The Nobel awards should be regarded as giving recognition to this general scientific progress as well as to the individuals involved.

This led Shockley to ideas for what he called a "sandwich transistor. In 1943 he was invited to join the Manhattan Project but he declined since he did not want to uproot his family. Bush in 1990 for "exceptional contributions to American society" and was granted a gold medal from the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1988.

The transistor revolutionized the electronics industry allowing the Information Age to occur and made possible the development of almost every modern electronic device from telephones to computers to missiles. ". John Bardeen (May 23 1908 – January 30 1991) was an American physicist and electrical engineer the only person to have won the Nobel Prize in Physics twice: first in 1956 with William Shockley and Walter Brattain for the invention of the transistor; and again in 1972 with Leon N Cooper and John Robert Schrieffer for a fundamental theory of conventional superconductivity known as the BCS theory.