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"If you want to get the Nobel Prize, you should have three conditions: First, hard work; Second, opportunities; Third, the spirit of cooperation. ”
—John Bardeen
Chen Guanrong | author
Deng Yixue | edit
John Bardeen (23 May 1908 – 30 January 1991) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956 and 1972, the only scientist in history to have won a physics prize twice.
From 1901 to 2021, a total of 116 Nobel Prizes in Physics were awarded, with a total of 222 winners, of which Bardeen won twice, so a total of 221 people won the prize. To break it down further, of the 116 awards, 47 had only one winner, 32 had two winners, and 37 had three winners. Unfortunately, there are only four female Nobel laureates in physics: Marie Curie (1903), Maria Guepet-Meyer (1963), Donna Strickland (2018), and Andrea Gates (2020).
Figure 1 Bardeen and his signature
Bardeen was born in Madison, Wisconsin, United States. His father, Charles R. Bardeen (1871-1935), was the founder and first dean of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and a professor of anatomy. His mother, Althea Harmer Bardeen (1873-1920), worked in interior design and decoration. Of the five siblings in the family, Bardeen was the second-
Figure 2 Bardeen's family (John on the far right)
At the age of 9, Bardeen jumped from the third year of elementary school to the first year of junior high school at Madison Public High School, and transferred to the University of Wisconsin Affiliated High School the following year. Soon after, he won the first prize in the Madison City Middle School Mathematics Competition. Bardeen's mother died of cancer when he was 12 years old. Little Bardeen, who has lost his mother's love, has become melancholy and lonely, has a long-term depression, his academic performance has declined across the board, and he has even failed in French. Bardeen passed through three years in a daze and graduated from high school at the same time as his brother.
In 1923, at the age of 15, Bardeen entered the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin while also studying mathematics and physics. There, he received a bachelor's degree in physics in 1928 and a master's degree in physics the following year.
For Bardeen in 1928, it was the starting point of his later lifelong study of physics. That year, many prominent physicists came to the University of Wisconsin for academic visits, including John H. Van Vleck (1899-1980), Peter J. W. Debye (1884-1966), Paul A. M. Dirac (1902-1984), Arnold J. W. Sommerfeld, 1868-1951), Werner K. Heisenberg (1901-1976), including Nobel laureates in physics. Their various academic frontier reports greatly encouraged Bardeen and led him to aspire to the direction of physics.
Bardeen stayed at university after graduation to do a year of antenna design research. The reports of the physicists mentioned above made him particularly yearn for Europe. He then applied for a doctoral fellowship at cambridge university, but unfortunately did not succeed.
In 1930, the U.S. economy began to enter the Great Depression. Bardeen landed a job at the Gulf Research Laboratory in Pittsburgh, working on geophysics and submarine oil exploration techniques. Soon, he invented a new technique that used electromagnetic fields to explore for oil, but the company used it in secrecy for more than three decades before announcing it.
In 1933, Bardeen left the Gulf Research Laboratory for Princeton University. Bardeen hopes to follow Einstein, who had just arrived in Europe at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, to pursue a Ph.D. However, Einstein had no intention of accepting graduate students, so he studied theoretical physics with eugene P. Wigner (1902-1995), a physicist of Hungarian origin. Wigner was an excellent physicist who has made outstanding contributions in many fields, especially in the theoretical study of atomic nuclei and elementary particles. In 1963, Wigner was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his outstanding work on modeling the shell of atomic nuclei. At Princeton, Bardeen received joint guidance from Wigner and later Frederick Seitz (1911-2008), a fellow of the American Academy of Sciences.
In the spring of 1935, the graduating Bardeen received a three-year grant from the Harvard Graduate Institute to visit Harvard University. At Harvard, he used the Wigener-Setz calculation method to derive a formula for the cohesion energy and conductivity of alkali metals in relation to volume. His calculations were consistent with those obtained by the later Nobel laureate in physics, Percy W. Bridgman (1882-1961), using high-pressure experiments. At Harvard, Bardeen also collaborated with John C. Slater (1900-1976), a member of the Later American Academy of Sciences at MIT, and his solid-state physics research group to begin theoretical and experimental research on superconducting materials.
In 1936, Bardeen, who was still a visiting scholar at Harvard, received his Ph.D. in mathematical physics from Princeton University. In his doctoral dissertation, he derived the function function of metal electrons to calculate the energy required for an electron to overflow from the inside of a crystal to the crystal surface.
In 1938, Bardeen married Jane Maxwell (1907-1997), a biology teacher at a girls' school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, before leaving Harvard. The two later had two sons and a daughter.
Figure 3 Jane and Bardeen (1938)
Figure 4 Photo of Bardeen and Jane's 50th wedding anniversary
In 1941, World War II broke out. Bardeen worked at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory until the end of the war in 1945. There, he participated in the research of hull demagnetization, underwater minesweeping, mine design, and torpedo design.
After world war II in 1945, Bardeen joined the physics department of Bell Lab. In late 1947, Barding collaborated with Walter H. Brattain (1902-1987) to invent the point-contact transistor. On this basis, William Shockley (1910-1989), director of the laboratory's physics department, invented the junction transistor in 1951. As we all know, the advent of the transistor has changed our world so much that it has been hailed as the greatest invention of the twentieth century. To this end, the three shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics. Incidentally, Bratton was born in Xiamen, China, where his parents worked as a foreign teacher at a small academy in Xiamen. By the time Bratton was one year old, the family had returned to the United States.
In fact, these three Nobel laureates in physics had already parted ways due to many internal contradictions before winning the prize. The main problem is considered to be In Shockley, as he was the director of physics for bullying two other colleagues. In 1951, Bardeen went to the University of Illinois (UIUC) as a professor in the Department of Physics and Electrical Engineering, Bratton stayed at Bell Labs but moved to another department, and Shockley later went to Silicon Valley to start a transistor lab.
Figure 5 Shockley (front), Bardeen (center), and Bratton (right) at Bell Labs
Bardeen worked at the University of Illinois until his retirement. There, he conducted long-term in-depth research into cryogenic superconductivity theory and experiments. There has been little progress in the half-century since the discovery of superconductivity in 1911. Bardeen proposed a theory of superconductivity based on the isotopic effect of superconductivity, but it was soon proved wrong by experiments. Bardeen then realized that his field theory was not well grounded. What to do? Bardeen understood that a person could not understand everything, but he could find a collaborator to remedy it. According to Lee's recollection, in the summer of 1953, Bardeen was interested in several polarized articles by Lee And hoped that Lee would introduce a young expert in particle physics and field theory to cooperate with him in the study of superconducting physics. Lee recommended Bardeen when he knew that his colleague at Columbia University, Leon N. Cooper (1930-), a highly talented graduate student, was doing postdoctoral research at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton after graduation. But Cooper was hesitant, saying he didn't understand superconducting physics. But Bardeen says that it is enough that you understand field theory.
In early 1957, an international congress on condensed matter physics and statistical mechanics was held at Stevens College in New Jersey. Bardeen sent his doctoral student, John R. Schrieffer (1931-2019), to the conference. There, Schlieffer listened to Lee's speech and was so inspired that he figured out some key technical issues on the train home after the meeting. As soon as he arrived at the school, he went to Bardeen and Cooper to report his new ideas. A week later, the three of them officially released their collaborative research, which successfully explained the phenomenon of metal superconductivity at low temperatures. This was the "BCS Theory" that would later be named after the three of them. To this end, the three of them shared the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physics. Bardeen became the only scientist to date to win the Nobel Prize in Physics twice.
Figure 6 Schliefer (left), Bardeen (center), and Cooper (right) at UIUC
In 1978, Bardeen left teaching electrical engineering and physics at the University of Illinois to retire as emeritus professor.
In the following 1980s, Bardeen was primarily interested in a new theory of quantum mechanics of charge density waves. He argues that charge density waves can be interpreted as macroscopic quantum phenomena with the same superconductivity. Bardeen devoted the last decade of his life to this research.
On January 30, 1991, Bardeen died of heart failure in a Boston hospital at the age of 83. He was buried at Forest Hill Cemetery on the outskirts of his hometown of Madison, Wisconsin. In 1997, Bardeen's wife, Jane, died and was buried with him.
Figure 7 Tombstone of Mr. and Mrs. Badin
Bardeen's major honors and awards throughout his life include:
In 1952, he received the Stuart Ballantine Award from the Franklin Institute.
In 1954, he was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
In 1959, he was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
From 1959 to 1962, he was a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the President of the United States.
In 1962, he was awarded the Fritz London Memorial Prize in Cryogenic Physics by the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics.
He was a member of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics from 1963 to 1972 and was president from 1969 to 1972.
In 1965, he was awarded the National Medal of Science.
From 1968 to 1969, he was president of the American Physical Society.
In 1971, he was awarded the IEEE Medal of Honor.
In 1972, he was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering.
In 1973, he was elected a Foreign Fellow of the Royal Society.
In 1975, he received the Franklin Award from the Franklin Institute.
In 1977, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by U.S. President Carter.
From 1981 to 1982, he was a member of the White House Science Committee.
In 1988, he was awarded the Lomonosov Gold Medal by the USSR Academy of Sciences.
In 1990, he was awarded the Third Century Award by U.S. President George H.W. Bush and was named one of the 100 most influential Americans of the 20th century.
In 1987. Received a gold medal from the American Academy of Achievement.
Although Bardeen was a scholar of theoretical physics, he devoted his life to practical applications. He has served as a consultant to a number of industries, enterprises and government agencies, maintaining long-term contacts and contacts with industry and government departments.
Bardeen has a long and close relationship with Xerox Photocopier Company. It was there that Bardeen began to study the optimization of photosensitive materials. He served as a technical advisor to the company from 1952, joined the company's board of directors in 1961, and joined its technical steering committee in 1970. Bardeen has been a key member of Xerox for many years.
Beginning in 1954, Bardeen also served as a technical consultant to General Electronics for a considerable period of time. In addition, Bardeen has served as a consultant in newly formed tech companies and companies, especially smaller companies founded by his students, supporting their entrepreneurship and providing technical guidance. One particularly successful example is The company Formed in 1975 and later developed into a highly successful company, Bardeen started as a member of the company's board of directors, where he worked for many years to direct the development of high-voltage integrated circuits.
Bardeen also has long-term contacts and cooperation with Sony corporation in Japan. In 1953, Bardeen met Ichiro Hatoyama, sony's first laboratory director, and his successor, Takeo Kikuchi. In 1968, when the University of Illinois celebrated Bardeen's 60th birthday, Ichiro Hatoyama flew from Japan to participate in the celebration. In 1989, Takeo Kikuchi made a special trip to the University of Illinois and donated money on behalf of the company to establish a title seat of "Sony-Bardeen Chair Professor" in recognition of Bardeen's contribution to the electronics industry.
Bardeen, the two-time Nobel laureate in physics, is not the kind of academic overlord who is sharp and even domineering. On the contrary, he has neither arrogant momentum nor a strange personality. His friends and students said he was an ordinary man. In fact, Bardeen has always been known for being "low-key". His students introduced a "Bardeen number," in which a person's achievement is divided by the degree to which he boasts about himself, as an indicator of one's modesty. Students believe that Bardeen's number is much greater than 1, while many scholars have this number less than 1. One story goes that when people congratulated Bardeen on winning two Nobel Prizes, he always laughed and explained: Both Nobel Prizes were shared by three people, so I actually only won two-thirds of the prizes.
Looking back on Bardeen's life, he had long experience working in schools, industry, and military laboratories, and lived through the Great Depression and World War II in the United States. Bardeen's rich and tortuous experience, combined with his clever and hard-working character, has made him such a scientific wizard.
Because it's celebrities, especially big celebrities, there's a lot of legend. Here are just two more reliable anecdotes.
In March 1957, Bardeen and his postdoc Cooper and Doctoral student Schriver planned to travel to Philadelphia to attend an international conference sponsored by the American Physical Society to present the "BCS Theory" on metal superconducting physics established by the three of them. However, Bardeen temporarily decided not to attend the meeting and asked the two students to give a presentation. Bardeen wanted his descendants to gain recognition from their peers in academia. Years later, Bardeen nominated Cooper and Schlieffer as Nobel prize candidates for Nobel prize winners. His intention was to give his students the same rewards as himself. Unexpectedly, the Nobel Prize selection committee put the three of them on the podium of the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Bardeen then donated all of his newly won Nobel Prize in Physics to the Fritz London Memorial Prize fund, awarded by the International Federation of Pure and Applied Physics, to commemorate the physicist who had made outstanding contributions to superconductivity research and to reward outstanding future generations.
Since 1991, the Department of Physics at the University of Illinois (UIUC) has established the John Bardeen Prize, awarded annually by the International Conference on Superconducting Materials and Mechanisms, to distinguish outstanding scientists who "provide important theories for superconductivity principles and lead to verifiable predictions."
Figure 8 Medal of the "John Bardeen Award"
Badin visited China twice. On September 4, 1975, Bardeen made his first visit to Beijing with a delegation of twelve American solid-state physicists. In addition to Bardeen, there were two Nobel laureates in physics, his former doctoral student Schliefer and Ivar Giaever (1929-), winner of the 1973 Physics Prize for discovering the superconductor tunneling effect. In Beijing, the delegation visited the Institute of Physics, the Institute of Semiconductors, the Institute of Biophysics, Peking University, Tsinghua University and the Semiconductor Equipment Factory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. After that, the delegation went to Xi'an, Nanjing, Wuxi and Shanghai, and visited Xi'an Jiaotong University, Nanjing University, Wuxi Rural and Factory, Fudan University, Shanghai Machinery Factory and other places. The tour ends on September 15th.
Bardeen's second visit was at the invitation of Zhou Peiyuan, president of the Chinese Ministry of Education and Peking University. On April 30, 1980, Bading arrived in Beijing with his wife. Vice Premier Fang Yi met with Badin and his wife at the Great Hall of the People. Bardeen's academic exchange activities are mainly conducted at Peking University. In mid-May, the couple visited Xi'an, Nanjing and Shanghai. Bardeen has given twelve academic reports and public lectures on the development and recent development of superconducting physics, which are very popular. During the lecture, Bardeen visited the Institute of Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences again. There, he half-jokingly said in response to a question from a Chinese friend: "If you want to get the Nobel Prize, you should have three conditions: First, work hard; Second, opportunities; Third, the spirit of cooperation. ”
Figure 9 Postcard commemorating Bardeen
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Source: Jizhi Club
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