prize is Finland's recognition for
innovators that aim to improve quality of life.
The prize has been established to steer the course of technological
development to a more humane direction."
Naturally, if cold fusion succeeds anyone working in the field will
deserve this prize, but the prize is awarded to people who actually
have produced practical, working device that is widely used. That is
perfectly reasonable. In the last 20 years, I cannot think of anyone
who has done more for people worldwide than Nakamura. The blue light
LED lead to the white light version. (To simplify, this is because
red and green LEDs already existed, and blue was all that was missing
to make white light.) Not only is this invention now bringing light
to one third of the human race that lacks electric-power and
illumination, it will also vastly reduce worldwide energy consumption
in first world and Third World countries. Nakamura has probably done
more to alleviate poverty and reduce energy consumption than all of
the environmentalist do-gooders tied together. I include myself in
that group, by the way. We have good intentions but -- let's face it
-- we are largely ineffective.
Nakamura may even be more effective than Bill Gates, who is the most
generous philanthropist toward the Third World in history.
Nakamura is an angry fellow at times, and he wrote a scathing book
about the plight of innovators in Japanese society, in Japanese,
titled "Ikari no bureikusuruu" (A Breakthrough in Anger), Shuueisha,
2001. I recommend it. I have told him I would be willing to
translated it, but he has not responded. If you Google "Shuji
Nakamura" you will probably find one of his outbursts in English. One
article that comes up is titled, "Shuji Nakamura: Inventor & Pariah,"
which is an apt title.
I doubt that any living cold fusion researcher will ever be awarded
anything other than the Frozen Boot, but if they are, I expect they
will drip so much ire, they will make Nakamura look friendly in
comparison. (A friend of mine who lived in Stalinist Russia said
people there used to talk about "getting the Frozen Boot" from the
authorities. When you got it hard enough you would be booted all the
way to frozen Siberia, or the basement of the Lubyanka prison. One
person who ended up in the Lubyanka was told: "we know you are
innocent but we have to meet quota, so we added you to this month's list.")
- Jed
