At the beginning of the 21st century, experimental physics saw a startling breakthrough thanks to the work of Jan Hendrik Schön.
This German physicist who worked at Bell Labs (the very laboratory where the transistor was invented) was a real prodigy. Everything he touched turned into pure gold. In the metaphorical sense, of course.
He set up daring and breakthrough experiments that, it seemed at the time, pushed physics far ahead of the curve. The number of publications Schön produced could be the envy of the most eminent scientists. At one period of his career, Schön published one article every eight days. Moreover, Schön’s articles were published in the most prestigious scientific journals, such as Nature and Science. In just a couple of years, Schön published almost 100 articles.
In particular, Schön’s biggest success was that he was supposedly able to create a transistor working at the molecular level from organic materials. This opened up tremendous possibilities for electronics.
It allowed even more transistors per unit volume of integrated circuits and increased the power of computers even more, and by using organic substances, the production of such circuits could become dozens of times cheaper. An era of incredibly powerful and cheap computing technology awaited us!
