True Genius: The Life and Science of John Bardeen, the Only Winner of Two Nobel Prizes in Physics , Lillian Hoddeson and Vicki Daitch Joseph Henry Press, Washington, DC, 2002. $27.95 (367 pp.) ISBN 0-309-08408-3
Although many outstanding scientists are known for their outgoing dynamic personalities, John Bardeen, one of the most creative scientists of the 20th century, was a modest and quiet man. Yet he received two Nobel prizes in physics—one for the transistor (which revolutionized computers and communications) and one for the theory of superconductivity (one of the fundamental theoretical advances in recent times). True Genius gives an insightful and warm account of the scientific and personal life of this remarkable man.
Bardeen was the son of the dean of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Medical School. An outstanding student, he skipped from third to seventh grade. He majored in electrical engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he took John Van Vleck’s course on quantum mechanics—the first of its kind in the US. He then joined the research laboratory of Gulf Oil Co in Pittsburgh, where he worked on electromagnetic prospecting. The authors follow his career to Princeton, where he did his PhD thesis on many-body effects on metal surfaces. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard, Bardeen joined the faculty of the University of Minnesota. There, he began his interest in superconductivity. Following Fritz London’s ideas, he was convinced that there was an energy gap in the electronic spectrum that led to the expulsion of magnetic field.
After World War II, Bardeen joined Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, where he worked on developing a semiconducting triode to replace the vacuum tube device, particularly in switching circuits. In a series of experimental and theoretical advances, Bardeen and Walter Brattain found that by placing two fine contacts at close spacing on a surface below which was a holelike semiconductor, they could achieve a 100-fold triode gain. As documented in the book, William Shockley, who led the group, thought he should receive the major credit for the discovery, because of an earlier suggestion of his (which proved to be incorrect). Shockley later developed the junction transistor, and the group shared the 1955 Nobel Prize in Physics.
In 1950, Bardeen moved to the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he was able to pursue his interests in basic research. He founded a semiconductor laboratory and a theory group. Returning to his old interest in superconductivity, he brought together Leon Cooper (a postdoc with field-theory training) and me (as a graduate student). To attack the problem, Cooper found that two electrons above a frozen Fermi sea bind for all coupling strengths, which shows that the normal state is unstable. I found the wave-function of the many-pair problem from which Bardeen proved there was an energy gap. Over a two-week period we were able to show that many of the theory’s predictions were in agreement with experiment, with unique effects of the pairing correlations being observed.
True Genius relates how Bardeen taught his students to decompose a complex problem into simple pieces that preserve the physics. He was highly successful in using simple mathematics to analyze complicated problems: Stating the grand formalism often gets in the way of fundamental simple effects.
The book contains a collection of wonderful stories of how genius and humility can be combined to produce remarkable results. Having made a hole-in-one on the golf course, Bardeen was asked which was better: a Nobel Prize or a hole-in-one. He replied that he guessed two Nobel prizes were better.
I recommend this book as a joyous read.