As promised, this is a post about the biography of the only person to ever win two Nobel prizes in physics: John Bardeen. The book is True Genius: The Life and Science of John Bardeen: The Only Winner of Two Nobel Prizes in Physics by Lillian Hoddeson and Vicki Daitch.
The book is basically aimed at recounting the biographical details of Bardeen's life. But it also considers, in light of those facts, why Bardeen is not very well known to the general public (say as compared to Einstein), as well as the nature of genius: what does it take to win one - or more - Nobel prizes?
Highlights that struck me as I read the book:
The midwest had a profound role to play in Bardeen's life: he was born and initially educated in Madison (finishing high school at the age of 15; already attending courses at the local university before that), and he eventually became a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The northeast also made major contributions to his career: he went to graduate school in Princeton (wanted to work with Einstein, but the man wasn't taking students); postdoc-ed at Harvard (with van Vleck, who also grew up in Madison, and whose course on quantum mechanics Bardeen had earlier attended at Wis-Mad); worked for the Navy during the war years in Washington DC (where he got to interview Einstein, who had come up with a new design for a torpedo); and the first Nobel - for the transistor - came from his work at Bell labs in New Jersey.
Bardeen's father was the Dean of the School of Medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Bardeen's mother, who passed away in her forties due to cancer, was a school teacher who worked on implementing the philosopher John Dewey's program of teaching children to set their own problems, and then find solutions using a combination of creativity and collaboration. This strategy was strongly reflected in Bardeen's work, especially the theory of superconductivity, which brought him the second Nobel.
The book confirms Bardeen's dubiousness about his first Nobel that I had referred to in my previous post. His discomfiture arose due to several reasons: he did not consider the invention of the transistor to be a deep physics contribution; he was hot on the trail of solving superconductivity; he was uncomfortable receiving (1956) the Nobel before his PhD advisor Eugene Wigner (1963). A nice coda to the story is mentioned in the book - Bardeen's wife, who was beginning to lose her hearing, received one of the first transistorized hearing aids.
The book reports that the conversation about not bringing all three children to the first Nobel ceremony did indeed occur, but between the King of Sweden and Mrs. Bardeen (and not John Bardeen, as I had suggested earlier).
The dispute with Josephson is also mentioned, including a follow-up that I had missed: Bardeen invited Josephson to UIUC as a postdoc, and Josephson came.
A substantial part of the book is centered around the functioning of the solid state physics division at Bell, hiring at and functioning of several prominent American universities, and the lore of superconductivity. I will not mention much about these topics except to give the authors full marks for their treatment of the relevant technologies and science as far as I could judge; and to mention the hilariously named Institute of Retarded Study (vis-a-vis the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, which housed Einstein, Godel, etc.) on the fourth floor of the physics building at UIUC, where the graduate students, including Bardeen's student Bob Schrieffer (the S in BCS) worked.
Why is Bardeen relatively unknown to the public? The book suggests (the first chapter is devoted to the topic) this is because he was not a nonconforming unstable self-trained solitary mad inventor type. He was soft spoken and modest, educated at institutions of higher learning and a family man, and very collaborative. The book memorably mentions one of his students, Ravindra Bhatt, recalling Bardeen's lack of self- promotion, and stating the concept of a 'Bardeen number': given by the ratio of genuine content to showy display.
What does it take to 'raise a genius'? The 15-page epilogue to the book addresses this subject. I will leave it to you to read it - if you want to win a Nobel prize you should be prepared to do some work!
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