True Genius The Life and Science of John Bardeen: The Only Winner of Two Nobel Prizes in Physics (2002) / Chapter Skim
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1 The Question of Genius
1 The Question of Genius
Pages 1-7
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From page 1... ...
The invention, in December of 1947, was the result of teamwork at Bell Telephone Laboratories, the research and development arm of the American Telephone and Telegraph Corporation. The company had wanted to replace vacuum tube amplifiers and relays in telephone circuits with a cheaper and more reliable technology.
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Later in his career, Shockley would revel in the publicity attracted by his theories correlating race with intelligence. Bardeen rarely expressed anger openly, but those who knew him could read his contempt for the behavior of Shockley, whose brilliance as a physicist Bardeen respected.
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We take for granted countless devices that were the stuff of science fiction half a century ago from personal computers, cellular telephones, automatic teller machines, and microwave ovens to facsimile machines and satellites. Every day, billions of transistors are at work in the lives of almost everyone in the industrialized world.
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In the competitive world of theoretical physics, the BCS theory was the triumphant solution of a long-standing riddle. Between 1911 and 1957, all the best theorists in the world, among them Feynman, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, and Lev Landau, had tried and failed to explain superconductivity.
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The public is less aware of Feynman's quantum electrodynamics than of his bongo drumming, or his entertaining tales of accidentally cracking scientific riddles as easily as he cracked safes filled with national security secrets. Similarly, the wild-haired Albert Einstein, who mugged for the camera with his tongue sticking out, engaged reporters less with his revolutionary physics than with his eccentricities and controversial politics.
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Only close friends and colleagues could read his irritation from the subtle shake of his head or slight hiss that would occasionally enter his voice. Even when Bardeen's words were audible, their meaning often remained puzzling.
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From page 7... ...
The profile that emerges from this biography of John Bardeen differs greatly from the popular image of a creative genius, but its features are common to the profiles of many, perhaps most, real geniuses. Noted throughout the book and discussed more fully in the last chapter are the features of this profile.
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