The Future of Artificial Light

we actually had a brilliant idea. Oh, light bulb went off overhead, and we decided, let's talk about the future of light and light bulbs. Kind of a focus on light bulbs, but well, we have to get to light bulbs. But well we can talk about the future. Really, what we mean is focusing on artificial light. Yeah, not just light that we can get by waiting around till the sun comes up, right, because artificial light is far more important and revolutionary to our lives then we often give

it credit for. I mean, think about all of the ways your life would be different if we didn't have artificial light. You could only see what was going on in the daytime. I would have to make wake up much earlier in the morning. Yeah, I would. I would have stubbed all of my toes off by now, as I just wandered blindly through my house. Yeah, I do

that with lights, so I just wouldn't have toes anymore. Well, I'm of the opinion that the story of artificial light is actually one of the most interesting questions we have in how humans have co evolved with our technology. Just think about the way artificial lighting has changed the way humans live and sleep. I mean, number one, it allows us to live in places that don't have a lot of natural lights, so we can adapt to a much

more indoor lifestyle. Another thing is that, I know some scientists think that humans used to have different sleep patterns and we largely have now that back back in the days before artificial lighting, bi phasic sleep was very common, where you would sleep twice a day in shorter little blocks instead of one long sleep at night. Yeah, and you would actually spend that time between the sleeps doing you know, various things you might be doing, you know,

actual social visits for example. Right. But as artificial lighting indoor lighting became much more common and cheaper and more widespread, that just kind of faded away, and now in most of the world, it's very common to sleep in just one big chunk. Or think about all the ways that artificial lighting has made learning easier. Imagine if you weren't able to read except like outside in the daytime. Or think about all of the other human inventions that would

be absolutely useless without artificial light. I mean not not even including all the ones that use light obviously, like we couldn't have our computer screen things like that, yeah, if they didn't emit light for us to see. But we couldn't have a submarine without artificial light. It's it's absolutely fundamental, it's crucial, it's a it's a bedrock of all the other technology that we use in our lives. I would not be excited about driving a car past dusk, right,

Oh exactly, Yeah, he didn't have headlights. Yeah, it's it's almost ridiculous to try to imagine the world we live in without it, and yet it gets no credit. We we don't really think to be thankful for artificial light very often. It was a big climb to get to having artificial light that's as good and as cheap and as plentiful as it is today. And it makes me wonder what the future is for being able to see

things artificial light. Yeah, so today we wanted to kind of dive into the history of how people have create at light and then talk about some of the ways that it's that it is going in the future and technologies that are up and coming that we're excited about. Yea. Yeah, So we obviously had some source of artificial light, even if it was pretty crude and not awesome, but we had some source as soon as we had fire, Bernie,

as you may you may refer to. So, yeah, it probably wasn't that long after humans discovered fire that they started to figure out ways of transporting that fire and keeping that fire burning so that they could use as a light source. Um. And thus we get to one of the earliest forms, the oil lamp. So tell me about oil lamps, Jonathan. All Right, So let's say that you first you gotta find some form of vessel doesn't

have to be artificial. You could actually find like maybe a shell or a rock that has a kind of a hollow a concave area in it, and then you put some form of flammable material, let's say moss in it, and you then you soak that moss actually in animal fat, which would be the oil in this case, and you light the fire. The oil and moss together work is fuel so that the fire remains lit. You can actually move the rock around so that you can carry the fire with you. And this is the example of an

oil lamp. Uh. These date back thousands of years before written history. We have found examples of oil lamps. So so to like, if you're just not done with your cave painting and you really want to get it done tonight, you can. Or or if you've gone on one of those amazing cave painting wine tours with your fellow cave painters and you're going cave to cave and it's getting laid, you know, you've got to still be able to see before you. You know, you don't want to skip the

last cave that was the best one. I think, to be fair, wine was a little bit after these oil lams. I'm w h any The pains were notorious complainers. Another thing I'm not so sure about that. We could look it up, but I think humans have had alcohol for a long long time. But you know, you bring up cave paintings, that's another thing. You know, if you don't have some source of light that you can carry around

with you. How do you think these deep internal cave paintings were done when people have to be able to see their work. Yeah, exactly. So you know what's interesting to me is that the oil lamp stuck around from

prehistory for a really long time. We're talking about seeing improvements to the oil lamp made in the eighteen century, so so thousands of years here, and that's when I'm the are Gone invented a lamp that was more efficient and then it consume more of the wick and the oil, which meant that you didn't have to trim the wick away like the burning wick. Once it was essentially turned

into carbon, you need to remove it. Um So this would be the way of where it was more of it was being consumed, so you wouldn't have to trim as frequently. Uh So that was a big improvement. But oil lamps were eventually replaced it by kerosene lamps in the eighteen fifties. Uh nine thousand years ago is when we started having wine maybe right, Okay, I was about to say, like, when did we start having wine in the office. It's kind of awesome. Uh So, but we

as humans, I got it. But oil lamps were replaced by kerosene lamps eighteen fifties, which uses obviously kerosene as a fuel and a wick or mantle as the means of having the flame. Uh, then we also have gas lamps. Now this is kind of interesting. So oil lamps and kerosene lamps neither of those were necessarily good for lighting something like a street. These were usually small lamps that

were good to carry around. Like if you ever see depictions of a character carrying a small flame lantern around, that's probably either an oil lamp or a kerosene lamp. But gas lamps used coal gas as fuel, and the earliest example I could find dates from sevent two, so actually pre dates kerosene lamps. That was when William Murdoch used coal gas to light his home as an experiment. I guess if you are convinced that your idea is gonna work, outfitting your own home with something that could

potentially kill you is the way to go. So did William Murdoch live long enough to be recognized for his achievement? He did. He actually eventually outfitted his workplace, which was the Soho Foundry, with gas lamps and by the early eighteen hundreds, gas lamps would start to become installed in

several cities in Europe. Baltimore became the first city in the United States to have gas lamps, and there are other areas other cities in the US that still have some gas lamp districts where either the gas lamps were rebuilt or preserved um like San Diego as an amazing gas lamp district. Uh and gas lamps remained the main method of lighting streets and homes until the twentieth century, so it stuck around for a good while. But somewhere in the meanwhile, all this time, we've been talking about

burning stuff to create light. What what about this new fangled electricity idea that was starting to hit the scene. Yeah, there were a lot of people experimenting with it as soon as you got volta with a voltaic pile. Once. Once that discovery was made, everyone was wondering if there

could be really cool uses for this discovery. One of those people was a British inventor, Humphrey Davy, who in eighteen o two connected pair of voltaic piles to pair of the charcoal electrodes and an arc of light emitted between the two carbon rods. Now, it was not a practical source of artificial light because one, it was way too bright. You could not use it to light a home. It would just be too uncomfortable. The light would be

too intense. The second problem was it consumed those carbon rods very quickly, so before long you would not be able to generate light at all. So first it would be too much light, and then it'll be no light. So it's kind of like trying to light your home with a sparkler. Yeah, not not a great not a great experience at least not if you're over the age

of like ten. So uh. Eventually, Williams State would make improvements to arc lamps in eighty eight, creating a clockwork mechanism that governed the movement of those carbon rods to maximize that fuel to consume as much of them as possible before the connection was lost. So, in other words, it would move the rods in relation to one another to try and keep the art going as long as it possibly could, and picturing something like a like a clockwork spit roast. For I'm not sure if that's what

it looked like. I have not seen a picture, so I'm going to say you were accurate, and I could be uncertain of that. Uh So the problem was that State's invention was costly, so it didn't really take off either. But the the promise of using electricity as a source of light in some way remained. Well, when did we get the incandescent bulbs that we're also familiar with? That's a why did you ask me that question? That's a

full episode right there, Joe. So incandescent bulbs. The the journey to the incandescent bulb was a very long one, starting all the way back with Humphrey Davy. But you have this progression of various inventors who all worked with electricity to try and figure out how to make something incandesce, which is all about heat. You heat up a material to a temperature high enough to make it glow. That is incandescence. That's what we mean when we say an

incandescent bulb. We're talking about heating up a filament, some form of material to a temperature high enough where it will glow. It will get hot enough to glow at a incredible luminescence so that you can actually see by it. So we're talking super hot here, warm Yeah, if you've ever touched a light bulb after it had just been turned off, you know what I'm talking about. They can get super hot, um, and we're the ones we're using today are not as hot as some of the earlier

ones any rate. Uh. The filament is consumed in this process. Right as you heat it up, it actually begins to essentially burn away. So that means eventually you get to a point where the filament is going to break somewhere along this connection because it's disintegrated enough. Yeah. Yeah, it's essentially there's they're little breaks that that open up until there's no longer a connection, Like it just breaks in half, or maybe not in half, but somewhere along its length,

and you have electrodes on either side. Well, now you no longer have a pathway for electricity to flow through. So that's when the light burns out. That's when you get the the dead bulb. If you ever have picked up an incandescent ballb after it's burned out and give it a little shake and you hear that little tingle tinging, that's the that's the broken filament inside just dancing around

because it's not connected to anything anymore. Uh, so early incandescent bulbs were problematic because the filaments burned out at a very short time, and it took some time for people to figure out how to fix this. One of the big developments was, hey, we need to remove the filament from oxygen so that it doesn't burn. So that means we have to put it in some form of container and create a vacuum. So early lightbulbs were put in vacuum tubes, but vacuum tube technology was not very

good in the early nineteenth century. It would not be until Thomas Edison came around. Thomas Haysen did not invent the lightbulb. No, he is often credited as the inventor of the light bulb. He did not. He invented essentially the first commercially viable lightbulb, the first one to remain working long enough for it to be an actual, you

useful thing, right. Um So, he started experimenting with a couple of different types of filaments and eventually discovered that a carbon coated filament and an oxygen free glass bulb could last several hours like forty forty hours of light before burning out. Uh So, Edison was not the first one to make the use of the container free of oxygen. Like I said, the other people had other people had tried to make vacuum tubes, but Edison's approach was sort

of the perfection of that art. Uh. The application of tungsten um was another big development in this light bulb process, tungsten being a metal that has a melting point of up to above six thousand degrees fahrenheit, which is something around a thirty degrees celsius. And that's high. That's high, y'all um. Lots of metals give off mostly heat a k A. Infrared photons um when they're electrified, but infrared light is invisible and therefore does not help us for

light bulb purposes. Also, if you get most metals too hot, they'll just melt, which is not useful for light bulbs either. So uh, you can heat tongue though to a comfortable like like four thousand degrees fahrenheit or celsius, and it'll stay solid and emit lots of visible light. So when I was saying these things get hot, I was not

kidding quite warm. Yeah, But the thing is that a plain old vacuum tube is not the best thing for tungsten because when when it heats up like that, it'll start shedding atoms that will eventually collect on the inside of the bulb, which will darken it over time, which again is not conducive to things what you want to make light for you. But different gases um in in in that vacuum tube, say inert gases, because you don't

want gasses floating around. And there, yeah, have been different gases that are in nert have been experimented with nice and one of the things I want to mention also were helogen light bulbs. Do you guys have a lot of experience with halogen light bulbs, so I'm aware of them my house and my house has is crazy. My house was made with all these different types of light fixtures, no two of which appear to accept the same kind

of light bulb. So you can imagine how I feel whenever a light bulb burns out, like I have to go through the closet of light bulbs to find the right one. Some of them are halogen light bulbs, so they also work through incandescence. They use a tungsten filament like Lauren was mentioning, so similar but inside a quartz envelope. That's filled with halogen gas. Now, the halogen gas combines with the tungsten vapor that's given off while the tungsten

is incandessing. So while normally the filament would be kind of vaporizing away over time until it breaks and then your light bulb burns out, in a halogen bulb, it that that vapor combines with the halogen gas, and the halogen gas will redeposit tungsten on the filament, So it preserves the life of the filament. It extends it. It's not extended indefinitely. It will still burn out, but it does mean that the hall light bulb will remain viable

longer because of this redepositing. That's so metal. It is so metal, so that those are the incandescent bulbs. Well, incandescent bulbs are a thing of the past, right, I mean that's that's they're more and more places on Earth where you are not even allowed to buy them anymore for energy efficiency purposes. That's great, though just esthetically it is a little sad. I like the globe and incandescent bulb, Yeah,

they are. They do have a very kind of warm glow to the understandably exactly so that they don't live as long, and they don't they're not great at energy efficiency. Alright, no, they're not more what's better. Well, next, we've got the fluorescent bulbs, which have their own issues, but fluoresce and bulbs work in a different way. So fluoresce and bulb

contains a pair of electrodes. So that's similar to an incandescent bulb, but instead of you don't have a filament in this case, right, you just have you have a gas filament. I guess it's not a physical it's not like an actual solid filament. I should say is physical? Is just gas. So these pair of electrodes. You also have some mercury. Uh not freddie mercury, which would be facoless. Yeah, don't don't stuff him into vacuum tubes. That's not no, no, uh,

he's your best friend. So you've got the bit of mercury. You've got an inert gas usually are gone, and a phosphor powder coating on the inside of the glass. So when you turn on a fluorescent lamp, current flows to the electrodes. All right. That creates a difference of voltage across the two electrodes, and the electron movement excites the mercury. Some of that mercury changes from liquid, which is what mercury tends to be in room temperature, to a gas.

So you get collisions between the electrons coming through the electrodes uh and the charged particles with the mercury gas atoms. That bumps up the electrons to a higher energy level, which is how any kind of photon is created. Exactly. It's when when an electron returns to its normal energy state and being yeah, it has to give off that

excess energy. Right, So if I if I excite an electron, if I energize an electron, so it bumps up to a higher energy level and then I stop, Well, then the electron is going to return to its normal state parties over. Yeah, but then it's like, well, I can't carry all this extra energy with me. I gotta get rid of it, so it emits it in the form

of a photon, which is the basic particle of light. However, in this case, we're talking about photons and the ultra violet range, which means that you and I can't see them, and that is where that phosphor cutting comes in. Yeah, because in this case, the phosphor coating. What it can do is absorbed that ultra violet radiation. It has the same sort of uh process where the electrons in the

fosphor coading get excited. They're like, oh, ultra violet awesome, they jump up and then return to normal, but they emit light within the visible spectrum. So it's it's kind of like it's like a step by step process of trying to get light from the visible light from this from this approach. And that's exactly how these things work. So it's pretty cool. Um, literally, much cooler. Yeah, it doesn't involve in condessing. Of course, now we live in the age of the L E ED bol yes, and

this is kind of a game changer in a way. Yeah, so, I mean L E d s also still have a lot of challenges, but I'll cover that in a second. Light emitting diodes also, that's what LED stands for, and they are taught type of solid state lighting or s s L. So solid state sounds pretty cool. You're like, all right, so how does this thing work? Well, we have to talk about semi conductors again. I know, I'm sorry. No, we love talking about semi conductors. I love talking about them.

I wish I had a truly deep understanding of them. I have a basic level understanding of semi conductor technology, maybe a little beyond basic, But I always every time I go into this, I'm always like, am I explaining this correctly? So with semiconductors you have You're doing great, thank you. You have positively charged sections, negatively charged sections. So the negatively charged area of the semiconductor has an

excess of electrons. That's what creates the negative charge. Right, the positively charged section we call uh we say that it has holes. In other words, it has the capacity to accept electrons. Okay, so it has the ability to create a flow from one side to the other. Yeah. You. It essentially says, hey, you know, if you got electron sent them on over because I got some space, dude, I mean like we can totally crash over here. I need a roomy rent is high. You know. It's kind

of like living in San Francisco. So in this case, you also have an area in between the two where you it's a mixture kind of. You have the holes and you have electrons. The electrons fill the first adjacent line of holes, and unless you give more energy to

the negative side. UH, it reaches a level of equilibrium where there's kind of a barrier between the the pete hype that's the positive side, and the N type that's the negative side UH material in the semiconductor, and that area in between is called the depletion zone, which I like to think is where you send Superman villains if

the negative zone fills up. UM. So when you introduce electricity to the semiconductor on the inside of the material, the electrons are pushed from the negative side to the positive side. They can overcome the depletion zone. Now when they get to the positive side, they enter the holes. The holes are at a lower energy level than the electrons the excited electrons are, so the electrons move into the holes, they emit that excess of energy in the form of a photon, just as we were talking about

with the fluorescent bulbs, and thus you get light. And this flow, by the way, only works in one direction. Diodes, that's a very important electronic component, and that's the that's

one of the cool things about them. They allow electricity to flow in one direction, but not the their way, and it has to go from ND type to P type because it's you know, you can't you can't make uh, negatively charged particles go into a negatively charged area because the light charges are going to not not without a

lot of effort. You've gotta push really hard. So, now that we've sort of looked at where we've gotten to, what we've sort of caught up with what modern technology has to offer in lighting, what does the future hold? I mean, one of the things we can look at is just the the efficiency of electrical light bulbs. They've come a long way, right sure, Yeah, Like like why we're addressing this question at all? You know, like we have a lot of things that work right now, but

how well do they work? Right? While wiring incandescent bulbs considered to be awful, when why are these other ones considered to be great. Here's one experiment you can try. Actually, don't try this because you might burn yourself. Okay, go up to an old incandescent bulb while it's on and touch it. Don't do this. It can get really telling me to do something and then not to do it. No, don't do this because you can burn your hand. It can get really hot. What what is heat? Heat is waste?

He does is wasted energy. Right, it means that you are you are pouring all this electricity and to generate the heat, which in turn generates the light. But that's that means that if there are alternatives where you don't have to heat up a material to this incredible temperature in order to get the light, then maybe you could be more efficient. You're you're you're wasting photons in that infrared zone, which unless you're Georgy LaForge you cannot see. Yeah.

So ideally what you would want is is some kind of thank you, thank you, Jonathan, You're welcome. Ideally you'd want a device where all of the energy going into it gets converted directly to visible photo. Right, that would be wonderful. I mean, it's never gonna happen, but it would be the goal. Right. But the closer the closer you can get to that, the higher the efficiency of

your bul your light producing uh artifacts. So let's let's do a quick comparison of the three major types that we mentioned, incandescent, fluorescent and L E D s. All right, so incandescent modern sixty what Incandescent light bulbs have a life expectancy of around twelve hundred hours of use so well beyond the forty hours the of Edison's first light bulbs us and by the way, managed to get those light bulbs up to a much higher hours of lifetime

than forty so they used three thousand kilowatt hours of electricity over the span of fifty thousand hours of use. Now you might be saying, wait, a sixty one incandescent light bulb has twelve hundred hours of lifetime, how could you get fifty thous hours of use out of it? Well, you couldn't get fifty thousand hours of use out of one.

You would have You would have to have enough of these light bulbs to get the equivalent of fifty thousand hours of use, in this case forty two light bulbs to get fifty thousand hours of use over that fifty thousand hours, you would be using three thousand kilowatt hours of electricity. All right, so we get that all the way. Also, side note, they're pretty easy to manufacture, Yes, yes, which

is positive for UM. It is important because that factors into how expensive they're going to be when you are going to buy them. So while they might not be terribly efficient, they're also not hard to make, so they're not expensive. Then you've got fluorescent bulbs, which last for approximately ten thousand hours, so nearly ten times as long

as the incandescent bulbs. They require fourteen watts to reach the light equivalent of a sixty watt incandescent bulb, so they need less of a wattage to reach that same luminescence. They use seven kilowatt hours over fifty thousand hours of use, and you would just need five of them to reach

that fifty thousand hours. But they're a little harder to make a little bit, and they also contain mercury, so that's another thing that you should remember that if you're ever disposing of fluorescent bulbs, you've got to be careful with them because mercury is poisonous. Don't break it up and lick it. No, well, I don't. I don't know what would possess you to do that, but definitely don't do it. Finally, we've got the LED bulbs. They can last fifty hours on a single bulb, so they can

hit that fifty tho all in just one bulb. Attend what led bulb can give the equivalent light of a sixty what incandescent bulb it uses five l what hours of electricity over the course of fifty hours of use. But here's the thing about l e ED bulbs, they're

pretty much a pain in the butt to manufacture. Yeah, So, if you've ever shopped for light bulbs and you've looked for LED bulbs, thinking I want to be as as efficient with my energy use as possible, you're gonna see that the price tag for those LED bulbs is significantly

higher than for your alternatives. And if you did the math over the lifetime of the light bulbs and the amount of energy you would use, you would probably see that the l e ED is going to save you the money in the long run, but it has a higher upfront cost. So it all depends on your situation. Right, If you can afford the upfront cost, then it makes perfect sense to go and outfit your home with l

a ED lights. Again, like, my house has got all these different weird light fixtures, some of which do not have LED alternatives for them. Like, there's not an LED light that's made in that size yet, or at least not one that I have been able to find. Uh So it's an exercise and frustration for me. But even if they did have all the LED fixtures. I'm not sure that I would be able to do it because that would be really expensive to buy lights for every

single fixture in my house. Like that's a big upfront cost. It is now again, over the lifetime, i'd be saving money. But if I don't have the cash to pay for it up front, that it doesn't help run. You know, one of the areas in which we've talked about using L e d s for future applications is in vertical farming, because you know, one of the problems with vertical farming.

We've talked about vertical farming on the show before. The ideas that you you know, sort of stack up a greenhouse model within your cities, and this solves a lot of problems. The crops are less exposed to the you know, the weather, and so they're they're less vulnerable to changes in climate and whether they're also closer to their final destination. Because a lot of the food we consume is in cities, but you can't grow it in the cities normally, so

it has large transportation costs, their spoilage. Having stuff in cities is good, but at the same time, it's hard to get all the light. You need to get even light distribution for your crops when you've got them stacked up in in the skyscraper and everything. Everything on the outside edge is going to have, you know, or at least everything on the eastern and western sides of the outside edge, you're going to have plenty of sun exposure.

But some of the other areas, particularly the ones further inside, are not right. So what a lot of people who have researched vertical farming have said is that, well, you're really just going to have to supplement it with artificial lighting. Now, you you can use artificial lighting to help plants grow and grow healthy. You can use led bulbs like we've

been talking about. But part of the problem there is, once you're investing that much money and energy into growing them in the city with all these light bulbs, is there really actually an advantage. Yeah, you might be negating that that cost savings and effort savings exactly right. But one of the interesting solutions I've seen to this is the idea of using only pink led light. The idea

behind this is that plants need light to grow and survive. Sure, they size it right, but they might not need the entire visible spectrum, so some plants can survive on only some narrower frequency bands of light. And actually, so there are these things called pink pink houses, which are growing facilities that only use certain frequencies of light and use less energy by doing that and not producing white light,

which is requires all the frequencies of light. Oh yeah, yeah, no, it makes it makes sense when you think about it in terms of color theories. And plants are green, they're they're reflecting a lot of those green spectrum photons and our wavelengths. I'm sorry, well, either way, I'm still likely correct.

Light behaves is both a wave at a particle, right, so certainly right right, So so yeah, if you just shoot the kind of light that they're going to absorb anyway at them, then you're yeah, anyway, I thought that was interesting, Yeah, very interesting. Another question is simply how efficient can we make our LED lights for these kind of things. LED lights are already very efficient. I mean we've done a really really good job getting them pretty

during efficient as far as energy consumption goes. Yes, oh sure sure. And it's definitely a possibility that the expensive processes and technologies that go into making l ed bulbs will be streamlined in the future. Those kind of technologies improve all the time. Oh yeah, that's a good win. So even if the bulbs themselves can't get much more efficient, maybe the process of making them can. Yeah, now, and that's that's definitely something that I think will improve. Um,

maybe it will improve gradually over time. It's kind of to me it's the same as micro chips. They are one of those one of those things where we do get improvements in the processes, but it tends to be this kind of tick talk approach. That's what Intel calls it.

They'll they'll create the technology to make microprocessors with ever ever smaller transistors or discrete elements on it, and then the talk part is where they maximize that technology and really are able to take advantage of it to the greatest extent they can before the next tick where they

make it even smaller. So the talk tends to be a little bit uh more cost effective because they've already made the investment into increasing the technology so they can make these uh increasingly small elements on a on a silicon chip. So we might see something like that for light emitting diodes, but there are other other alternatives, folks, you mean, apart from L E d s, there are tell me about the bulb of the future light which

might not be bulb shaped. Now it might it actually may not even need to have a and may not need to be encapsulated in anything. Light emitting electrochemical cells, so that sounds really complicated. They're sometimes called l E c s or sometimes l E e c s because it's light emitting at least. Uh So, well, I guess it all depends on whether you think it's a hard see or self see. So it sounds like it's a mouthful.

But the light emitting electrochemical cells, but first, you know, electrochemical cells are something that we're all familiar with already. Batteries are an example of an electrochemical cell. So electrochemical cells are just they they allow either the transmission of

generation of of electricity through some form of chemical reaction. Now, in the case of light emitting electro chemical cells, well the whole things in the name, right, it emits light when you have electricity introduced into this, So it's a

solid state device kind of like LEDs. But let's talk about it in the form of a sandwich, right, it would it would be a polymer sandwich because you talk about whatever's in the middle is the sandwich part, right like you wouldn't you would say, like a you know, a roast beef sandwich, lowrist beefs in the middle, it's not the bread parts. So in this case, be a polymer sandwich. So the middle of the sandwich is the

light emitting polymer which is filled with mobile ions. Uh. The bottom of the sandwich, the base of the bulb, in other words, could be if you wanted it to be. It could be an opaque electrode wouldn't have to be the top layer would have to be transparent in order to let light pass through. Otherwise you would have these opaque coverings and light would be generated in between them, but you wouldn't be able to see it, right, Yeah, that wouldn't be useful. It's a light bulb, it would be. Yeah.

I'd be like if you've got a light bulb dipped it in paint and then the paint was so thick that it would not allow light to pass through, it's not useful. So uh, a lot of them will use uh, you know, various types of very thin, thin layers to act as these electrodes that are effectively transparent. Uh So, like indium tin oxide was used in a lot of the early ones. I'm seeing now that graphing is starting

to be used in in prototype. Yeah. So graphing, by the way, in case you forgot, that's the sheet of carbon atoms that's one atom thick. If you were to roll graphing into a tube, you would have a carbon nanotube. Um. So, graphing is being used as the electrode of choice by a lot of different researchers. And one of the biggest advantages of l c s over l e d s is that they are potentially way easier to mass produce.

So we had talked about how l e d s have this product shin challenge that it's it's a very intensive, energy inefficient means of making the light bulbs. Light bulbs themselves are efficient, but the manufacturing process isn't as because it's it's complicated. There's a lot of stuff going on. L e c s are potentially way less complicated. You could print them because you don't have to worry about

precision as much. Printing is not a very precise way of going about making something because the layers of think of it as ink can vary greatly across an entire sheet. However, with l e c s that thickness is not critical to the operation of the l e C So you could do it using this kind of method of production and not worry about impacting the effectiveness of the ultimate bulb that you create. Yeah, so you can make a

lot of it. Potentially, you can make a lot of it much more quickly than you could with L e d s, thus bringing the cost way down for the consumer. Uh. Now there are some challenges. One of the big ones is getting l e c s to have their lifetime up to comparable levels with the other technologies. So, according to a report in the journal Chemical Science, researchers at the universities of is It boss L, Basil, b A S E L. This is where I have no idea

and valencia that one I know how to say. Uh, they have created l e cs with an effective life of So that's better than incandescent bulbs already. It's almost more than twice the lifetime of your average incandescent bulb at sixty watts anyway, but still well below l E d s, which are at fifty hours, So it's not it's it's promising. It's not uh at the level right now where you would necessarily switch from one to the other, even if it were ready for for the construction, which

isn't necessarily um. Also, they might never be as quick acting as L E D s. One benefit of LEDs is that you turn it on, You flip the switch, and the bulb turns on pretty much instantaneously, um, which is also a good point on incandescent bulbs. But depending on what substance um you're using, as in a mirror for the L E C, it can take a while for for the photons to start photoning right, so kind of like a fluorescent bulb, like an old school fluorescent bulb.

These days they've got these uh these like proactive switches in them, but carrying a little bit of a charge to begin with, so that they can they can have like a dim section, a dim session and completely right way. Yeah, because I remember those old bulbs where you would turn it on and you would get the little flickering ink well, which also can happen as the bulb gets older and the electrodes start to have That's also where you used to get the annoying, buzzing noise that fluorescent bulbs used

to make. You don't get it so much anymore because they have these little starters, as Ned Flanders would say, they hum like angels. It's odd, though, right, because we all still have the association of those things when we think Floresce embulbs. Those are the sort of things we think about, or at least those are the sort of things I think about when I think Florence embulbs, even

if it may not no longer be true anymore. Sure sure, um, So we might never get an L E C TV is the thing, like, it's probably never going to be the best technology for things that need to refresh at a at a constant rate, like like a high graphic display. Um. But there's some really cool potentials with these things. Um. For for instance, you can create lots of different colors of light depending on what substance you're using as an emitter.

UM researchers are actually still kind of working on making good clean white light from L A C s. It's the one of the current challenges and getting the product up to market. If you want a lavender bulbo, they got the technology for you. But if you want just a regular white bulb. We're still working so you can sell it to music venues before you can sell it to or or high school students from like three light

Oh my goodness, yes, put a unicorn on that baby. Um. Yeah, and and also um, although l e c's have been most commonly created on on glass, you can also totally use a flexible and even stretchable substrates as as your base. Yeah.

This could mean that we have some truly inventive uh light sources in our future, like things that you know that we don't even associate with a thing that makes light now, which is really cool, Like the idea that with some creative application of this technology, we could have totally new form factors for light sources, which maybe we'll end up at tron a boy can dream. So we had one last bit and Joe, I think you added

this in our notes. Well, I was just recalling how maybe the future of light is that we don't need light? Know why? Well, I do you remember back when we talked about what humans would look like in the future, like, you know, if humans continue evolving, how will we change?

And there was this one article in Forbes. I think I recall where there are a couple of people were speculating they were drawing pictures of these humans with huge eyes and stuff, and they're like, this is what humans will look like in the future, or at least that's

how it was interpreted. I think they defended themselves by saying like, no, no, no, no no, we're just kind of guessing, and well, they essentially what they said was, we said, if you take this assumption that humans are going to be genetically modifying themselves so that they alter their appearance in some way, and if you take the assumption and extend it down this particular path, here's what they might

look like. So, in other words, they were saying, we never said this is what humans are gonna look like. We said this is what humans could look like, which I think at that point you wonder why would bother or even making a picture. Well for the sake of conversation, yea, yeah, it's interesting, and their argument being that it would be evolutionarily advantageous for us to be able to see in

the dark when we are colonizing new dark planets. Yeah, I think they said that it would be actually, uh, we would re engineer ourselves to have gigantic eyes that could take in huge amounts of you know, that basically could see in the dark very well, because that would be more energy efficient, you know, we wouldn't have to waste so much energy official lighting if we could just see in the dark. I mean, aside from the concerns about how feasible that kind of genetic engineering is, I

don't know. I mean, I it seems kind of far fetched to me, but I guess I can't dismiss it out of hand. Maybe someday we would change ourselves. Another way we could think about it is, let's imagine that we become much more comfortable with wearing some kind of goggles all the time, you know, like the next stage beyond hollow lens and Google glass, we have some kind

of augmented reality tech goggles that we use. Would it just be that we decide, hey, it's actually much more efficient instead of lighting all our environments to just have our glasses all have night vision. Uh. Again, seems kind of far fetched, but maybe maybe, I guess. I guess it would depend on on again, how the manufacture of

those technologies moved along. Right now, it's still relatively expensive to create reliable night visions, so but yeah, if it's you have to reach that tipping point right where the alternative is more energy efficient and more economical than the artificial light. And until we reach that point, the artificial

light is clearly going to be more more abundant. I just imagine that if we do come to that stage where we're all just looking through night vision goggles in dark houses all the time, what's that going to be like for our pets. I'm just thinking. I think I'm just thinking of coming home one day and saying, honey, I looked at I looked at the store lightbulb. Bulbs are twenty dollars a piece. I'm getting my eyes and big and they'll be back in. Yes, I think I

think cats pry my eyelids. I think cats would throw us a party if we stopped putting bright lights on all the time. I don't know, they might actually get upset of the fact that we can actually see what they're up to. Cats cats are very particular about that kind of thing. Uh, well, this was kind of fun to talk about the idea of let's just look at something that a lot of us take for granted that is a basic element in our lives, something that we that's all around us all the time, and we don't

necessarily think about that frequently. Despite the fact that we do associate having an idea with a lightbulb going on, we don't necessarily actually think about the light bulbs themselves so much. So this was a lot of fun. Oh and one last thing before before we go into our outroar here, I wanted to come back with I had actually written a thing about how old wine was for what the stuff, So I'm not sure why I was totally blanking on it earlier. But wine has been around,

we suspect for about nine thousand years. Cave paintings date back as long as forty years, so there's a good amount of time during which people were probably not drunk unless they found a slightly rotten plum. Uh wow, that's a long time to look at cave painting sober. Yeah. On that note, if you guys have any suggestions for topics we should cover in the future, like what's the future of wine or anything else for that matter, you

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