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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4 A Graduate Student's Paradise
4 A Graduate Student's Paradise
Pages 45-65
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From page 45... ...
Every now and then a bicycle headlight flickered by as a student returned from late study in the library or from a laboratory. Driving half a mile west of the main campus, Bardeen pulled up to the Graduate College, where he would live for the next two years.
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From page 46... ...
He told John that he needed to buy a formal black scholastic gown to wear at dinner, adding that he could probably get one inexpensively from a graduating student. The gowns grew increasingly stained and tattered as they were passed on.
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From page 47... ...
The two bowled as a team to win the doubles graduate bowling tournament and then faced off against one another for the singles championship. In bridge they were "enemies." Bardeen's partner, John Vanderslice, another mathematics graduate student (who Brattain referred to as "Slice")
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From page 48... ...
When Walter learned that Arnold Sommerfeld, the great European quantum theorist, would be lecturing in Ann Arbor at the 1931 Michigan summer school in theoretical physics, he convinced Bell Labs to let him attend Sommerfeld's course. The lectures covered the new "semiciassical" electron theory of metals that Sommerfeld had developed several years earlier.
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From page 49... ...
The institute, though institutionally separate from the university, was housed in Fine Hall. Bardeen recalled institute seminars that included such greats as Einstein, John von Neumann, Oswald Veblen, and Hermann WeyI.
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From page 50... ...
By the time Bardeen entered his graduate program, that gap was no longer noticeable. Among the European physicists who had taken an interest in building up American physics was the eminent Dutch theoretical physicist Paul Ehrenfest.
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From page 51... ...
One of his favorites was the one that von Neumann offered on "Operator Theory" during the first and second semesters of Bardeen's time at Princeton. The seminar dealt with Hilbert space, an infinite dimensional space of functions.
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From page 52... ...
was in math, he selected a physics problem for his thesis. Bardeen "found that there wasn't much opportunity of working with Einstein after all." The great man had done his major work decades ago and was then mainly devoted to relocating Germanlewish refugee physicists.
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From page 53... ...
Exploring a few problems that Robertson suggested, he soon realized that the esoteric field was not ripe for progress. He thought he would be constantly frustrated by "all those infinities" that arise in relativistic quantum field theory, because single electrons can make a virtual transition to an infinite number of states.
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From page 54... ...
One Princeton student judged Wigner "too polite for this informal society." In his own office, Wigner would ask for permission to remove his jacket. Wigner's biographer, Andrew Szanton, described a telling interchange he had had with Wigner.
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From page 55... ...
In his later years, Bardeen would sometimes note that William Shockley, his Bell Labs group leader and co-Nobel laureate, often used the same approach of simplifying problems to their essentials. But the physicist Philip Anderson, who knew both Shockley and Bardeen, pointed out that while Shockley believed in simplifying problems, he sometimes found it difficult to try alternative approaches if the first attempt failed.
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From page 56... ...
But the time John and lane spent together was minimal in that summer of 1934, because lane had already arranged to work at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Research Laboratory on the Massachusetts coast. When John learned that his younger brother Tom was marrying his longtime sweetheart lanes Smith, he suggested that Tom apply to Gulf for a position.
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From page 57... ...
lohn's sister Ann recalled, "He wouldn't say a word about them, and he was very closed-lipped about the whole thing." When he was in Pittsburgh John also visited his former Gulf buddies, with whom he could relax and sometimes carouse. Seitz recalled a visit that he and Bardeen made in June 1934, after they passed their prelims.
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From page 58... ...
Paradoxically, as the metallurgist and historian of technology Cyril Stanley Smith once noted, physicists interested in explaining real materials were forced to leave the domain of real materials for a period of time. For almost three decades, from 1905 until 1933, they had puzzled over the more abstract problem of explaining ideal materials, much simpler models of metals, insulators, and the like.
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From page 59... ...
And to understand the crystal structure of a metal, it was necessary to go back only to 1912, when Max von Laue, Walther Friederich, and Paul Knipping demonstrated in their Munich experiments that crystals can diffract X rays. Their work offered the first startling look at the crystal structure inside metals.
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From page 60... ...
In his classic calculations of 1927, Sommerfeld followed Pauli's program and structured a "semi-cIassical" quantum theory of solids. Avoiding the full use of the quantum-mechanical machinery based on Schrodinger's wave equation, and employing the FermiDirac statistics only as needed in modifying the classical theory, Sommerfeld was able to address a whole range of problems that had previously been insoluble.
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From page 61... ...
Wilson's work also clarified the ghostlike notion of the "hole, " a concept of solids that PeierIs first described in 1928. An empty electron state near the top of an otherwise filled energy band, the hole behaves as though it were a positively charged particle.
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From page 62... ...
To Bardeen the Wigner-Seitz work "looked like it would open up a new area." At MIT, Slater, who made the Wigner-Seitz method central to his training of graduate students, wrote of the WignerSeitz papers, "There were so many approximations that it was hard to accept the numerical results very seriously. However, for the first time they had given a usable method for estimating energy bands in actual crystals." Within a decade the first crude methods for calculating the properties of metals would lead to better ones.
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From page 63... ...
" As Bardeen began writing up his thesis, he was surprised to learn that Harvard's Society of Fellows, recently established in 1933, was considering him for their third class of junior fellows. It was an extraordinary opportunity.
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From page 64... ...
I think I was too scared to hardly say a word." When Bardeen failed to make much of an impression at the interview, John Van VIeck stepped in. Van VIeck had recently left the University of Wisconsin and was now on Harvard's physics faculty.
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From page 65... ...
" Paul Clark subsequently wrote in a history of the Wisconsin Medical School that "Dr. Bardeen spoke in a somewhat mumbling fashion, moving his lips only slightly, but he thought with clarity and there was no mumbling in his decisions." He, too, referred to Charles as "a prodigious worker, a patient, tolerant man, simple in his tastes, keenly intellectual .
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