Is this quote from Joakim accurate?
Remember, wattage is energy per second of time. If you were to concentrate the energy of one watt over one second into only a hundredth of a second, that would be 100 Watts, enough to burn out a 10 Watt LED. One millionth of a Watt imparted through the circuit through a static discharge is easily enough to burn out an LED. (Remember again, a Watt is not an actual unit of energy. One Watt over one entire second equals one Joule of energy. A Watt is just the rate of energy flow)
Perhaps not literally but I was just illustrating an example to try to prove a point.
The point was that only a surprisingly small amount of energy is enough to be able to burn out an LED, such as from a relatively small static electricity shock. It is actually NOT the voltage that burns out an LED but the wattage (the amount of energy imparted to the LED within a very short interval of time, a fraction of a second). Theoretically, you could supply an LED with a million volts and that LED would run just fine as long as the current (mA) level did not at any time exceed the LED's specifications.
(wattage imparted to the LED would be equal to the portion of voltage actually absorbed by the LED, multiplied by the current)
If you want to actually closely look at the numbers, a "typical" static shock is on the order of several milliJoules of energy. (a millijoule being 0.001 Joule, the equivalent amount of energy of 0.001 Watts over one second) Yet this is still enough to blow out an LED rated for, say, 3 Watts of power.
This may seem counterintuitive to many people, because you might think if a component should be able to normally handle power over one second it should be able to handle a small fraction of that same power over a fraction of a second. But basic physics works a little differently on small scales than it does on large scales. The components inside an LED are tiny, on a very small scale. It would be like the equivalent of observing that a 50 Watt light bulb uses 30,000 Joules of energy over 10 minutes, then asking why it can't candle 2,000 Watts over one second (only 2000 Joules) if not turned on for the rest of that 10 minute time period. The simple fact is that the filament cannot dissipate that much heat fast enough. With microscopic electronic components, they can reach excessive temperatures very fast from very small amounts of energy. On a small scale, a second is a long period of time.
I should clarify in my statement, when I said "One millionth of a Watt imparted through the circuit through a static discharge is easily enough to burn out an LED", that what I actually meant was the equivalent energy of one millionth of a Watt over one second, which could mathematically work out to many Watts in the time interval of a tiny fraction of a second.
I thought that should have been obvious from the context of the rest of my statement, so I did not feel it was worth the effort of correcting the error.
This is probably unnecessary but lastly I want to clarify something, for anyone who thinks my claim about an LED being able to survive a million volts is outrageous. It is technically true, but I am not aware of any high voltage (>20kV let's say) power supply that could meet the very tight current specifications. Even an extremely low powered high voltage power supply would be sure to blow out the LED. The high voltage power supply might have a low average current, but when high voltages like that are involved there will usually be current spikes. To explain this in a different way, the calculated average wattage output of the power supply might be only 0.1 watts, but within that there are going to be short intervals of hundreds of watts. It's just the nature of high voltage, it has a tendency of moving around very quickly in short little bursts.