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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6 Academic Life
6 Academic Life
Pages 83-98
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From page 83... ...
" lane had enjoyed teaching biology to bright young women and was pleased to learn some months later from a friend that "all of her Dana Hall children had passed their college boards with 'good,' 'honor,' or 'high honor."' Even those who had tried her patience had done well. "It made me feel good that my struggles with them had turned out successfully." Miss Cooke and Miss Waldo "were very complimentary about my success this year and said they wished, for Dana's sake, that I were staying." lohn's new willingness to commit to lane stemmed from his successful negotiations with the University of Minnesota.
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From page 84... ...
When two physics posts opened for the fall of 1938, one was immediately extended to Nier. And when Harvard offered Nier another year of support, Minnesota countered with an offer a little higher than the usual starting salary.
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From page 85... ...
It was a drizzly Appalachian summer morning. Most of lohn's immediate family found a way to be there.
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From page 86... ...
Sunday morning the newlyweds drove to Green Bay to visit lohn's brother "Willie" and his wife Charlotte. "They killed the fatted calf for us and showed us the town." With no trace of resentment at spending her honeymoon on family rounds, lane's letters reflect only the pleasure with which she discovered that John valued family as much as she did.
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From page 87... ...
In Montana they visited one of lohn's geologist friends from Gulf. At Glacier National Park they hiked fourteen miles and made a pact to return for a longer vacation.
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From page 88... ...
" After saying good-bye to Helen and Don, the Bardeens headed down the West Coast to San Francisco and Yosemite National Park. They walked "about four or five miles through downtown Frisco and along the water front" and had "great fun" on the trolley cars.
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From page 89... ...
The drawer front is curved to resemble the back of the book and on the top Lynn had copied in black the title of the book and the picture of the baby that decorated the front cover of the real book." Before leaving Dana Hall, lane had asked Miss Cooke for a letter of recommendation, should she want to seek another teaching position. Having a child ruled that possibility out for her.
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From page 90... ...
On one occasion the game broke off after a faculty-to-student score of "25 to 3 or something like that, and we chose sides to make it more fun." The annual Physics against Chemistry game fared no better. In the late 1930s, physics chair lay Buchta revived an earlier tradition of a friendly softball game between the two departments at their annual joint picnic.
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From page 91... ...
He worked with several graduate students but was not at Minnesota long enough to help them complete their doctorates. At the end of his first academic year at Minnesota, Bardeen felt lucky "to have the opportunity to teach during the summer and get a little extra money on the side." But the heavy teaching load, especially for the beginning physics course, drained him.
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From page 92... ...
"These difficulties have been almost completely removed by modern quantum theory as applied to the problem by Sommerfeld, Houston, Bloch, Mott, and others." Laying out the experimental picture concerning electrical conductivity he wrote, "Perhaps the most important thing an adequate theory of conductivity must explain is the remarkable difference in conductivity between metals and insulators." The early theories by Paul Drude and Hendrik Antoon Lorentz, he wrote, "did not attempt to give an explanation of these facts in any detail; they merely attempted to give the mechanism of conductivity." Bardeen's paper discussed Arnold Sommerfeld's semiclassical theory of conductivity, mentioning William Houston's estimate of the electrons' mean free path, computed on the basis of Sommerfeld's theory. He also described Felix Bloch's theory and its remarkable consequence that "a perfect periodic lattice will have no resistance." Outlining the difference between metals and insulators according to the band theory, he explained why "the 'hole' in the otherwise filled band acts like a particle of positive charge and positive mass in the region of negative curvature, and like a particle of positive charge and negative mass in the region of positive curvature near the bottom of the band." Moving into a more detailed discussion of conductivity and resistance, he appealed to works by his mentors Peter Debye and Percy Bridgman.
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From page 93... ...
They had "dinner downtown," then saw a show of Pinnochio "in celebration of the day. " Some months earlier she had baked a Valentine cake for John "decorated with small red cinnamon candy hearts." When Jimmy was seven months old, lane wrote to her family, "The kind of love that grows as you live with and really learn to know a man is so much more satisfying than the romantic fluff girls dream about." lohn's unusual reserve and his intense focus on physics nonetheless created a gap in their relationship, one that was often painful to lane.
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From page 94... ...
He reported back to lane, then shivering in the below-zero temperatures of a lingering Minneapolis winter, that the weather had been "perfect all the way." The Bardeens starting combining family vacations with lohn's professional trips. In late spring of 1940, he drove to Pittsburgh to attend a meeting of the American Physical Society, while lane and Jimmy traveled ahead by train to visit with family in Washington, Pennsylvania.
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From page 95... ...
Nier also worked extensively on an electromagnetic isotope separation method, after Enrico Fermi asked Nier to prepare some 235U to use in his research at Columbia University. Fermi suggested that Nier obtain the 235U using the mass spectrometer that Nier had developed to separate isotopes.
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From page 96... ...
" lohn's sister Helen caused additional worry. In late 1939, to avoid the dampness of the coast, she moved with Donald and Glenis to McBride in the Canadian Rockies.
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From page 97... ...
"Being an only child," lane noted, "she and Jimmy (who has also had that handicap) don't get along together in complete harmony." lane sent Glenis "to the University nursery school so that she will have playmates of her own age and can be helped by persons skilled in child care." lane confided to her father that "she has tried to see just how much she could get away with, but I think she accepts me as boss now.
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From page 98... ...
Building on this intuitive picture, Bardeen assumed that when circumstances are favorable, small displacements of the ions inside superconductors cause the electrons to gain an amount of energy that more than compensates for the energy spent on ionic displacement. The disparity between these energies, he argued, would cause gaps to form in the electronic structure near the Fermi surface.
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