 It's certainly a gigantic honor. It represents recognition by my professional peers, which certainly makes me feel wonderful. It's also a recognition of the discovery that I made. Sometimes you discover something and nobody else thinks it's great, or they don't... What have you discovered? That doesn't seem like anything. It did indeed take a while for it to be recognized as being somewhat distinctive. And that's a bit of the frustrating part. Why can't they see what I see? I seem to stumble across things that are really rather obvious in hindsight, and my colleagues are sometimes unwilling to accept them, or it's too simple, or it would have been discovered before if it was important. It can't possibly be written, and that has happened to me over and over again. And the more significant the discovery, it seems to be greater the resistance to have it accepted. So in a way, the rewards are finally a vindication, because they say, okay, now it's accepted. Now people accept that this is an important idea. I sat down and interviewed my mother. She told me all sorts of things, including how they got out of Russia, which wasn't easy. And I can now begin to understand my childhood, which was my parents had all their friends, and it was basically a bunch of Russian ladies who had married Polish men. And the reason they ended up in Canada is that the Polish citizens could go back to Poland, and there was a brief interval in Poland in mid-1946 where the government was not a communist government yet, and they were letting anyone leave who wanted to leave. My parents ended up in a refugee camp, which was a former German army barracks near Salzburg, and that's where I was born. When my parents had the opportunity finally to emigrate from Europe, they went to Canada, and we ended up on a ship called the Royal Stewart. I was about one and a half years old, crawling around on the ship, and my mother tells me that I would test every bolt on the ship to see if I could undo it. And that's what I did. There was no bolt on the ship that was safe for me, and so already you could tell that I was going to be an experimentalist and maybe an engineer. My mother was quite well educated for her time. She was a college graduate and was a schoolteacher. On the other hand, my father came from a very poor family with very limited opportunities for education. He learned to be a tailor. He was very good with his hands, so undoubtedly I must have inherited that from him as I became an experimentalist. Well, I wasn't quite eleven and a Sputnik happened, and that had a very big impact in the United States and Canada, everywhere. People were both impressed and very, very worried, what does this mean? I was a mere child, and it was clear that my parents and their friends and their friends regarded this as a very, very important event and also a very important scientific threshold. And I remember thinking to myself, wow, my parents are really impressed with this. Maybe there's something to this science stuff. Maybe I should go into this science stuff. They seem to respect it very highly. I was a wild and crazy hobbyist experimenter. I experimented with rockets. So it was quite a variety of different hobbies, experiments, different kinds of, just science, just left and right. So I entered college. I was at McGill University with every intention of honoring in chemistry. And the chemistry professor said, we're going to do the basics of chemistry and we're going to start with Schrodinger's equation. Well, my mind was not prepared as a freshman for Schrodinger's equation, and my mind rebelled. It didn't make any sense. And as a result, I barely, I just barely passed the course. I had almost a failing grade in the course because my mind could not assimilate all these concepts. And I was despondent because my dreams of becoming a scientist were dead. Well, they would not accept me into chemistry. They wouldn't let me honor in chemistry. And so what choice did I have? I went over to the physics department, and they were much more liberal. And they said, well, we don't care about this chemistry grade. You know, let's see how you do. And of course, not everybody went all the way through, was able to honor in physics. But I found physics very, very easy because it was logical. Unlike the chemistry, which was illogical, you cannot start with Schrodinger's equation. The subject doesn't make any sense. With physics, I didn't have to study because everything made common sense. And you could just build it up yourself. And then I went on, and I had a very good education. The science education, the physics education in Canada was superb. And it gave me some great opportunities to develop myself, including the summer job where you're surrounded by scientists. I mean, this is a fantastic experience. Of course, that was the formative experience. I look back to my assignment then. The MOSFET transistor had just been perfected to the point where it was commercial. And I was in a nuclear physics lab and told to make some circuits. And they said, here, try these new transistors. But be very careful. They're sensitive to static electricity. In those days, one transistor cost $50, which was a huge amount of money back then. And of course, I paid no mind to the static electricity. I immediately ruined one. And it was OK. It was OK. And now I tell my students, if you don't break anything, you haven't done it right. It means you haven't taken sufficient risks. And so it's part of the physics education. And what society invested in me, so I went and looked back after my PhD. And all the equipment I had bought and the facilities and so forth, just to bring me to the point of having a PhD, society had already spent about $1 million on me. And that represents a somewhat rather forward thing. That's just a very advanced society to realize that this was an important thing to do. The big industrial labs were sending recruiters to the universities. And they said to any bright young people around. And they said, oh, well, here's someone. Please come for an interview at Bell Labs. I interviewed at various places. And it was a real cross-examination, the interview. There was a scientist there who was very famous. He always found fault with every speaker. And 10 minutes into my interview presentation, he said, well, this is wrong. And I answered very curiously, well, it looks wrong. It was actually right. And then he bothered me again. And I answered very curiously. And then around the midpoint of my interview, he came up with another objection. And I answered, as anyone who's ever read the famous paper by Keldish would know, and that put him in his place. And apparently, that won it for me. That was the, OK. He held his own against tough criticism. The beauty of that period of time, which we cannot reproduce today, which is not available to the young people today, is that the great industrial research labs gave more freedom than you'd have academic freedom. Just to give an example, when I joined Bell Labs, it was, OK, instead of them telling me what to do, it was, what would you like to do, and how can we help you? And that's a little bit hard to find. But it was a great opportunity to grow. The only drawback is it was rather inward-looking. When I joined them, it was called the Bell Labs. They thought they were the only ones. And that was rather ingrown. So that was a great experience to go elsewhere. He said, no, there's great stuff being done other places, too. And there's new people to learn from and a whole new areas of science to explore. And I've had a diversity of experiences. I've worked at three universities and three industrial research labs. I have always tried to cover all of science between the following limits. I would not go into high energy physics and I would not go into biology. But everything in between, all the chemistry, the low energy physics, all of those things, I felt I was duty-bound to try to learn about. So I've been fortunate enough to have the opportunity to work in different areas, but always doing things that I was interested in. And I'm usually interested in the simplest things that surround us. When it came, for example, to work on solar cells, we were always trying to improve the solar cells. But there was a thought that they could be improved by trapping the light internally. And I found that you could improve the light absorption by approximately 50 times. 50 or 50 times, that's a huge effect. And it was kind of irresistible. And it was, I regard, a big discovery, but it took many years for it to be accepted as valid. But it's today, it's in every solar panel. That's one opportunity I had. I think the next great opportunity I had was to look with fresh eyes on the problem of making a laser and how that could be changed. And people had just started thinking about manipulating the band structure of the electron bands in a semiconductor and what would strain do. And I heard about this. I said, wait a minute, strain. I can use that to make lasers better. There's a problem in lasers that needs to be solved. It can be solved with strain. And that sort of fell into my lap. But when I went to the people who made lasers, I said, oh, strain, are you crazy? That'll ruin our lasers. We don't want that. So that also took a little while to be accepted. It was a very creative period for me because it was only a year later that I was thinking about inhibited spontaneous emission and how we could make periodic dielectric structures in what we call today photonic crystals, how we could use them to control spontaneous emission. And that turned out to be a very fruitful scientific area. And with applications but also an idea that had been overlooked for about 100 years, which I don't understand why it had been overlooked, that should have been identified perhaps at least 50, maybe 80 years earlier and had sort of slipped through the cracks. So I'm rather proud of that. I've started four companies and each of them introducing a new scientific concept. Sometimes at the commercial level, these things are a little bit harder to explain. But more recently, I've put forward an idea, this is an idea I've believed in for a long time, but it goes back to photovoltaic scan solar cells that a great solar cell should also be a great LED and that solar cells when they're working properly emit light. And this enabled my company, my solar company, to break the world record in solar cell efficiency, which it still holds, 28.8% in the single Johnson solar cell. And it was trying to follow this principle. A great solar cell should be a great LED. I experienced to this day a huge resistance on this. And part of the reason is, it's a solar cell that's supposed to take in light. Why should it give any light back? It boggles the imagination. Which of your many achievements are you most proud of as a support team? Well, I'm rather proud of all of them, but it's the orphans I'm most proud of. And the orphan is, I believe that the solar energy is going to assist civilization. Of course it is already, but largely it's coming through government subsidies. Unfortunately, when that happens, it ends up subsidizing the old technology, which is silicon solar panels. And I want the world to adopt the thin film direct-cap semiconductors, which are more efficient, more practical, and the long run will cost less. And I feel there's a crusade, but I'm running against the grain. I'm going against the tide. And that's the one thing that I envision will end up being the most important. The reason being that we're eventually going to get all our energy from solar energy. The idea of going out and digging in the ground is going to be regarded as incredibly neanderthal, incredibly old. I should mention other projects that we have, the inverse of the photonic crystal, which is the optical antenna. Again, an orphan of physics. Antennas have been neglected since Marconi's time. And to reintroduce that into optics, this is currently a very important project. We're very fortunate to get a very large grant in the United States to find a replacement for the transistor. Of course, it's very challenging. We have not found a replacement. But if we find something good, that will also have a huge effect on civilization. Certainly, you replace what, the transistor? And that would be very, very exciting. So those are the three areas, the solar area, to replace the transistor and the idea of using the optical antennas as a normal routine thing. Those are my three big areas of research right now. I think I just need to be the best scientist I can possibly be. And that this will end up helping the privileged, helping the underprivileged, helping everybody. I've always felt this social responsibility to create scientific advancements that help the society make life better. And it, to me, is a dream I look back and I've actually done that for heaven's sake. And people are actually using my stuff. And to me, that's rather unbelievable because it was a dream for such a very long period of time.