Jason Crawford

Now they wanted to go back to theory to explain why something unexpectedly succeeded.

And they came back to a concept that had already existed, but that had not been emphasized, which is the concept of minority carriers.

So if you know a little bit about silicon and semiconductors, you know that there's two types of silicon, there's N-type and P-type, which we create through doping the silicon, meaning creating very tiny impurities of elements like boron and phosphorus.

N-type silicon has an excess of electrons, and so negative charge flows through it very easily.

P-type is positive, and it has a deficiency of electrons, and positive charge flows through it more easily.

But it's possible for positive charge to flow through N-type and for negative charge to flow through P-type.

And this is known as minority carriers, the positive charges or negative charges flowing through the area where they're not the majority.

Now, it was known that this could happen, but it wasn't known how important this effect was.

And so the researchers at Bell Labs sort of resurrected the theory or gave new emphasis to the theory of minority carriers and realized that it was affecting things more than they thought it would.

And on this basis, Shockley actually went and designed the junction transistor, a different design for the transistor that depended on these minority carriers and that became the design that they actually ran with and scaled up.

So they were really shuttling back and forth here between science and invention.

And I have to, just looking at this, I have to wonder, if they hadn't been doing this

invention, if they hadn't been trying to make a transistor or other solid-state electronic components, how long would it have taken pure physics to get around to investigating surface states?

Would physics ever have realized the importance of minority carriers?

Maybe.

Maybe not.

Maybe it would have taken a long time.

Maybe technology had to get out in front here and point the way.

kind of get out ahead and then pull science along behind it.

And so I'm going to go out on a bit of a limb here and suggest that maybe technology actually can't wait for science.