John Bardeen

John Bardeen is the only person to have won the Nobel Prize in Physics twice, for two separate discoveries that between them define modern electronics and low-temperature physics. Born in Madison, Wisconsin in 1908 to a professor of anatomy and an artist, he skipped several grades, entered the University of Wisconsin at fifteen, and took degrees in electrical engineering. He worked as a geophysicist for Gulf Research for three years, developing magnetic and gravitational survey methods, before taking a doctorate in mathematical physics at Princeton under Eugene Wigner. He spent the war at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory working on mine countermeasures. He joined Bell Labs in 1945 in a solid-state physics group with Walter Brattain and William Shockley. Bardeen's theoretical contribution was the concept of surface states — that electrons trapped at a semiconductor's surface screened the interior from applied fields, which explained why earlier attempts had failed. On 23 December 1947 he and Brattain demonstrated the point-contact transistor using two gold contacts on germanium. The three shared the 1956 Nobel Prize. Shockley's conduct, including excluding them from the patent for his own junction transistor, made the group unworkable, and Bardeen left for the University of Illinois in 1951. There he turned to superconductivity, a phenomenon unexplained since its discovery in 1911. With Leon Cooper and Robert Schrieffer he produced BCS theory in 1957: electrons overcome their mutual repulsion by pairing through interaction with the crystal lattice, and the paired electrons move without resistance. It won the 1972 Nobel Prize. He was modest to the point of invisibility in public, and played golf. He died in 1991.

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