John Bardeen and the Theory of Superconductivity: A Late Revision of a Homework Assignment for J. M. Luttinger

This account of the history of the Bardeen–Cooper–Schrieffer theory of superconductivity has its roots in an assignment that Quin Luttinger designed for me in 1963 when I was his graduate student. It improves on my student work by tracing the story from historical source materials as well as published papers, thus reflecting the contingencies and human elements that shape all research in physics. I also made an attempt to portray general features of how John Bardeen approached solving problems in physics.     

My Life in Nuclear Physics, Photography, and Opera

I sketch my life as an experimental nuclear physicist, beginning as a graduate student at Harvard University from 1948 to 1951, then as a postdoctoral fellow at the Cavendish Laboratory from 1951 to 1952, and finally as a faculty member at the University of Minnesota from 1952 until my retirement in 1991. I also carried out research at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Indiana University, and Los Alamos National Laboratory, and I participated in a number of summer schools and international conferences on nuclear physics. I also have worked in photography and opera. Over the years, I met and collaborated with many people in many walks of life who became friends for life.     

The Discovery of the Tau Lepton and the Changes in Elementary-Particle Physics in Forty Years

I describe the discovery of the tau lepton in the 1970s using the SPEAR electron-positron collider and the SLAC-LBL detector of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. I also describe the subsequent verification of the existence of the tau lepton and its leptonic nature by experiments at SPEAR and at the DORIS electron-positron collider at DESY. As a preliminary to the tau discovery I discuss how I became a physicist and became interested in leptons. This history of the discovery of the tau allows me to give a general picture of the high-energy physics world of forty years ago and to discuss the changes that have occurred in the practice of high-energy physics over these forty years.Martin L. Perl is a professor, experimenter, and group leader at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center of Stanford University. In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of the tau lepton.     

Vitaly Ginzburg and high temperature superconductivity: Personal reminiscences

This article is an attempt to give Western readers, as well as young researchers in Russia, a glance at the atmosphere in one of the leading physics institutions in the USSR from 1977–1988, through the eye of a graduate student and later a posdoc in the theory group led by Vitaly Ginzburg, arguably the most enthusiatic proponent of high-temperature superconductivity before the discovery of Bednorz and Muller. This is a very personal narration, wherein the events of my own life and career are inevitably intertwined with scientific events and with my reminiscences of great Russian physicists whom I had the pleasure to meet with while working in the “High-Temperature Superconductivity Section” at the Lebedev Institute within the aforementioned 12 years.     

Adventures of a Theoretical Physicist, Part I: Europe

I was born in Budapest, Hungary, on July 7, 1907, and this first part of my interview with Andor Frenkel focuses on my life and work in Europe. After my elementary and secondary education I studied mathematics at the University of Budapest for two years. I went to the University of G?ttingen in 1928 where I attended Max Born’s lectures on quantum mechanics, which influenced me to change from mathematics to physics, and as a consequence I focused on filling the gaps in my physics background. When ready to turn to research work I followed the advice of my friend Edward Teller and spent three months in Werner Heisenberg’s group at the University of Leipzig in the summer of 1930. That fall I returned to the University of Budapest, where I received my Ph.D.degree in the summer of 1932. Two months later, because I had become entangled in the illegal Communist Party, I was arrested and sentenced to fourteen months in prison. Fifteen months after my release, I joined Lev Landau’s group at the Ukrainian Physical-Technical Institute in Kharkov, passed Landau’s so-called “theorminimum” program on my second attempt, began research on the theory of liquid helium, and lost my faith in communism following Stalin’s repressive measures. I obtained an exit visa through the Hungarian Legation and returned to Budapest in June 1937. That September, again with the help of my friend Edward Teller, I attended a conference in Paris where I met Fritz London and Edmond Bauer, who arranged for me a small scholarship and an association with the Langevin laboratory at the Collège de France. Four months later, in January 1938 Kapitza, and John F. Allen and A. Donald Misener reported their independent discovery of the superfluidity of helium, which London and I explored theoretically and I explained with my two-fluid theory later in 1938. Following the German invasion of France, my wife and I left Paris for Toulouse in June 1940, obtained exit visas to enter Spain and Portugal in February 1941, and boarded a Portuguese ship for New York the following month. The second part of this interview, covering my life and work in America, will appear in the next issue.     

Nikolai Borisovich Delone in my life

Nikolai Delone has literally dragged me to science. I owe him my scientific carrier. In addition he taught me diligence, responsibility, purposefulness, and theoretical and experimental skills that were helpful in all my life.     

What’s Wrong with this Criticism

One of the endearing traits of Asher Peres is that when somebody publishes something he knows to be wrong, he does not bother to refute it, even if the paper criticizes his own work. Life is too brief for such frivolity. As a small 70th birthday present I would like to answer one such recent attack. It’s not much of a present, since Asher will not read my paper. Why should he? He already knows this criticism is nonsense. But somebody has to set the written record straight for future historians, so I will do it as part of this celebration. Fortunately this particular issue is so easily settled that this can be a very short paper. Since Asher is a master of the very short paper, my Peresian brevity is an important part of my act of homage. The criticism I address can be found in a new formulation by Karl Hess and Walter Philipp(1) of their view that all versions of Bell’s theorem are fundamentally flawed. I focus here only on their criticism of the version in Asher’s book.(2) This essay was completed and submitted before the sad and unexpected death of Asher Peres on January 1, 2005. I have left it in its original form because I sent Asher a preprint, and he told me that his wife Aviva had enjoyed it. I like to think that perhaps he had a quick look and enjoyed it a bit himself. Life in the field of quantum foundations will not be as much fun without his opinions, his wit, and his warmth I point out that in spite of recent claims to the contrary, the proof of Bell’s theorem in Asher Peres’s book works even in the presence of time-correlated hidden variables in the detectors.     

The Playful Physicist

This interview covers Arthur Schawlows professional life from his days as a graduate student at the University of Toronto, through his work with Charles Townes at Columbia University, his work at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, and into his professorship at Stanford University.This interview with Arthur L. Schawlow is adapted from an interview conducted by Joan Lisa Bromberg on January 19,1984, at Stanford University. This interview is one of some 1,000 transcribed interviews available for study by scholars at the American Institute of Physics Center for History of Physics in College Park, Maryland. Requests for reprints should be directed to John S. Rigden, Department of Physics, Washington University, St.Louis, MO 63130, USA, e-mail: jrigden@aip.org     

Bill YEN在斯坦福的日子(1962～1965)

After a boyhood spent in a number of countries, Bill Yen enrolled as an undergraduate student at the University of Redlands, a private liberal arts and sciences university located in southern California. He spent the years 1952~1956 there, graduating with the BS degree in Physics. His postgraduate training was at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, where he carried out experiments in nuc-lear magnetic resonance under Prof. Richard Nor-berg. He was awarded the Ph.D degree in 1962. His doctoral work was sufficiently impressive that he was offered a postdoctoral fellowship to work in the area of electron spin resonance with Prof. George Pake at Stanford University.     

Dick Crane��s California Days

Horace Richard Crane (1907–2007) was born and educated in California. His childhood was full of activities that helped him become an outstanding experimental physicist. As a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology (1930–1934), he had the good fortune to work with Charles C. Lauritsen (1892–1968) just as he introduced accelerator-based nuclear physics to Caltech. They shared the euphoric excitement of opening up a new field with simple, ingenious apparatus and experiments. This work prepared Crane for his career at the University of Michigan (1935–1973) where in the 1950s, after making the first measurement of the electron’s magnetic moment, he devised the g−2 technique and made the first measurement of the anomaly in the electron’s magnetic moment. A man of direct, almost laconic style, he made lasting contributions to the exposition of physics to the general public and to its teaching in high schools, community colleges, four-year colleges, and universities. I tell how he became a physicist and describe some of his early achievements.     

Response to Nagle’s Criticism of My Proposed Definition of the Entropy

In a recent paper, Nagle criticized the new definition of entropy that I had proposed in an earlier work. In the examples for which Nagle claims my definition fails, he took a formula that I had derived for one set of experiments and used it to represent my definition for other experiments. However, the formulas obtained from my definition depend on the specific experimental observables. If my definition is correctly applied to Nagles experiments, no contradictions remain.     

Michel Besson's stay at Harvard

In this article, I shall recount the circumstances of Michel Besson's stay in my laboratory for one year, during which time he completed experiments on tuning the radiation from a PbSe laser diode continuously from 8 microns to 22 microns in the infrared.

The connection of this research to the program in my laboratory, especially the circumstance that his efforts were a continuation of the work that brought me to Harvard twelve years earlier, will be discussed.

The principal theme will be the role of this research in his doctoral thesis to the University of Paris, and in the genesis of the high pressure laboratory that is his legacy.     

The fast show with x‐rays and electrons

On October 20–26, 2004, more than 350 people participated in the 31st Annual Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (SSRL) Users' Meeting, workshops, and social events. The presentation by SSRL Director Keith Hodgson in the opening session focused on the success in 2004 in getting SPEAR3 and the SSRL beam lines operating and productive. Looking towards the future, he discussed the exciting new opportunities at the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), an X-ray free electron laser. Hodgson emphasized the importance of safety when conducting experiments at SSRL, a point strongly reiterated by SLAC Director Jonathan Dorfan.     

Spin glass models with Kac interactions

In this paper I will review my work on disordered systems — spin glass model with two body and p > 2 body interactions — with long but finite interaction range R. I will describe the relation of these model with Mean Field Theory in the Kac limit and some attempts to go beyond mean field.     

J.L. Meijering's contribution to the calculation of phase diagrams — A personal perspective

During the 1950s the present author had the benefit of studying with Wagner, Chipman, and Cohen, reading the work of Zener, Kubaschewski, Darken and Meijering, and having student colleagues such as Hillert, Hilliard and Cahn wiht whom one could argue and disagree. Notwithstanding the fact that all of these individuals contributed substantially to the author's appreciation of the interaction between thermochemistry and phase diagrams, none had a greater impact than J.L. Meijering. Although I did not meet him in person until 1967, I found that his 1950–1963 papers (listed below) and the extensive correspondence we conducted on lattice stability had the most profound influence on my own perception of the importance of phase diagram calculations. In this brief paper I hope to review Meijering's contribution to the development of our understanding of binary phase diagram characteristics, synthesis of ternary phase diagrams from the components binary diagrams, miscibility gap phenomena, magnetic contributions, and lattice stability. I will try to convince you of my own opinion that Meijering has been the most successful disciple of Van Laar in our time in enhancing the tradition of the Dutch school of thermodynamicists.     

Reminiscence of 40-year research on nitrogen metabolism

This article summarizes my research over 40 years. The main theme of my work is nitrogen metabolism of amino acids, though later I focused on protein turnover in the cell. In the first years of my research work, I was busy dissecting the pathways involved in the metabolism of certain amino acids and their related enzymes. Then I became interested in the physiology and regulation of matabolism of these amino acids. For that, I used primary cultured hepatocytes, which contain many liver-specific enzymes. However, this play field was very rough around 1970 and hence I had to smooth them (differentiated) first. We discovered a specific growth factor (hepatocyte growth factor, HGF) in rat platelets. Exceptionally, I also worked on branched chain amino acids (valine, leucine and isoleucine). These amino acids are not efficiently metabolized in the liver, so I had to consider the physiology of extrahepatic tissues as well. Finally, I came across a huge protease complex, the proteasome. Whether these players, small amino acid metabolizing enzymes and the huge protease complex, danced well in harmony on my playground or not, I still do not know.     

Gerson Goldhaber: A Life in Science

I draw on my interviews in 2005–2007 with Gerson Goldhaber (1924–2010), his wife Judith, and his colleagues at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. I discuss his childhood, early education, marriage to his first wife Sulamith (1923–1965), and his further education at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (1942–1947) and his doctoral research at University of Wisconsin at Madison (1947–1950). He then was appointed to an instructorship in physics at Columbia University (1950–1953) before accepting a position in the physics department at the University of California at Berkeley and the Radiation Laboratory (later the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, today the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory), where he remained for the rest of his life. He made fundamental contributions to physics, including to the discovery of the antiproton in 1955, the GGLP effect in 1960, the psi particle in 1974, and charmed mesons in 1977, and to cosmology, including the discovery of the accelerating universe and dark energy in 1998. Beginning in the late 1960s, he also took up art, and he and his second wife Judith, whom he married in 1969, later collaborated in illustrating and writing two popular books. Goldhaber died in Berkeley, California, on July 19, 2010, at the age of 86.     

I Am the Cat Who Walks by Himself

The city of lions. Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne. The war starts. Drôle de guerre. Going to work. Going to school. Fleeing from village to village. Playing cat and mouse. The second landing. Return to Beaulieu. Return to Paris. Joining the boyscouts. Learning languages. Israel becomes independent. Arrival in Haifa. Kalay high school. Military training. The Hebrew Technion in Haifa. Relativity. Asher Peres. Metallurgy. Return to France. Escape from jail. Aviva.I am the cat who walks by himself, and all places are alike to me.Rudyard KiplingI am grateful to all those who contributed to this Festschrift which celebrates my 70th birthday and therefore the beginning of my eighth decade. In the Jewish religion, there is a prayer, “she-hehhyanu” to thank the Lord for having kept us alive and let us reach this day. I am an atheist and I have no Lord to thank, but I wish to thank many other people who are no longer alive and who helped me reach this point.