Great ideas never happen in isolation. When Charles Darwin wrote The Origin of the Species in 1859, Alfred Russel Wallace came up with the same concept at the same time. Problem was, he published his work after Darwin. When Newton created calculus, Gottfried Leibniz did the same thing but Newton got the credit as his work came out before Leibniz's. (Leibniz did Newton one better, he invented the Binary System.) When looking at this data, I see similar concepts underlying the Physorg Article titled Quantum Dots May Lead to Rainbow Solar Cell and what Carver Mead, the inventor of VLSI, is doing with his Foveon X3 Image Sensor because both deal with capturing differing wavelengths of light in enabling their respective technologies to execute a given task with the first generating electricity from the sun while the second generates state-of-the art images from the sun.
When this is taken into account, maybe the solar cell researchers should talk to Mead as he has elegant hardware that may shortcut development time on tech that's needed by the world.
Hey, it's worth a shot, isn't it?
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