So, what did you personally learn from Shockley?

Oh a lot! He was very impatient but he was a genius. And he would come in the afternoon and say this is what you have. Well, that's alright and try to make such and such experiment. The next morning, he would ask, "Did you do that experiment already?" Impatient as he was so I learned a lot from him. We used to go for lunch and these lunches were tougher than Phd examinations. He would take this yellow pad and a pencil and would have a hamburger at the famous Kink's Restaurant on Al Camino in Palo Alto.

And he would check me out and this, "You don't know" and okay read and so on. It was also (ZA: He was a good teacher). He was a good teacher and also very very tough. He wanted quantitative answers and not just talking around. He was very strict. I learned to understand the solar cell. One of the famous papers that Shockley and I made is the theory of deficiency of solar cells that has been reprinted many times. (ZA: We'll come that in a while)(QU: Yes.)

But when you first started out working in
Shockley's Apricot Barn (left). (QU: Apricot Barn it was indeed) Did you ever imagine that silicon would
be such a big thing?

We had hoped for it. But as a practising experimentalist in that apricot barn of Shockley's, we had so many difficulties trying just to make a simple dial a simple junction which is much simpler than a transistor structure and we had so many failures. It was not clean enough. Our technology was not under control. So when people began to talk of integrated circuits, putting 4 transistor-resistance competitors together in one little device.

We thought it could not work, we really had to understand the material much better. So it was very difficult, we hoped for it. But the daily experimentation and all the drawbacks and all the failures were really the thing. But Shockley always said "Relax, of course it is difficult right now but if the principle works, if there is no law of physics against something, the engineers- provided they get enough money, provided the economic push is sufficiently large, then you can make it. And he was right.

If I look at the present integrated circuits at the yield you get at a good semiconductor integrated circuit factory, over 90% after a short running up time this is really amazing. It's a phenomenon and one should say of course the first people like Shockley and even myself trying to work on it. We were since we were so few at the time and we became known but it was a huge army, huge armies of engineers especially in Silicon Valley on the east coast of the US and in Japan. It really developed, this is quite typical that you have a few forefathers but then the engineers and the financiers must take over.

Professor Queisser, many countries are trying to clone Silicon Valley.(QU: That's quite right) We have Malaysia's multimedia super corridor, Hongkong's cyber port, Bangalore's IT industrial Park. What do you think it would take to come
up with something like Silicon Valley?

Seems to be very difficult. Many regions in the US have tried to copy it. And they were not really as successful as Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley now begins to hit certain boundaries, housing is so expensive there that people move out. Environmental laws have been toughened so much that also industries want to move out. But now the new structure of the software companies, the Internet companies have sprung up there.

It has to be new, it has to be the entrepreneurial spirit, it has to have a minimum of bureaucracy, it has to be an interaction between the different companies. What was new in silicon valley is that new little companies came out of the medium sized ones offering a speciality in technology, in measurements, and so on and supplies and chemicals and so on. So it was entire network of symbiosis of various small companies, whereas previously in Japan it's the big companies. They are too sluggish simply the size will also produce inertia. Yes, yes.

Can Silicon Valley ever be superseded by these other IT hubs in your mind?

I have my doubts at the present time because it can be superseded if living housing prices and so on in Silicon Valley become so exorbitant. (Do you think that will happen?) Well, there was an article in the paper recently, the number 22 bus that runs up and down the spine of Silicon Valley on Al Camino, I have used it a lot myself in recent years, is now sort of the substitute housing for many people who have become homeless. Social things can develop and the imbalance of the very very rich just hideously rich people and the very very poor who now have no more homes but use the number 22 bus.

If that becomes so important, there is a limit here. Shockley by the way used that word in the 50s, he said it’s the principle, typical physicist language, its the principle of equal unattractiveness. Southern California was unattractive because of smog and we will if silicon ever makes it and he saw that, maybe more than we did. It will become as unattractive simply because everybody moves there and competition gets very tough and housing and other services become very competitive.

There have been more and more reports about how the number of IT literate people are actually Asians, Hispanics, surpassing the American workers. Now what do you make of this trend?

Well they are working very hard, if you look at Mt View, a city in Silicon Valley where I had my first apartment (which was a tiny little town) and has now been built up especially by Asian Americans- remarkable very determined people, and together, as a family clan, put their money together, invest, build it up, work extremely hard. So the old American dream, that if you are an immigrant and if you just work hard, no matter what you are, you can make it, is still alive. And that is really remarkable about the United States of America.

They offer people the chance and this has to be there, you have to offer people a chance. Taiwan is doing actually very well. I have many friends in Taiwan. I visit regularly there and they try to follow that particular thing, whereas in Europe we have old and ageing industries. It's much more difficult. Bureaucracy is very hard. There are people who have made all sorts of rules. So you have to give people freedom and you have to allow people to become rich because greed, if u want to call it that, is a very strong and driving force.

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