All Nobel Laureates were announced. They are all American except two, one Romanian German, one Israeli. This is the age of American as far as the Nobel Prize is concerned. Half of the American winners are immigrants, naturalized citizens. Obama is a black horse to win the Peace Prize, a surprise to most people in the world. Even he himself doesn't think he deserves it. Peace Prize is very subjective & political. Some people even interpret this as an award to the American People who after all elected him as the president & so have a foresight & promise to the peace in the future. Now move to the other front. One resident of Mountain View in California won the Physics Prize. Charles Kao is an Electrical Engineer. He is awarded for his work on Fiber Optics. The other two persons share the prize are also Electrical Engineers who worked on Charge Coupled Devices (CCD)that makes modern digital camera possible. The only bad thing is that Kao worked on fiber optics in 1965 & he got the award a little bit late (44 years later) since he already develops some kind of Alzheimer's disease. It is pretty hard for engineers to get Nobel Prize mainly because they usually focus on the application side of the scientific discovery or invention. OSI is the open model used in the communication & network industry. It consists of seven layers: physical, link, network, transport, session, presentation & application. Only the physical layer relates to the device physics and can be a potential candidate of Nobel Prize. In this Internet age, the influence of the Ethernet protocol (link layer) is immense. But it is not in the radar scope of the Nobel Prize. I spent almost two years working on Fibre Channel Storage Network. My works were in the link, network & transport layers & had very little to do with the physical layer. Charles Kao got the prize mainly due to his research on the physical layer. Depending on your career goal, you have to focus on something, after all you only got 24 hours a day. My engineering work on fibre channel has a lot to do with the communication protocols & software. Anyway, I got four patents out of my work.
It is not uncommon for a person to wait 30 years to get the Nobel Prize. For patent, it is not that bad, but still takes time. You may have to wait three years or more to get patent granted. In our Taida days, we used to hear some brilliant classmates set the goal to get Nobel Prize in some distant future. Time flies, the distant future is now. The first one I know is 許貞雄. He was my good old classmate in high school & major in physics. He got his Ph.D from University of Wisconsin & went to Stony Brook to follow 楊振寧 for post-doctoral research. He didn’t stay long before he went back to Taiwan. I asked him about the whole thing several years later. Here is what he said: “Dr. Young is so deep (in thinking or something else) that I lost all my confidence as a research fellow of physics.” He opted to teach in 清華大學 for the rest of his life. In our EE Dept, the most notable candidates are 李純儀 & Amo, both of them are visible & vocal. Lately we haven’t heard anything from 李純儀 about his ambition. However, Amo is still pursuing. We should proudly cheer: “Carry on, Dr. Amo.”
6 comments:
In order to be nominated as Nobel Prize candidate, one has to be recommended by a certain group of people. It is not a competition since there is no application to be submitted. This is the reason why the Nobel Prize winner is called Nobel Laureate. As we know it is not uncommon for one to wait 30 years to get the prize. I think there is some reason behind it. Very often a new finding or invention my not be obvious to become influential. It may take several years to mature & impact the society. However, a lot of times the prizes were awarded too soon and later proved contrary to the original intention of the awards. This is especially true in the cases of Economics Award. The latest example was the award to Merton & Scholes in 1997 for their work on option trading & pricing formula. The trouble of hedge funds around 2000 & the last year’s crash related to the derivatives trading are directly caused by the operation based on the work of Merton & Scholes. They sure make a big mess in the world financial market & doom the financial future of a lot of people. In fact, a lot of time the economists don’t know what they are talking about & a lot of their predictions prove to be wrong later. Because of this, many people think this award should be abolished. I think the other way to solve the problem is that no Economics Prize should be awarded within 15 years or longer after the original work is done.
I would like to congratulate Mark Lin's 4 patents. They must be great contributions and all of your classmates are proud of you. I hope that some day when our classmates get togther, we can devote one day or two to hear volunteers talk about their accomplishments in life. So far, I heard only four in detail: Gus Chang's CMOS invention, AJ Chen's remote sensing center at NCU, Amo's solution to Einstein-Boris-Podolsky paradox, and Chen Ho Wu's story at his Leotek Electronics Corp. Everyone of them was very exciting. There must be much much more.
What Mark Lin's invention must have something to do with one of the mysteries I am always wondering. How could we have so many channels to transmit the you-tube video free of charge? My impression not long ago was that the channels were so limited that TV companies had to fight for them. Consider the volume of you-tube transmission, the total must be equivalent to millions of TV channels. How could this be possible?
As to Nobel prize in economics, I agree that it is not as precise as physics, chemistry and medicine, but it is as important. The results in physics and chemistry are basically deterministic (not at quantum level) reactions, but economics is a action-reaction game played by human beings. Without a good understanding of people's ration and emotion driven reaction, civilization may not last. Economics is one of the most serious pursues on human behavior.
One point on the economica prize, it may be a little political. I think Deng Xiao-Ping should be awarded the prize. Among all the theorists, there should be some practioners. Deng was the one who knew how to do economics.
MarkYang has a point. Human history in large part is driven by Economics. It is 經濟 in mandarin. In a larger sense, it can be called 民生. The crumble of the communism is not due to religion, patriotism, nationalism or political system, it is mainly due to the Economics. Deng might deserve the Nobel Prize due to his revised economic policy. But in the meantime, he got penalized in TianAnMen Square event. The timing was wrong for him. In history, one has to do thing well at the right place & at the right time in order to be successful.
As to the mystery of YouTube stuff, it is the Protocol. In radio & television, the communication is broadcast, it is one to all. It monopolizes the channel or bandwidth. In the internet, it is not one to all, it is distributed access. The most popular protocol is CSMA/CD, Carrier Sense, Multiple Access with Collision Detection. It is very much like our verbal conversation. Everybody in the room senses no one is talking, they start opening mouth to talk. It is first come first serve. If for some reason, two persons talk simultaneously, both of them sense the noise & back off. Now the line is quiet, so it is everyone’s chance to get on to the line again. The protocol specifies the back off time a random number, so it is very unlikely to get collision next time. In ectronics all of the above occur in a very short period of time, in sub microsecond range. In other words, million of people can talk without trouble. The another factor of the protocol is the length of the access. One only gets a specified max time to talk. After that you have to stop & relinquish the line so the others can have a fair access. Since one hasn’t finished the talking, one has to separate his message into several sentences or paragraphs. In internet, this is called a packet. A packet contains preamble that identifies who owns it & the order of the paragraphs so eventually the receiver can reassemble the packets into a full session of the talk. The physical layer of the OSI assures the electronic signal to pass through. The link layer supervises the CSMA/CD protocol. The network layer is the internet router to be sure the packets go to the right party. The transport layer is responsible for partition & reassemble of the packets into a full session of the communication. The application layer is some software like Email Service, Google Search or File/Photo Attachment Service etc. This is just a general concept of how the whole thing works. The truth story is really tedious & complicate. All things happen in microsecond range. Internet used to run at 10 megabit/second. Now it is common to have 1 or even 10 gigabit/second. This is the reason high tech companies have to work on new microprocessor & ASICs every year to keep up with the new demand of faster Internet. When we access the video clips of YouTube, it looks real time & happens immediately. Sometime you see the video assembled in multiple layers slowly. This is the time it goes through transport layer & reassembles the packets in sequence & order. Anyway, it is a miracle to most people that so much logic can be done with so short of time. We, the electrical engineers, understand the intricacy of the hardware, software & their interactions in such a high speed fashion that make things work almost instantly. For us it is not a miracle, it is the triumph of the human intelligence.
Indeed, getting a U.S. patent is certainly a great achievement and a recorded one. I am sure many of our classmates have that. After all, we have a bunch of high achievers in our class. As in Nobel Prize, there are countless great people who did not get the Nobel recognition simply because whose contributions to our modern civilization did not fall into the Nobel categories; there are countless inventors who did not get a patent or did not even bother to apply for one. Those classmates who had ever worked on classified projects would know that under the umbrella of secrecy no invention can be filed for patent and no discovery can be published until it is declassified. In the non-classified world, many companies do not file their inventions for patents due to the dependencies on specific technologies which could quickly become obsolete. As Mark Lin mentioned it takes about 3 years for the patent bureau to grant a patent, so if a technology is projected to become obsolete shortly why bother to file patents based on it, as long as you can keep your inventions secret for the duration of your market window. A lot of small specialty technology companies operate that way. Any U.S. patent is an asset that a company can leverage in all sorts of dealings. I think in terms of revenue generated by patent royalty, IBM probably is at the top. Well, the above are from my humble personal experience.
On Deng Shao-Ping, I don’t think he cared about Nobel Prize. It is not like if you don’t get the Nobel, you are no good.
Wei Chen is right in most of his comment. If most of us really tried hard, we should have a lot more patents granted. While we work in the high tech industry, we tend to focus on our work in meeting deadlines, passing alpha, beta tests etc. We very often fail to file applications for patents & some of us work in the aerospace industry may not have chances to file applications. I have to admit that most patents I got are just the records of my work in the high tech industry. I don’t feel that they are the earth-shaking inventions worth of congratulation.
As to Mr. Deng, I think he deserves the prize of being a brilliant Bridge player.
I would like thank Mark Lin for his explanation of the high speed transmission in internet. The method makes sense. Though it works, it is still hard to believe. The other two phenomena are also hard to believe, although I know the physics behind them.
One is how can a large airplane such as Boeing 747 fly. This is not only my doubt. A few decades ago, several experts in aerodynamics calculated the weight that an airplane could possibly lift was much much smaller than what we see today.
Another one is, with three thin wire, tremedous power can be transmitted from the power plant to a city. See how much power a city requires. It can be transmitted by the movements of the electrons in the thin wires. It is unbelievable.
To see more technological miracles is one of the main reasons that we wish to live longer.
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