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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5 Many-Body Beginnings
5 Many-Body Beginnings
Pages 66-82
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From page 66... ...
He stopped to watch a group of rowboats gliding past. Then he entered Eliot House, another Harvard residential complex resembling Lowell House.
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From page 67... ...
Bardeen might have reverted to his usual pattern of dividing his time between physics and games had not the society imposed certain social rituals on its fellows. The junior fellows were expected to eat lunch with each other on most days and to dine formally with the senior fellows every Monday evening at Eliot House.
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From page 68... ...
Other friends were the philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine, who was at the time immersed in mathematical logic, and the behavioral psychologist Burrhus Frederick Skinner. Bardeen's career would benefit many times from his acquaintances with former Harvard junior fellows.
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From page 69... ...
Bardeen readily accepted Bethe's invitation to visit Cornell, where the two theorists conferred about applying solidstate theory to nuclear physics in calculating the energy level density of heavy nuclei. Bardeen also appreciated the "style and approach" of two excellent British texts that appeared in 1936 on the quantum theory of solids: Nevill Mott's and Harry lones's, Theory of the Properties of Metals and Alloys and Alan Wilson's The Theory of Metals.
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From page 70... ...
That, in turn, affected the material's electrical, magnetic, thermal, and optical properties, which Bridgman had carefully measured. Bridgman encouraged Slater to apply quantum mechanics to his data; in particular, to explain the compressibility of alkali halides (materials in the same class as ordinary salt)
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From page 71... ...
Herring had met Slater as a student at Princeton and had been impressed by the speed with which Slater produced physics papers. Slater would say, "Well here's something that needs to be calculated," and go on to quickly do so, writing down the equations, and "zip zip zip, he's got a paper." One of the papers that Slater wrote in his short time at Princeton was his classic work on the approximation method known as the Augmented Plane Wave method.
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From page 72... ...
I talked about his work with him." Bardeen enjoyed Shockley's quick intelligence, imagination, and self-confidence. The two had many common interests and spoke at length about calculating wave functions for alkali halides.
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From page 73... ...
He learned about Shockley on a recruiting visit to MIT. When he then heard that Shockley was preparing to accept a physics instructorship at Yale, Kelly quickly countered with an offer of a research position at Bell Labs having better terms.
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From page 74... ...
Bardeen was excited to have the opportunity to work with the unsorted data of this master experimenter who, Bardeen recognized, was "at the height of his productivity." Bardeen's teamwork with Bridgman established a model for Bardeen of highly productive collaborative work between a theorist and an experimentalist. He would in the years ahead create similar collaborations whenever possible.
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From page 75... ...
Maila Walter interprets Bridgman's search for scientific meaning as a way of coping with the new quantum physics, for which he "was intellectually and emotionally unprepared." Bridgman wrote copiously on operationalism during the 1920s and 1930s; Bardeen could not have remained untouched by the grounded convictions of the man who developed this philosophy. "The concept is synonymous with the corresponding set of operations," Bridgman wrote in 1927 in his celebrated monograph, The Logic of Modern Physics.
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From page 76... ...
And in 1977 Van VIeck would share the Nobel Prize with Philip Anderson and Nevill Mott for their studies of the electronic structure of magnetic and disordered systems.) The Nobel Prize connections between certain scientist mentors and their students have been examined by the sociologist Harriet Zuckerman in her classic study of Nobel Prize-winning scientists.
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From page 77... ...
He also tried to extend earlier work by Wigner on isotopic spin to a study of the effects of symmetry on nuclear energy levels, but this too "was too elaborate a calculation for its time." Similarly, Bardeen tried but failed to explain the "exchange forces" that arise as a consequence of the symmetry of the quantum-mechanical wave function when two particles exchange position. These forces seemed to increase the calculated velocity of an electron at the Fermi surface all the way to infinity, an obviously anomalous effect of the mathematics employed.
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From page 78... ...
In 1911 the great Dutch experimentalist Heike Kammerlingh Onnes had observed that at very low temperatures, certain metals and alloys lose all their electrical resistance. Over the next four and a half decades nearly every theorist working in physics sought to explain this puzzling effect.
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From page 79... ...
Walter Elsasser based his theory on the assumption of relativistic electrons, while Richard Schachenmeier assumed exchange forces between conduction electrons and bound electrons. Leon Brillouin associated superconductivity with electrons trapped in metastable states.
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From page 80... ...
If there is no electric field, the change in current will be zero, and an existing current will flow forever. Solving the "London equations" together with Maxwell's equations for the electric and magnetic fields yielded the observed experimental results, for instance, that the magnetic field decays exponentially as it enters the superconductor, with a penetration depth between 10-6 and 1O-5 cm.
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From page 81... ...
While studying the reproductive patterns of wasps there for her master's thesis, she had many opportunities to see John during the summers of 1936 and 1937. From Boston she wrote home, "Dinner at the Wayside Inn Thursday night, the Pops concert at Symphony Hall Friday night, dinner at the Blue Ship on T Wharf and a drive last night....
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From page 82... ...
By November lane's Dana Hall colleagues were showing "great interest in 'that nice young man from Cambridge,' who comes to see me occasionally and frequently telephones when I am out." lane still expressed reservations about John. "He really is fond of me and always wants to be with me when he seeks entertainment, but he works more than he plays and Physics is his first love." Almost in the same breath, she resolved to be "more philosophical about the situation," because "I do not see how there can ever be any other man for me."
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