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tournesol_bot Bot ,
@tournesol_bot@jlai.lu avatar

This video is recommended by Tournesol:
[33🌻] Veritasium: Why It Was Almost Impossible to Make the Blue LED

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LemmyExpert ,

Testing

Agent641 ,

Making blue LEDs is easy. Just make a red one, then move towards it really fast.

lemmesay ,
@lemmesay@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

Doppler effect?

Sentau ,

Yeah but it only works if the source is moving towards the observer

mikezeman ,

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshift#Blueshift

Essentially yes

doctorcrimson ,

Weren't PN Junctions covered in basic chemistry? How is this content showing up in feeds here and on YT, is the average person really such a moron?

friendlymessage ,

How about you actually watch the video and find out?

doctorcrimson ,

Nah I'm good.

stephen01king ,

You just answered your own question.

doctorcrimson ,

It really doesn't, my question is why this content is getting pushed so hard. I suppose it's just another day in the life decided by algorithms.

friendlymessage ,

It's not getting pushed, it's being liked. Because it's informative and entertaining. Simple really.

doctorcrimson ,

There is a ton of entertaining and informative content that doesn't show up in multiple separate feeds for me. Because it doesn't get pushed by the algorithms.

UndercoverUlrikHD ,

No, it's just really niche knowledge that most people have no use learning

scarabic ,

If it was so hard to make the first one that hundreds of researchers couldn’t do it for years… then how is it so cheap and easy to do today?

5in1k ,

Scale.

smileyhead ,

I don't get the dislikes, it is a great question.
But as someone above, I think the cost was to dicover a way to make blue LED at all and make it scalable, then it's just like any other product.

scarabic ,

Thanks - and yeah I absolutely pre-suppose that much. I was just hoping for a more specific answer. There could be just as interesting of a story about how it went from prototype —> ubiquity. I personally don’t just wave that process off and say “meh economies of scale.” Production scaling is often quite innovative too. And many lab innovations die on the vine because they can’t cross this chasm. So the fact that this one could, after being such a holy grail for so long, is something I would love to understand more.

downhomechunk ,
@downhomechunk@midwest.social avatar

I didn't watch this, but i bet technology connections video about blue Christmas lights is more entertaining!

Leviathan ,

Which one? The man can't stop making videos about blue Christmas lights!

Zanshi ,

All of them! I like Veritasium though, not every video is a banger but this one definitely is

Damdy ,

Haven't watch the video yet, but I remember how impressed my step dad was with the blue LED when we got our PlayStation 2. I was like, yeah great whatever let's play games, at the time.

Lanky_Pomegranate530 ,
@Lanky_Pomegranate530@midwest.social avatar

Here is an Odysee Link for those that don't want to give youtube support.

porkchop ,

Just a PSA for those who don’t know… no shade against Odysee… I’ve just encountered folks here who don’t know this:

Veritassium and many others on YouTube make their living by the advertising shown on YT. If you’re a premium member, even more money goes to the creator when you watch their content. It’s this very money that allows independent creators to create more / better content!

SuperSpruce ,

I wish he posted his stuff on Nebula as well. His stuff totally fits the vibe of the platform, and would potentially make him even more money.

SeabassDan ,

So they get more from the subscription fee without ads than they from the ad revenue? Many also have their own sponsors, right?

porkchop ,

Yes to both!

Atemu ,
@Atemu@lemmy.ml avatar

If they weren't comfortable with not getting YT ad revenue, they wouldn't be uploading their content to alternative sites.

Relying on YT as the gatekeeper to your entire livelihood also has a cost. It's not trivial to calculate but I imagine it's greater than the loss of AdSense money. There's a reason many people who rely on video content creation to survive hedge through the likes of Nebula, Floatplane or, indeed, Odyssey.

Clanket ,

That was an excellent watch, thanks for sharing.

YouTube is horrendous for ads though.

Shard ,

Revanced

Bronco1676 ,

I aint downloading a two year old microg gmscore apk 💀

boywar3 ,

You thinking of Vanced? Revanced is updated pretty regularly

Bronco1676 ,

No when I patch youtube, it wants me to download this 2 year old gmscore build:

https://github.com/TeamVanced/VancedMicroG/releases

boywar3 ,

Ah gotcha

JohnEdwa ,
@JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz avatar

That's required for the non-root installation to login to YouTube, yeah. If you are rooted you can modify the patch list and remove microg.

linuxPIPEpower ,

I freaking hate blue LEDs.

I actively avoid buying anything with a blue LED because they are so obnoxious. So bright. Why do I want to read by the light of my HDD? Does this video explain why they have to be like that?

Maybe if you have a separate wing of the mansion to do computing stuff it is not annoying. But if like a lot of people you have electronics in your living space, these lights are extremely disruptive.

It seems that can't really be dimmed.. I had to give up on a couple of blue backlit alarm clocks because there is no way that the time can be visible without illuminating the whole area around them.

For whatever reason, red is the best one. I would prefer another color aesthetically. For whatever reason, red is the only color that does what it has to do and nothing more.

https://discuss.tchncs.de/pictrs/image/7839d9c9-adad-46ba-ba51-b8e460cbc08b.png

WillBalls ,

This is actually a biological phenomenon that most humans experience! Our eyes are more attuned to greens and blues rather than reds, so green and blue light appear brighter as the cones in our eyes are more sensitive to those colors. Similarly, our cones are less sensitive to red so it appears darker.

There's also a physics component to this as well since red light has about half the energy (twice the wavelength) as blue light. However, since there's a difference in energy, the engineer must take that into account when designing multicolor LED applications so as to keep a level light intensity when changing or blending colors.

Here's an eli5 question with some more info: https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ghx9g6/eli5_why_does_red_light_seem_darker/?rdt=58820

FiFoFree ,

If you own anything with "white" LEDs, I have some bad news for you...

lud ,

Or reading this on anything except an e-reader or if someone else printed it out on a printer without blue leds first.

linuxPIPEpower ,

Luckily my device screens can all be turned off, closed, put face down and otherwise turned off when not in use. Unlike indicator lights on the routers, APs, HDDs, PCs, mice, powerbars, extension cords, radios, headphones, USB cables, ACs, microwaves etc etc etc. Either totally unnecessary to have a light in the first place, or a subtle light could do the job just as well.

Krudler ,

I'm the guy that takes an awl and literally shatters them, or I will just place tape over top if they are recessed too far.

Front facing LEDs are a menace.

Clent ,

Excellent counter example to anyone claiming that we need patent and copyright to innovate.

This man made nothing on his invention and was not motivated by money but fame.

There are endless of examples of how those who do things for money hold back the creativity that leads to innovation. This is one of them. It almost didn't happen because his pursuit was not seen as profitable.

faultyproboscus ,

Sure, but the company fronted the millions of dollars required to develop the technology. The investment needs to come from somewhere.

That doesn't have to be a private company, though. We need public funding that retains the patent rights, if not just to make the invention free from licensing costs to manufacture.

The insane thing about our current system is that we do have public funding, but private companies wind up with the patent anyway

Clent ,

The company didn't invent it. A person did. The company almost stopped it from being invented. They didn't spend millions inventing this. A person spent tens of thousands of hours inventing it.

That the funding is only available from a company is a result of the patent system. It does not spur development, it perverts it. Any ideas to the contrary are propaganda.

People have been inventing shit longer than corporations have existed. People have been inventing things without any guarantee on return on investment for most of human history.

Capitalism is bullshit and the capitalization of ideas harms humanity.

lud ,

Maybe they didn't invent it. But he wouldn't and couln't have invented it without them.

Someone would have invented it eventually though.

Clent , (edited )

Correct. With or with patents and with or without copyright, it eventually would have been invented.

Edit: Curious if you watched the full video. It clearly indicates that all corporate efforts were heading in an opposite direction and that the path this inventor took was considered to be not profitable and not worth the investment by everyone else working on this. The company he worked for wanted to shut down his research and focus on following the herd. No one else was close to his level of progress and capitalist interests almost scuttled this invention.

lud , (edited )

Yes, I watched the video. Inventing stuff is obviously very expensive and I doubt anyone could have done it without being financed in some way.

Why are you so sure that the eventually hypothetical inventor wouldn't have patented it? Inventing is expensive and one would presumably want to make the millions spent on the project back and isn't your time worth anything?

I am happy that the invention wasn't delayed considering how much it has changed the world.

Kedly ,

I mean, the video even showed that there WERE notable people other than him travelling down the same path, his first few leaps were copied off them, he just figured out the last few himself

LarmyOfLone ,

Yeah it's pretty bad and nobody talks about it. Nobody researches the effects of patents on our global civilization. I suspect the practical role of patents is to actually retard innovation - something gets improved or invented or most of the time just engineered to work better and monopolization or just paperwork makes it too expensive for wide spread adoption. This in turn helps prevents disruptive technology from making large scale investments obsolete - instead of having to adopt and improve your factories you can continue as before because any innovation will be slow and also priced to be around as expensive as existing solutions. Or the patent can just be bought. And even if an inventor has noble intentions, starting manufacturing yourself is a totally different skill set so like most startups often fails and then the patent gets sold off. Innovation becomes a commodity.

This is my logical conclusion but it's speculative. I suspect researching negative effects of patents is a somewhat "taboo" topic for scientists to research.

In regards to climate change this becomes... genocidal. We have hundreds of thousands of industrial processes that rely on fossil fuels or certain levels of energy. With all the before mentioned effects this basically made a timely response to climate change impossible. Every little improvement to existing processes is patented and maximized for profit. Basically we never had a chance.

VindictiveJudge ,
@VindictiveJudge@lemmy.world avatar

This man made nothing on his invention and was not motivated by money but fame.

And then he sued the company for $20 million because the CEO didn't want to respect his efforts and stiffed him.

Clent ,

And the amount he actually won only covered the legal fees, so he made nothing.

VindictiveJudge ,
@VindictiveJudge@lemmy.world avatar

And if he had been granted a patent for his invention, he would have been fairly compensated for his work by being able to license production to companies that had the means to make them at scale. OP seems to think this scenario is an example of how patents should be abolished, but it's a perfect example of why we have them in the first place. And that reason is so that rich people don't fuck over comparatively poor inventors.

Clent , (edited )

Your cognitive dissonance is why we cannot improve this system. Patents cannot both be responsible for his lack of profit from his invention and how he would have been fairly compensated.

Patents do exists and we was not fairly compensated, therefore patent do not solve their intended problem.

We live in this reality. Not whatever rose colored version you think could exist if we just get the correct tweaks in place.

At some point we need to stop trying to adapt the concepts people came up with hundreds of years ago. Created in a world that no longer resembles our own.

Consider how contentious the issue was that they redefined to included it in the constitution. The consider what other contentious issues were also included in that same document, i.e. the three fifths compromise.

Atemu ,
@Atemu@lemmy.ml avatar

Parents do exists

Phew, was scared there for a second.

KyuubiNoKitsune ,

The first blue LED I ever saw was on the dashboard of my mom's VW Golf. I always wanted one like that, but now they're everywhere!

https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/pictrs/image/f4bfae54-3e08-4691-8926-c592cb8d6bc6.jpeg

JoMomma ,

Goodbye night vision

KyuubiNoKitsune ,

Agreed, though the original wasn't as bright as the one in the pic. It was a frosted LED and was relatively dim.

JoMomma ,

I like my car dashboard like I like my 1952 F-86 Saber night variant gauges... Orange

nicerdicer ,

Before there were blue LED, the indicator light for full beam was a blue tinted incandescent bulb. My parents had a Volkswagen Passat from the 1980s (?) where the usually blue indicator light for full beam was a green LED, since blue ones were not invented back then.

KyuubiNoKitsune ,

Very interesting. I think my mom bought her car in 1996

rob_t_firefly , (edited )
@rob_t_firefly@lemmy.world avatar

My favorite thing about widely-available blue LEDs was the effect on TV scifi.

Watch the Star Trek shows made in the 1980s and 1990s and the tricorders, alien gadgets, and other props were always twinkling with red, yellow, and green LEDs to look futuristic. A generation later and every single hand prop on 2000s Doctor Who, Torchwood, etc. glowed and twinkled blue because the LEDs had just become cheap enough for prop makers, but weren't yet widespread in day-to-day life so the viewers were seeing something strange and unusual.

Now every color of LED imaginable is just common and whatever, but for a good stretch of time glowy blue became the standard "scifi" color just because that particular tech happened to turn up at that particular time.

aStonedSanta ,

Purple still seems to be a tough one for most rgb devices I’ve used lol

filcuk ,

They're still rgb plus maybe yw using colour mixing, so depending on the quality, tuning, physics and our perceptionof light, not all colours are as nice or bright.

aStonedSanta ,

Yeah. I just think being RgB it would be good at purple 😂
One of those situations where the name was probably not created based on logic lol

Alto ,
@Alto@kbin.social avatar

It's called RGB because there's a red, green, and blue diode. Not sure how that's not a logical name.

aStonedSanta ,

Oh I was making a joke cause it sucks at purple. Which is red and blue combined generally. But that’s not really how the RGB color cycle works as far as I understand in some extremely cursory Wikipedia reading lol

Alto ,
@Alto@kbin.social avatar

IIRC, it has something to do with the fact that purple sort of doesn't actually exist. As I understand, purple is basically your brain going "idk wtf it is but it's not green"

aStonedSanta ,

lol my favorite color would be a weird one. 😂

Alto ,
@Alto@kbin.social avatar

Right there with you.

More specifically, it's because purple fires your red and blue cones, but not the green one. Normally, as green is between red and blue, anything that would trigger those two also would trigger green. So when it doesn't, that's when your brain goes "well I guess it's not green???"

T156 ,

I'm not sure that LEDs were the thing that kicked off the trend. They made it easier to implement, but even in the 80s and 90s, you had things like Tron that might have kicked off the futuristic look with neon lines/tubes.

RampantParanoia2365 ,

9's sonic screwdriver

sagrotan ,
@sagrotan@lemmy.world avatar

I took a blue sharpie on my white LED - voilà

paholg ,

Your white led is a blue led with a phosphorescent coating.

Everythingispenguins ,

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/81a1c61d-bf2e-489b-a49d-d18e2b9ec80f.jpeg

NikkiDimes , (edited )

Well no, but...yeah sure why not haha

Edit: Read the comment I replied to completely backwards nvm, am dumb lol

xthexder ,
@xthexder@l.sw0.com avatar

It literally is. They even covered that in the post's video.

NikkiDimes ,

Sorry, I totally misread the comment I replied to, disregard haha

JATtho ,

This was an yet another glorious episode from veritasium.

I hope we get well past UVC LEDs. (i.e., shorter wavelengths) UV LEDs are already available. Unfortunately, this progress will stop before X-ray light. With +1 KeV energy, you pretty much must blast off the electrons from the atoms to emit X-rays, which an x-ray tube already does. Or by peeling off a piece of scotch tape.

FlyingSquid ,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

Maybe making X-ray emitters cheap enough to put in a flashlight isn't the best idea anyway.

JATtho ,

Maybe not in a flashlight, but the scientific industry would be very pleased with them. Sterilize water and all surfaces in a second? Flash with 200nm light.

heckypecky ,

Handheld battery powered X-ray devices exist and are widely available. I used to work with those. In Germany you need a permit to operate them. https://www.thermofisher.com/order/catalog/product/de/en/XL2

Hamartiogonic ,
@Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz avatar

What’s wrong with the current UV tubes? Sure, the smaller ones take about 5-10 W to get the job done, so maybe an LED version would be more efficient. If you’re using UV to keep a massive pool clean, then you’re obviously going to be need more of those bulbs, and they can add up to hundreds of watts quite easily. Is that really a big problem though? Having a pool isn’t cheap, so electricity spent on UV probably isn’t going to be your main concern. Making it cheaper is always welcome, but are UV tubes really that big of a problem?

areyouevenreal ,

I mean they aren't instant and have to be within a fairly short distance of the thing you want to sterilize in order to work because they are absorbed by the air. Something like a pool would be practically impossible as water also absorbs UV and a pool is too big to penetrate all the way through just from the sides or bottom. It only works for drinking water because you pass said water through a tube that must be fairly narrow.

Oh yeah and an X-ray could sterilize all the way through an object, not just the surface. Very useful for making things like microwave meals.

SatansMaggotyCumFart ,

How about cheap enough to put in a fleshlight?

FlyingSquid ,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

If you have a bone in your penis, you may not be fully human.

Otherwise, don't x-ray your penis.

SatansMaggotyCumFart ,

X-rays use invisible electromagnetic energy beams to produce images of internal tissues, bones, and organs on film or digital media.

Good advice, but I put a Kleenex in my urethra for safekeeping and I'd love to track it down to get it out again.

southsamurai ,
@southsamurai@sh.itjust.works avatar

Amateur. It's in the scrotum along with all the pee.

ikapoz ,

Next time you have to fart just squeeze your butt cheeks together real hard. It’ll pop right out.

SatansMaggotyCumFart ,

The fart?

ikapoz ,

You tell me. Your user name suggests some expertise.

FiFoFree ,

/c/flashlight sends its regards

lud ,

D4V2 x-ray edition when?

TonyTonyChopper ,
@TonyTonyChopper@mander.xyz avatar

More efficient compact X-ray generators would be pretty huge for science work. We run the diffractometer in my lab at 2 kW and it still takes hours to get a good quality scan

ColeSloth ,

Get past uvc for what purpose?

collapse_already ,

I imagine that lithography for integrated circuits would be an application, assuming you could make an appropriate photo-resist. The shorter the wavelength, the smaller the possible feature size. Current lithography relies on constructive and destructive interference between wavelengths to create super small features.

ColeSloth ,

As far as "light" it's already capped out, then. Going shorter there's only x-ray and then Gamma ray. Gamma ray lithography sounds bad-ass and dangerous.

JATtho ,

Gamma rays have so much energy that they are basically emitted only by nuclear processes, as far as I know.

ColeSloth ,

Until we stick it in an led!

I guess past the uv range we should just call them ED, but then you only think about erectile dysfunction.

nyakojiru ,
@nyakojiru@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Sorry sir I have no idea what you are talking about

Mo5560 ,

  1. Light = energy, shorter wavelengths= higher energy. Blue light has a shorter wavelength than red light. UV has even more energy. X-Rays have a lot more energy. For reference in the visible spectrum were talking about maybe 1-4 eV (this may be wrong, I'm too drunk to look it up rn).

  2. If we want to produce light, the aim is to find an energy gap that has the exact energy gap that corresponds to the wavelength we're interested in. Typically this corresponds to an electronic transition, i.e. an electron "jumps" into a higher orbital, on its way down it will emit the energy difference as light.

2.1 X-Rays rn are produced by accelerating electrons onto a metal plate with high voltage. The impact of the electron "rips" out an electron in the close vicinity of the nucleus. Another electron will take the place of that electron, the energy gap associated with that process is large, which is why it produces X-Rays.

  1. If we want to produce LEDs that emit in the far UV range we have to find large energy gaps in materials which is difficult. We still have to have a way to get the electron across the energy gap using electricity.

  2. X-Ray LEDs are probably not realistic, as the energy of x-rays is so large that we have to rip out electrons from the close vicinity of the nucleus... which is already what we're doing with X-ray tubes.

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