诺贝尔奖项原本计划奖励的人或组织是，按照创办者遗嘱的说法，已经授予了人类最极的贡献。通常，在物理领域，那种贡献是对非常小或非常远的理解的衡量，一道光照进无知的广袤黑暗，关于宇宙如何运作。今年，相较之下，物理奖被奖给了一道实际的光，已经授予了人类大大的共享，而且还后续又来。名城大学的Isamu Akasaki，名古屋大学的Hiroshi Amano和圣巴巴拉加州大学的Shuji Nakamura，分享了解决制造散发蓝光的二极管问题。
The Nobel prizes were originally intended to reward people or organisations that[/who], as the founder['ll] put it, have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind. Usually, in the field of physics, that benefit is a measure of understanding of the very small or [the] very distant, a light shone into the vast darkness of ignorance about how the universe works. This year, by contrast, the physics award[/prize] /was given to/ [has been awarded for] an actual light that has conferred great benefit on mankind and yet there's more. Isamu Akasaki of Meijo University, Hiroshi Amano of Nagoya University and Shuji Nakamura of the University of California, Saint Babara, shared cracking the problem of making diodes that emits blue light.
蜡烛和台灯的灯光在19世纪让位给了白炽灯泡，但是这类灯泡仍然挥霍大量的电能作为热量。一种散发光的二极管，或者LED，使用半导体来把电转化为灯，效率几乎完美。
The light of candles and lamps gave way to candescent bulbs in the 19th century, but such bulbs still squandered a great deal of electric energy as heat. A light-emitting diode, or LED, uses semiconductor to turn electricity into light with almost perfect efficiency.
但是LEDs，制造灯光，用的是狭窄的色谱（颜色的范围），由半导体的性能裁定。红色的LED首先于1960年代初出现。绿色的要花费到那个十年的末期。但是蓝色，产生白色所需要的第三种原色，则难以找到。那要花费到1990年代初，当Akasaki, Amano和Nakamura博士们研究出如何做到，使用一种名为氮化镓 (Gallium Nitride) 的物质。
But LEDs make light through narrow bands of colour dictated by the works of semiconductors. Red LEDs first came out in early 1960s. The green ones took until the end of that decade. But blue, the third primary colour needed to generate white was elusive. That would take to early 1990s when Drs Akasaki, Amano and Nakamura worked out how to make do it, by using a substance named Gallium Nitride.
基于LED的光，武装着全部三种原色，现在取代的不只是白炽灯泡，还有荧光灯。但是蓝光也已经走出自己的路。蓝色的二极管处于DVD播放器的核心，而且它们也被适当地被命名为蓝光继承者。
LED-based light, armed with all three primaries, are now displacing not only candescent bulbs but fluorescent lights. But blue lights has made its own way too. Blue diodes are in the heart of DVD players and they're aptly named blue-ray successors.
