John Bardeen

Did You Know?

• Bardeen is one of only three people to have won multiple Nobel Prizes in the same category, the others being Frederick Sanger and Karl Barry Sharpless in chemistry.
• In 1990, Bardeen appeared on Life magazine's list of '100 Most Influential Americans of the Century.'
• The engineering quadrangle at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign is named the Bardeen Quad.

Early life and education

John Bardeen was born in Madison, Wisconsin, to Charles Russell Bardeen, the first dean of the University of Wisconsin Medical School, and Althea Harmer. He attended University of Wisconsin High School and graduated in 1923 at age 15, having delayed graduation due to courses at another school and his mother's death. He entered the University of Wisconsin in 1923, joined the Zeta Psi fraternity, and raised part of his membership fees by playing billiards.

He was initiated into Tau Beta Pi engineering honor society. Choosing engineering over academia, he earned a B.S. in Electrical Engineering in 1928, taking five years instead of four because he took graduate courses and completed a master's thesis under Leo J. Peters. He received an M.S. in Electrical Engineering in 1929. After working at Gulf Research Laboratories from 1930 to 1933 on magnetic and gravitational surveys, he entered Princeton University's graduate program in mathematics.

In 1935 he became a junior fellow at Harvard University, working with John Hasbrouck van Vleck and Percy Williams Bridgman on cohesion and electrical conduction in metals. He received his Ph.D. in Mathematical Physics from Princeton in 1936.

Career

From 1938 to 1941, Bardeen was an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota department of physics. In October 1945, he joined Bell Telephone Laboratories as part of a solid-state physics group led by William Shockley and chemist Stanley Morgan, which included Walter Brattain, Gerald Pearson, Robert Gibney, Hilbert Moore, and several technicians. The group sought a solid-state alternative to vacuum tube amplifiers. Initial experiments based on Shockley's field-effect ideas failed, leading Bardeen to propose a theory involving surface states that blocked the field.

The group then studied these surface states, meeting daily. By winter 1946, Bardeen submitted a paper on surface states to Physical Review. Brattain began experiments using light on semiconductor surfaces, leading to further papers. Work accelerated when they used electrolytes around point contacts, and Moore built a circuit allowing variable frequency input and suggested using glycol borate. Power amplification was observed when Pearson placed a voltage on a droplet of glycol borate across a p–n junction.

Research

On December 23, 1947, Bardeen and Walter Brattain, working without William Shockley, created a point-contact transistor that achieved amplification. Bell Labs' patent attorneys later found that Shockley's field-effect principle had been anticipated in a 1930 patent by Julius Lilienfeld, who had filed in Canada in 1925. Shockley took most of the public credit for the transistor, straining his relationship with Bardeen. Bell Labs management presented the three as a team.

Shockley eventually blocked Bardeen and Brattain from working on the junction transistor. Bardeen began pursuing superconductivity theory and left Bell Labs in 1951. The transistor was 1/50 the size of vacuum tubes, used less power, and was more reliable. In 1956, Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley received the Nobel Prize in Physics for their semiconductor research and discovery of the transistor effect.

In 1957, Bardeen, Leon Cooper, and John Robert Schrieffer proposed the BCS theory of superconductivity. In 1972, they jointly received the Nobel Prize in Physics for this theory, making Bardeen the first person to win two Nobel Prizes in the same field.

Personal life

While at Princeton, Bardeen met Jane Maxwell during a visit to friends in Pittsburgh, and they married on July 18, 1938. He was a scientist with an unassuming personality. During nearly 40 years as a professor at the University of Illinois, he was remembered by neighbors for hosting cookouts where he prepared food and asked guests if they liked their hamburger bun toasted. He enjoyed golf and family picnics.

Lillian Hoddeson noted that because he differed from the popular stereotype of a genius and was uninterested in appearing other than ordinary, the public and media often overlooked him. In a 1988 interview, Bardeen said he was not a religious person and did not think about it much, but also stated that science cannot answer ultimate questions about life's meaning and purpose. He believed in a code of moral values. His wife took their children to church and taught Sunday school, but both made clear they did not believe in an afterlife.

He was father to James M. Bardeen, William A. Bardeen, and daughter Elizabeth. He died of heart disease on January 30, 1991, at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, having come there for medical consultation. He and Jane are buried at Forest Hill Cemetery in Madison, Wisconsin.