When Nick Holonyak set out to create a new kind of visible lighting using semiconductor(半导体）alloys(合金），his colleagues thought he was unrealistic.Today,his discovery of lighti-emitting diodes,or LEDs,is used in everything from DVDs to alarm clocks to airports.Dozens of his students have continued his work,developing lighting used in traffic lights and other everyday technology.
当霍洛尼亚克着手用半导体合金创造一种新的可视照明设备的时候，同事们都认为他不现实。今天，他发现的发光二极管，或叫LED，使用范围覆盖从DVD到机场警钟的一切东西。他 的许多学生继续着他的工作，发明了交通灯中使用的照明设备和其他日用技术。
On April 23,2004,Holonyak received the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize at a ceremony in Washington.This marks the 10th year that the Lemelson-MIT program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology(MIT) has given the award to prominent inventors.
2004的4月23日，霍洛尼亚克在华盛顿的一次典礼上被授予Lemelson-MIT项目的50万美元的 奖金。这标志着第十年，麻省理工学院项目在麻省理工学院（MIT）给予奖励杰出的发明家。
"Anytime you get an award,big or little,it's alawys a surprise,"Holonyak said.
“任何时候你得到一个奖，不论是大是小，这始终是一个惊喜，”霍洛尼亚克说。
Holonyak,75,was a student of John Bardeen,an inventor of the transistor(晶体管）,in the early 1950s.After graduate school,Holonyak worked at Bell Labs.He later went to General Electric,where he invented a switch now widely used in house dimmer switches.Later,Holonyak started looking into how semiconductors could be used to generate light.But while his colleaguses were looking into how to generate invisible lighti,he wanted to generate visible light.The LEDs he invented in 1962 now last about 10 times longer than incandescent bulbs,and are more environmentally friendly and cost effective.
霍洛尼亚克，75岁，是20世纪50年代初晶体管的发明者约翰·巴丁的学生。从研究生院毕业之后，霍洛尼亚克在Bell实验室工作。他后来去了通用电器公司，在那里他发明了一种开关，现在广泛用于房子调光开关。后来，霍洛尼亚克开始寻找半导体可以用来产生光。当他的同事们正在研究如何发出看不见的光时，他却想要看得见的光。1962年他发明的LED，现在的使用寿命可以比白炽灯泡长十倍，而且更环保和成本效益。
Holonyak,now a professor of elevtrical and computer engineering and physics at the University of Illinois,said he suspected that LEDs would become as commonplace(平凡的）as they are today,but didn't realize how many uses they would have.
霍洛尼亚克，现在是伊利诺伊大学电子、计算机工程和物理专业的教授，他说他预料到LED的使用有可能像今天这样普遍，但没有意识到它会有多少用途。
"You don't know in the beginning.You think you're doing something important,you think it's worth doing,but you really can't tell what the big payoff(成果）is going to be,and when,and how.You just don't know,"he said.
"开始的时候你并不知道，你认为你在做一件很重要的事情，你认为它值得做，但是你不能说出要付出多大的代价，什么时候付出，怎样付出。你并不知道。"他说。
The Lemelson-MIT Program also recognized Edith Flanigen,75,with the $100,000 Lemelson-MIT Lifetime Achievement Award for the work on a new generation of "molecular(分子）sieves(滤网）that can separate molecules by size.
Lemelson-MIT项目同样授予75岁的Edi也Flanigen10万美元的终身成就奖，她的成就是创造新一代的"分子筛"，也就是可以通过大小来分离分子。