The unusual properties of liquid helium

Each year since 1925, one UCLA faculty member has been selected to present the Faculty Research Lecture. In 1976, Isadore Rudnick was so honored. As an experimentalist, Izzy chose to make his presentation a lecture demonstration, like those of Michael Faraday’s famous Christmas presentations at the Royal Society in London. This required that an entire low-temperature laboratory be recreated on the stage of Schoenberg Hall, including a transparent Dewar vessel. The success of those live demonstrations, and the fact that two of Izzy’s sons were film makers, prompted him to make a 17-min film version of those demonstrations. That film won the award for best Technical and Scientific Film at the 21st Annual San Francisco International Film Festival, in 1977. Also, at this same time, the Cultural Revolution in China had ended, and Izzy was one of the first U.S. physicists invited to lecture there. As a gift to his Chinese hosts, he had this film translated into Mandarin. Due to the scarcity of the material available for those early Chinese television broadcasts, the film was played frequently, and Izzy became a TV celebrity throughout China. The film, shown in this talk, is included in ASA’s Collected Works of Isadore Rudnick.