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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10 Homecoming
10 Homecoming
Pages 165-189
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From page 165... ...
Falcons rested alertly on telephone lines, waiting for a meal, while redwinged blacI |
From page 166... ...
With the railroad providing transportation to Chicago, Champaign became the county's commercial center, much to the chagrin of Urbana residents. Both towns grew rapidly with subdivisions replacing soybeans at a breakneck pace, especially in Champaign.
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From page 167... ...
John occasionally helped the boys polish their Little League baseball skills by playing catcher to their pitcher, or chasing and catching fly balls as they practiced their batting techniques. Bill found the neighborhood a splendid place to get into scrapes, from which he sometimes had to be rescued or even carried to the doctor.
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From page 168... ...
John "interpreted my lack of interest in activities and my lack of enthusiasm for Les Houches as evidence of bad temper and a mean disposition and was very blunt in telling me so. Consequently I stubbornly resolved to keep my troubles to myself and to just stick it out until this 'flu,' 'virus,' or whatever had cured itself." When she was finally diagnosed with typhoid, she insisted that he and the children go on with their European tour while she recovered in Switzerland.
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From page 169... ...
There are likely many sets of moral values compatible with successful civilized society. It is when they conflict that difficulties arise.
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From page 170... ...
Rabi had humorously rebuffed his invitation with the comment, "I love subways and I hate cows." Loomis managed to hire a few new faculty using a successful hiring strategy similar to the one Charles Bardeen had used in shaping the Wisconsin medical school. He focused on promising postdoctoral-level scientists: "young, competent but relatively unproven people with fresh ideas, rather than less-risky, established end more expensive scientists." In 1930 Loomis brought in Gerald M
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From page 171... ...
Almost two-thirds of the faculty that Loomis had added in the 1930s went elsewhere during the war, forcing him to undertake yet another massive rebuilding effort after his return to Illinois in 1947. This time Loomis drew on a network of influential colleagues that included his friend Louis Ridenour from the MIT Rad Laboratory, who had received his doctorate at Caltech in the up-andcoming field of high-voltage physics (which would evolve into high-energy physics)
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From page 172... ...
Lazarus, who was appointed at Seitz's suggestion, arrived even before Seitz, who had contacted Loomis on Lazarus's behalf after the young physicist told Seitz he was looking for a job. By the time Bardeen arrived, the Illinois physics department was, with Cornell, one of the top two academic departments in America in the area of solid-state physics.
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From page 173... ...
Around 10:00 A.M. most physicists would wander over to the departmental lounge to drink coffee while catching up on the work of colleagues or discussing recent journal articles.
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From page 174... ...
Hatoyama entertained his American colleague at his home during the long 1953 trip. Later, Bardeen wrote to Hatoyama that the visit to lap en had been "one of the great events of my life." In 1960 Hatoyama left Denki Shikenjo to direct Sony's then new research laboratory.
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From page 175... ...
The lecture became vividly imprinted in Holonyak's memory. Bardeen arrived with a transparent box, "about eight or nine or ten inches long and about six or seven or eight inches high and three or four inches thick." It was the music box that Bell Labs had made for him in 1949.
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From page 176... ...
He recognized that Brattain's frequent visits to Urbana in the early 1950s were because "he missed his partner. " On one particular visit, Holonyak happened to observe Brattain and Bardeen working together in Bardeen's semiconductor laboratory.
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From page 177... ...
The semiconductor laboratory, when it began functioning in the fall of 1952, was initially housed in a large, empty room that had previously contained the university's historic ILLIAC computer. The ten-foot-Ion", two-foot-wide computer, which was just becoming operable at the time Bardeen's group began setting up their laboratory, left behind ample work space when it was moved to another building.
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From page 178... ...
An apocryphal story features John Bardeen offering his two early graduate students Holonyak and Schrieffer a choice between semiconductor research and the superconductivity problem. "The semiconductor topic," he is reputed to have said, "is guaranteed to generate results if you work hard enough.
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From page 179... ...
I was asking him things that he wasn't familiar with. And he didn't say anything just because there wasn't anything to say, and he wasn't going to talk just for no good reason at all." When Holonyak left for Bell Labs in 1954, Paul Handler came on board as a postdoc to work in the semiconductor lab.
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From page 180... ...
When Holonyak learned that he would be stationed in Japan, Bardeen encouraged him to call on Hatoyama and Kikuchi. Hatoyama, Bardeen wrote Holonyak, "is a very nice fellow, and I am sure he would enjoy meeting you." For the next eight months Holonyak visited both Japanese scientists "every other weekend," and they became good friends.
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From page 181... ...
If he paused and he was thinking, you realized that he was thinking, and you thought." Bardeen viewed student participation as one of the most important aspects of the learning experience, for undergraduates as well as graduate students. He helped them to develop confidence by encouraging them to find answers for themselves.
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From page 182... ...
Sometimes you'd walk to the door and the door would be half way closed and he would start speaking to the empty chair." For many people conversation is a way of organizing thoughts that are incomplete out loud. Schrieffer came to "realize that usual conversations about serious research move much too rapidly for people to think deeply." Bardeen presented a different model.
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From page 183... ...
For others, despite his policy of keeping his office door open, "he always appeared too busy to encourage idle questions." Bardeen politely hid any irritation he may have felt for less able or less confident students who approached him with questions he considered trivial. But he did not waste time explaining things that had already found their best exposition in the literature.
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From page 184... ...
came up and gave me a reference to some obscure journal." To Russell it appeared that Bardeen "knew everything that was going on in his field." Bardeen occasionally helped the students of other professors. John Wheatley suggested that his student, Andy Anderson, go see Bardeen about the interpretation of some of his experimental results.
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From page 185... ...
Effect of Surface Conditions on 1954 (electrical engineering) Characteristics of Rectifier Junctions Thomas Nolan Morgan Newton Bernades Photoconductivity in Germanium at Liquid 1955 Helium Temperatures Theory of the Specific Heat of Superconductors 1957 Based on an Energy Gap Model Daniel Charles Mattis Conductivity Problems in Quantum Theory 1957 J
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From page 186... ...
Galvanomagnetic Properties of Carriers Associated with the Cleaned 1960 Germanium Surface Kendal True Rogers Superconductivity in Small Systems 1960 Toshihito Tsuneto (thesis submitted to Kyoto University, Japan) Part One: Transverse Collective Excitations 1960 in Superconductors and Electromagnetic Absorbtion.
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From page 187... ...
Once back in Urbana he continued to work on liquid crystals, light scattering, heat capacity measurements, and charge density waves, as well as electrically driven structural phase transitions and their interactions with superconductivity. Bardeen had the highest regard for McMilIan, whom he once described as "very
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From page 188... ...
Hess remembers John showing the two toddlers his medals and a strange golf ball that had a transistor radio inside. Another year, when postdoc Ludwig Tewordt and his wife found it impossible to visit family in Europe at Christmas, John and lane stopped by their apartment on Christmas Day bearing gifts for their three children.
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From page 189... ...
Ned Goldwasser remembered one "absolutely superb" experience at a department picnic. When one of his children screwed up his courage and asked Bardeen a question about relativity, the Nobel laureate did his best to explain the theory in terms the ten-year-old could understand.
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