John Bardeen won two physics Nobels and gamed the committee for his coauthors
John Bardeen remains the only person with two Nobel Prizes in Physics. By the late 1960s he feared his coauthors on a theory of superconductivity would miss out, because the committee disliked honouring anyone twice. So he started nominating other scientists whose prize would make his own theory's award look overdue.
His reasoning was tactical. Superconducting tunnelling, work by Leo Esaki, Ivar Giaever and Brian Josephson, depended on the theory Bardeen had built in 1957 with Leon Cooper and his student Robert Schrieffer, known by their initials as BCS. Honouring the tunnelling work first would be awkward, so the committee would likely reward BCS before it. The three nominees also came from different countries, which Bardeen thought the committee liked. He nominated them in 1967 and kept renewing. BCS won in 1972; tunnelling followed in 1973.
His first prize came from Bell Labs, where a team under William Shockley was hunting for a solid-state replacement for fragile glass vacuum tubes. Shockley's plan to control a semiconductor with an outside electric field kept failing, until Bardeen proposed that states on the material's surface were blocking the field. On 23 December 1947, working without Shockley, Bardeen and Walter Brattain got a point-contact transistor to amplify a signal. The device was 1/50 the size of the tubes it replaced and far more reliable. Shockley then grabbed most of the public credit and shut the two out of work on the junction transistor. Bardeen left for the University of Illinois in 1951 at $10,000 a year.
Born in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1908, he finished high school at 15 and chose engineering partly to avoid becoming an academic like his father, a medical school dean. He paid part of his fraternity dues by playing billiards. After stints as an oil-company geophysicist and a wartime researcher on magnetic mines and torpedoes, he found his calling in solid-state physics.
Late in life he argued that electrons in charge density waves move as a collective quantum effect, an idea met with doubt; experiments reported in 2012 on tantalum trisulfide rings lent it support. He published papers less than a year before his death in 1991. His superconductivity work underpins MRI scanners.
Source: John Bardeen
