
Broken Genius – the case of William Shockley (2013) - jkuria
https://web.archive.org/web/20180905024656/https://rupensavoulian.com/2013/04/05/broken-genius-the-case-of-william-shockley/
======
zik
Shockley was apparently awful to work for and reportedly tried to steal the
credit for Bardeen and Brattain's transistor work. All in all he doesn't seem
to have been a very nice person.

"He (Shockley) called both Bardeen and I in separately, shortly after the
demonstration, and told us that sometimes the people who do the work don’t get
the credit for it."

"Shockley took the lion’s share of the credit in public for the invention of
transistor, which led to a deterioration of Bardeen’s relationship with
Shockley. Bell Labs management however consistently presented all three
inventors as a team. Shockley eventually infuriated and alienated Bardeen and
Brattain, and he essentially blocked the two from working on the junction
transistor."

[https://alixus.wordpress.com/undeserved-nobel-prizes-
transis...](https://alixus.wordpress.com/undeserved-nobel-prizes-
transistor-2/)

Of course the FET transistor was actually invented by Lilienfeld twenty years
earlier and was long since patented. Shockley and team were aware of it and
referenced it in their own work. They were working around Lilienfeld's patent
by doing things slightly differently with the BJT. So awarding Shockley's team
the Nobel Prize for the invention of the transistor seems to overlook poor old
Lilienfeld rather badly.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Edgar_Lilienfeld](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Edgar_Lilienfeld)

And in the end the transistors in your CPU are FETs derived from Lilienfeld's
design, not the BJT of Shockley's team.

~~~
slededit
FETs weren't desirable at the time though - which is why they didn't attain
widespread use. Its very difficult to get linear behavior from a FET and at
that time the primary use of the devices was analogue in linear mode. The BJT
was more than just a patent workaround.

These days we can make linear FETs although they are still rare. Most are
intended to be used in saturation as part of digital circuitry.

~~~
taneq
Ironic that BJTs were developed to work around FETs' undesirable
nonlinearities for analogue systems, while now FETs are used to work around
BJTs' undesirable inefficiency in switchmode use.

Just goes to show that in engineering, "how good is X?" is a meaningless
question without saying what X is used for.

------
j9461701
>Psychologists and biologists currently regard the controversy as outdated,
and speak of the interaction between genes and environment.

As examined at length by Steven Pinker's Blank Slate, they regard the
controversy as outdated because nature won. Definitely. We've found even
enviroment itself is heavily impacted by genetics, as people tend to strongly
self-select what kind of day-to-day conditions they live in.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4739500/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4739500/)

>Shockley, by advocating such genetic-determinist views on race and
intelligence, seemed like an atavistic throwback, to a time in America’s
history when immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe (particularly Jewish
immigrants) were screened out because of their alleged intellectual
inferiority to the superior Nordic races.

Considering the Manhattan project had so many Eastern European jews involved
it was joking referred to as a "Hungarian high school science fair project"
this seems unlikely. But it wouldn't be the first time a racist ostensibly
interested only in 'the biology of intelligence' conspicuously ignored the
Jewish community's intellectual accomplishments.

~~~
cfmcdonald
> As examined at length by Steven Pinker's Blank Slate, they regard the
> controversy as outdated because nature won. Definitely.

How is this supported by your link, whose second bullet point is "No traits
are 100% heritable"?

~~~
j9461701
The state of the field previously was anyone could be anything in the right
enviroment. For example the following quote from John B. Watson:

"Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to
bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to
become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist,
merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents,
penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors."

For many years this blank slate view predominated, on every topic of human
nature. Leading to some tragic results occasionally, such as the case of David
Reimer in which attempts to socialize him as a girl after a botched
circumcision against his will likely contributed to his suicide.

Eventually the evidence became overwhelming that this view was faulty. But
more than that, the wishy washy "everything is nature and nurture all mixing
together" fallback position was although not explicitly wrong profoundly
disingenuous. Who you are is almost entirely contained within your genes, with
a minority contribution from enviroment and parents and schooling. Nature won
the debate, as profoundly as it was ever possible to win it, and it annoys me
seeing equivocation in the discussion of the matter.

~~~
rphlx
> Who you are is almost entirely contained within your genes, with a minority
> contribution from enviroment and parents and schooling. Nature won the
> debate

It would be more precise to say that maximum potential is largely genetic.
Watson was wrong in that sense, but right in the opposite sense: an extremely
bad environment - malnutrition, disease, pollution, very poor or no education,
and so on - can definitely prevent someone from reaching their genetic
potential. Unfortunately, an extremely good environment does not seem to
reliably eliminate a genetic ceiling (for want of a better term) to a similar
extent.

~~~
heavenlyblue
An extremely good environment takes away any sort of existential risk in your
endeavour of life, therefore reducing one’s ability to ever take any sorts of
risks.

In simple words, being born in a lab environment makes one adapted to that lab
environment.

------
kkylin
Off-topic, but for anyone who didn't know, Bardeen really was one of the great
theoretical physicists of the 20th century:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bardeen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bardeen)
. Which makes this all the more remarkable:
[http://www.physics.umd.edu/courses/Phys798S/anlage/Phys798SA...](http://www.physics.umd.edu/courses/Phys798S/anlage/Phys798SAnlageSpring06/Josephson%20Physics%20Today%205153075.pdf)
.

------
jkuria
Saw the movie Blackkklansman yesterday and in the new member induction scene,
he is mentioned as a Klansman and a friend of the grand wizard. I got curious
and did a lil research and sure enough...

------
j7ake
The thing that bothers me about Shockley is how he was actually not that
involved in developing the transistor. Bardeen and Brattain got it working
without much input from Shockley. But once they got it working, Shockley
swooped in and tried to take most of the credit.

That's not how to live life.

------
lordgrenville
A lot of this material is also covered in _The Idea Factory_ , Jon Gertner's
great book about Bell Labs.

------
strken
For some reason, I'm getting a 404.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20180905024656/https://rupensavo...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180905024656/https://rupensavoulian.com/2013/04/05/broken-
genius-the-case-of-william-shockley/)

