[est]

Also QFT

> Although scientifically intriguing, the results won’t immediately result in ultra-efficient commercial LEDs since the demonstration works only for LEDs with very low input power that produce very small amounts of light.

[xtracto]

This reminded me of an Asimov short story about an "experimenter" (engineer?) vs a pure scientist. In the story, a ship was trying to enter Jupiter (IIRC) but needed a "force field". The scientist created a force field... which had one problem: It could only be turned on a very small amount of time before it became unstable (and I think exploded).

The scientist then spend a lot of his time trying to come up with a better force field which could remain active for more time, but he stopped when he realized it was theoretically impossible (and hence, it was impossible to land in Jupiter). Meanwhile, the "experimenter" achieved the impossible after using the already created field, by turning it on-and-of very quickly and thus, preventin it from destabilizing!.

What does it have to do with this? Well, what if we had hundreds of those very dim leds? that might provide usable light.

[rbanffy]

With outputs on the picowatt region, you'd need a couple trillion LED's ;-)

But I agree engineers are weird animals. Often people have no idea of what they are really doing when they say "that can't be done" to one of us.