41 Facts About John Bardeen

John Bardeen was an American solid-state physicist.

John Bardeen is the only person to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics twice: first in 1956 with William Shockley and Walter Houser Brattain for their invention of the transistor; and again in 1972 with Leon Cooper and John Robert Schrieffer for their fundamental theory of superconductivity, known as the BCS theory.

John Bardeen is the first of only three people to have won multiple Nobel Prizes in the same category, and one of five persons with two Nobel Prizes.

John Bardeen was born in Madison, Wisconsin, on May 23,1908.

John Bardeen was the son of Charles Bardeen, the first dean of the University of Wisconsin Medical School.

John Bardeen graduated from the school in 1923 at age 15.

John Bardeen could have graduated several years earlier, but this was postponed because he took courses at another high school and because of his mother's death.

John Bardeen raised a part of the needed membership fees by playing billiards.

John Bardeen was initiated as a member of Tau Beta Pi engineering honor society.

John Bardeen received his Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering in 1928 from the University of Wisconsin.

John Bardeen received his Master of Science degree in electrical engineering in 1929 from Wisconsin.

John Bardeen furthered his studies by staying on at Wisconsin, but he eventually went to work for Gulf Research Laboratories, the research arm of the Gulf Oil Corporation that was based in Pittsburgh.

From 1930 to 1933, John Bardeen worked there on the development of methods for the interpretation of magnetic and gravitational surveys.

John Bardeen spent the next three years there, from 1935 to 1938, working with to-be Nobel laureates in physics John Hasbrouck van Vleck and Percy Williams Bridgman on problems in cohesion and electrical conduction in metals, and did some work on level density of nuclei.

From 1941 to 1944, John Bardeen headed the group working on magnetic mines and torpedoes and mine and torpedo countermeasures at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory.

In October 1945, John Bardeen began work at Bell Labs as a member of a solid-state physics group led by William Shockley and chemist Stanley Morgan.

The group was at a standstill until John Bardeen suggested a theory that invoked surface states that prevented the field from penetrating the semiconductor.

John Bardeen began pursuing a theory for superconductivity and left Bell Labs in 1951.

John Bardeen accepted the offer and left Bell Labs, joining the engineering and physics faculties at Illinois in 1951, where he was professor of electrical engineering and of physics.

John Bardeen was an active professor at Illinois from 1951 to 1975 and then became professor emeritus.

John Bardeen's proposals that CDW electron transport is a collective quantum phenomenon were initially greeted with skepticism.

In 1956, John Bardeen shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with William Shockley of Semiconductor Laboratory of Beckman Instruments and Walter Brattain of Bell Telephone Laboratories "for their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect".

John Bardeen brought only one of his three children to the Nobel Prize ceremony.

John Bardeen became interested in superconducting tunnelling in the summer of 1960 after consulting for the General Electric Research Laboratory in Schenectady, New York where he learned about experiments done by Ivar Giaever at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute which suggested that electrons from a normal material could tunnel into a superconducting one.

John Bardeen challenged Josephson's theory on a note in his own paper received ten days later by Physical Review Letters:.

John Bardeen became the first person to win two Nobel Prizes in the same field.

John Bardeen brought his three children to the Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm.

John Bardeen gave much of his Nobel Prize money to fund the Fritz London Memorial Lectures at Duke University.

John Bardeen was concerned that they might not be awarded because of the Nobel Committee's reticence to award the same person twice, which would be his case as a co-author of the theory.

John Bardeen nominated scientists who worked on superconducting tunneling effects such as the Josephson effect for the prize in 1967: Leo Esaki, Ivar Giaever and Brian Josephson.

John Bardeen recognized that because the tunneling developments depended on superconductivity, it would increase the chances that BCS itself would be awarded first.

John Bardeen reasoned that the Nobel Committee had a predilection for multinational teams, which was the case for his tunneling nominees, each being from a different country.

John Bardeen renewed the nominations in 1971,1972, when BCS received the prize, and finally 1973, when tunneling was awarded.

John Bardeen is the only double laureate in physics, and one of three double laureates of the same prize; the others are Frederick Sanger who won the 1958 and 1980 Prizes in Chemistry and Karl Barry Sharpless who won the 2001 and 2022 Prizes in chemistry.

John Bardeen enjoyed playing golf and going on picnics with his family.

When John Bardeen was asked about his beliefs during a 1988 interview, he responded: "I am not a religious person, and so do not think about it very much".

John Bardeen's children were taken to church by his wife, who taught Sunday school and was a church elder.

John Bardeen was the father of James M Bardeen, William A Bardeen, and daughter Elizabeth.

John Bardeen died of heart disease at age 82 at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 30,1991.

Mr John Bardeen shared two Nobel Prizes and has been awarded numerous other honors.

John Bardeen was honored on a March 6,2008, United States postage stamp as part of the "American Scientists" series designed by artist Victor Stabin.