Engineer Who Won the Nobel Prize Twice in Physics | Hacker News Reader

Engineer Who Won the Nobel Prize Twice in Physics

wondersofphysics.com

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Bardeen was an amazing guy. I love this quote from his Wikipedia article in particular:

"Bardeen was a scientist with a very unassuming personality. While he served as a professor for almost 40 years at the University of Illinois, he was best remembered by neighbors for hosting cookouts where he would prepare food for his friends, many of whom were unaware of his accomplishments at the university."

Something about a man whose accomplishments have given us computers and the MRI being a friendly neighborhood dad, whose neighbors weren't even aware their hamburgers were being cooked by a man who had changed the course of human civilization, is so appealing to me.

I’m probably getting the exact details wrong, however: I once read that he had a golf partner for over 30 years, and this golf partner only learned that Bardeen had two Nobels after Bardeen had died.

IDK, his just seems normal to me. Why would your Nobels come up during golf unless you were trying to work it in. Which is pretty classless.

If I won a Nobel, let alone two I wouldn't make it through more than a month of knowing someone without mentioning it. That's...probably among the many things that separate me from Nobel candidates. Only the mediocre feel they have something to prove.

Maybe over ONE round of 18, but winning the world's most prestigious prize, twice, for your work never coming up in 30 years? Frankly, that's quite amazing.

I feel like it would take superhuman restraint to not work it in once during 30 years though. If it were me I'd never shut about it.

People would mention about getting a new job, new promotion, or graduating, let alone winning the biggest prize in science.

Where did he think those new golf clubs upgrades came from, twice?

This is very characteristic of Midwestern culture, at least in the parts I'm familiar with.

I think it is appealing because it is in such stark contrast to today's culture of constant self promotion and exaggeration of mediocre achievements.

> today's culture

Not a historian but I strongly suspect self-promotion is not something new.

Agreed, but also internet basically gave everyone a megaphone, so that they can shout their mediocre achievements.

The world has also become more top heavy than a few decades ago. Competition for the top x% of a field has likely become fiercer as the alternative has become less self-sustaining.

There is nothing wrong with being mediocre.

There is also nothing good with being mediocre.

There's a lot of good with being mediocre. normalcy, so long as you're not in some sort of barbarian culture. is a net positive.

I excel at mediocrity.

It's almost as if being mediocre is fairly mediocre

Just compare Bardeen to Shockley.

Yep. Newton tried to discredit Leibniz for example even though Leibniz was the first to publish calculus:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz–Newton_calculus_contro...

Do you think shameless self-promotion has always been as culturally acceptable as it seems to be today (in American culture, let’s say)?

I used to be a much humbler person, especially in college, when I witnessed people much more capable than I.

Once I entered the workforce I became less humble and self-promoted a lot more. I think this is because how performance evaluation and job promotion works at my employer and similar employers: people doing a lot of great work but without self-promotion are given lower ratings and passed over for promotions.

Most people I know who fail at self promotion solve that issue by finding other jobs that value them. Obviously it depends on the job market you are in. But getting a better job is quite easy in competitive industries especially if you remove location-bias. A friend refused to move to SF from San Jose and despised the commute, and thus turned down a massive career (and money) opportunity.

Self-promotion and exaggeration of mediocre achievements as the path to success has been around since time immemorial. If you can't do, talk.

Julius Caesar didn't become dictator for life by doing a great job repressing the Gauls. He became dictator for life by doing a great job of talking about how bad-ass the Gauls were, and how hard he had to work to repress them.

Yup. Napoleon was also a terrific writer who carried a printing press with him as a (just another) General in Italy to be sure his first-hand heavily spun reports of his fighting prowess were the first French citizens would see. Of course, we see more of this now, in a mass civic rather than rural society.

Some to better effect than others.

“Are you asking about Vice President Biden?” McChrystal says with a laugh. “Who’s that?”

“Biden?” suggests a top adviser. “Did you say: Bite Me?”

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/the-runa...

I suppose in the case of Caesar, one must be able to talk and do - if we consider his narrative as mostly grounded in fact, which I do.

If you can do, also talk. I'd like to find out!

Comentarii de Bello Gallo is a masterwork in PR :)

IMO this is what causing this huge self-promotion trend.

1 - it's become so much easier and accessible, with twitter, blog, FB, IG, YT.

2 - your ability to promote yourself has great impact in your financial and career growth.

3 - EGO. Remember when you were the smartest kid in your high school and then went to university and realized, there are many smart people like you.

SV, is the next step above. Everyone thinks they're the next Steve Jobs, Musk, etc. until the start working with other smart peers.

You were once the smart kid in the family, high school, your university classes, etc. Then you come to SV and realize wow, so many other smart people here. I'm just another average guy/gal who was in my top 1% of my college or high school. Some of these peers are even more driven than me and they're great hustlers.

So you either accept that you're not so special, or you try to out hustle others for recognition.

> [self promotion has] become so much easier and accessible

True. But why has it become acceptable? We choose to use micro-publishing to brag. It's just as easy and accessible to publish your own bowel movements, but we haven't normalized that.

It's not the tech doing it by itself.

There are even some in SV who are clearly a step-function smarter than most other intelligent folk. Balaji Srinivasan, Marc Andreesen, Larry Page, Eric Yuan, Peter Thiel, Taher Elgamal and Naval Ravikant are amongst them in the famous league. Eric Yuan is also hilarious in real life despite English being his second language.

Self-esteem movement of phony over-confidence, crumbling under pressure, and no depth of knowledge.

When Bill Gates had his neighbors over for breakfast, I wonder if they were aware that their pancakes were being sorted by a man who had changed the course of human civilization.

A reference to the famous result of Papadimitriou and Gates, of course.

https://web.archive.org/web/20070610154429/http://www.cs.ber...

Gates did not change the course of anything.

The personal computer revolution was inevitable, and operating systems were plentiful and doable, and we see the same market concentration, product bundling, and monopoly patterns emerge in every industry, so if not Gates, it just would have been somebody else.

If you want to claim he was a more talented monopolist, then I'd point out that monopolies stifle innovation, so a less talented monopolist would have changed the course of civilization much more, i.e. his kind of changing is not the type we need to applaud. Yawl don't remember, but before the dot com era came along and opened things up, Microsoft had more or less completely stifled the computer software industry, there was hardly anything going on in terms of attracting investment and creating jobs, everyone was too fearful of getting stomped.

also, while he's no doubt a very smart guy, he's hardly ever said an intellectually interesting thing. Go ahead and challenge that statement, if he has, I'd love to hear it. Strikes me as a complete dullard.

> a man who had changed the course of human civilization.

He learned how to do self-promotion from his friend Steve Jobs.

> is so appealing to me.

So what is so appealing? Isn't it shows that people are so indifferent and ignorant that they couldn't even spot a Nobel prize winner just because they did not care enough to ask?

What if his success or life would be dependent on their recognition? He would probably die unnoticed ... It's very sad story I would say.

Reading this actually should convince even the most modest person in the world to promote himself like hell ...

Actually I think I also should promote myself from now on because people would simply not notice any of my talents and thus many opportunities to do great things can be lost. I think it was a great mistake every time I was modest about own talents and abilities.

Do you go around asking people if they've won a Nobel Prize?

Really, what's appealing here is living modestly in a time before it was so easy to find out who someone was by typing their name into a search bar. Bardeen did his work out of a genuine drive for scientific discovery, not the pursuit of wealth or fame. That's what that anecdote shows me and what appeals to me about him.

I'm sure Bardeen was not sweating about his "legacy" after winning a Nobel Prize, lol.

>Do you go around asking people if they've won a Nobel Prize?

When some person came to me to take an argentinian tango lesson I've managed somehow to find out that he has been working on a eu collider project. So actually I think I do. When I meet a person I am curious to ask a person about his interests and I watch his body movements to understand his way of looking at the world. You can tell that to some degree by how people move you see.

>Really, what's appealing here is living modestly in a time before it was so easy to find out who someone was by typing their name into a search bar.

So what is so good about it? Some people can't find out about this and some opportunities has been lost. What is the benefit of it? I do not like when people promote themselves for the sake of it without anything valuable to offer but when it's not the case what good this 'modesty' can do? Letting win to those who do not deserve it? what is particulary good about it? Now I tend to think about it as being irresponsible in a way.

>Bardeen did his work out of a genuine drive for scientific discovery, not the pursuit of wealth or fame. That's what that anecdote shows me and what appeals to me about him.

Since when 'wealth or fame' considered to be something negative? If a person offers something valueable and worthy I see no reason for such person to be in a shadow and poor without enough money. What would be good about it except perhaps to please some 'socialists/communists' and I've seen what those guys "can" "build" in the ussr so I do not want them to thrive.

Uh I think this depends on the context. In your work you must absolutely self promote. You have to bluntly tell your boss the work you accomplished especially if it's work that's getting attention. But that's because this is a big part of work. We're trying to give more responsibility to people who are achieving things in the work place. It's relevant.

But bringing those things up at a BBQ or while golfing just seems like an attempt to agrandize yourself. Those are supposed to be egalitarian social situations. Your work accomplishments have little value there. Unless you want to live in the god awful world of that HBO show "Succession".

>We're trying to give more responsibility to people who are achieving things in the work place.

It depends on the context as you say of course but what I've seen is that people who where screaming more were giving more responsibility instead of people who were actually achieving something.

I'd say this characterization is questionable at best. He worked as an engineer for 4 years and then got a Ph.D. in Physics, as well as working the majority of his life as a physics researcher and teacher. It's like calling a surgeon with an undergraduate degree in Biology a "biologist'.

Well there's also the fact that the transistor is an applied physics device and not really the discovery of any new fundamental force or particle. Which some would (wrongly, in my opinion) consider engineering.

Wait, why are these things mutually exclusive? He was both a physicist and an engineer! He literally used his knowledge of physics to physically engineer novel devices.

As for your surgeon example, I sure as hell hope my surgeon identifies as a biologist. If someone's slicing me open, they better be up-to-date and involved with the literature. (To your point, after speaking to my fair share of medical doctors, it seems a frightening few actually do this.)

Alfred Nobel's will states that the prize should go to "those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind." The part about the preceding year didn't work out very well, but when it comes to conferring the greatest benefit to mankind, John Bardeen certainly made the grade. Twice.

It doesn't really matter whether he should be primarily categorized as an engineer or a physicist or anything else.

The Engineering Quad at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is also named "Bardeen Quad" in John Bardeen's honor.

I haven't been back to my alma mater in a while, so my memory may be fuzzy, but I remember there was a plaque on the southwest end of the quad commemorating his achievements. I hope it's still there!

When I was taking my introduction to semiconductors class in junior year, I thought it was pretty cool that we were studying a subject that one of the university's professors helped invent.

At one time, one of the classrooms in the Everitt Lab had a plaque noting that it was the site of the first university lecture on transistors, ever. I assume it's still there, though I haven't been back to the U of I for a while myself.

I never met Prof. Bardeen, but those I know who did said he was one of the nicest and most modest, unassuming guys you'd ever want to meet.

Edit:

An acquaintance of mine was a librarian at the U of I. According to her, even after he retired, he'd come into the Grainger Engineering Library a few times a week to catch up on the latest journals. She said he was always super-nice and polite to the staff. I believe she said he generally just wore a flannel shirt and jeans.

I remember a class I took when I was studying for my BSEE. It had to do with the necessity of maintaining a lab notebook, of filling it out properly, and making sure to sign and date entries. The purpose was to maintain a documented history showing how efforts in the lab led from some basic principals to a patentable invention. The example was a few pages taken from Bardeen's notebook at the point where they finally were able to create a working transistor. Who knows when your work is going to change the world!

For what it's worth: US patent law has now changed. The law is no longer "first in invent", it's now "first to file".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_to_file_and_first_to_inv...

Muhc of the low-hanging fruit was picked in the 20th century. Every major branch of physics and engineering came out or was developed out of that century. now it's so much more theoretical and complicated and abstract in trying to tie the loose ends of the 20th century discoveries. As well as making incremental improvements.

> Muhc of the low-hanging fruit was picked in the 20th century.

Scientists were decrying the end of physics--back in the 1800s.

They just had to explain this silly black body thing and they would have it all wrapped up.

You are correct, though, in that the breakthroughs come due to the points that don't mesh with our understanding and that the apparatus to reach those point is quite a bit more expensive nowadays. I would point out, though, that you are kind of pointing toward "theoretical" physics--where there is a model that really does mostly work.

However, on the condensed matter side of the world, things aren't anywhere nearly so well-explained.

We can't fold proteins reliably. We can't engineer and explain superconductors. etc.

Look at how long it took simply to engineer a blue LED.

While the theoretical physics folks may think they have a handle on the world, the solid-state folks just chuckle and build another vacuum chamber.

Or, perhaps, someday in the 31st century, they'll be amazed at our startling lack of progress in the 21st century before the cascade of incredible breakthroughs in the years following. Who knows, really, what the "low hanging fruit" on the grand scale of things are.

This is seriously short changing the giants of 19th century.

I had a physics for engineers ( irony! ) course lecturer at De Anza College who worked at Bell Labs at the time on the transistor project.

Oh yeah, that was the time when I used my HP 48G as a universal remote to turn on all 6 TVs in the lecture hall and people freaked out. }:)

I've always had my eye out for time travelers from our future (I've had my eye out for UFOs as well, with about the same rate of success). It sounds like Bardeen could make the short list.

To this point I had been focusing on Edwin Howard Armstrong....

;-)

There’s a [perhaps apocryphal?] story about Onsager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_Onsager standing up at a conference and saying to someone discussing super conductivity, “No no no you’re off by a factor of two!”

“A factor of 2?”

“Yes, definitely.”

He couldn’t explain the factor two under further questioning. It turns out he was exactly right, there is a factor of 2 that arises from the fact that to superconduct electrons form Cooper pairs. [Aside: Actually, related to Bardeen, since Cooper pairing was first really well explained by the BCS theory!]

Onsager also had some calculational techniques nobody else understood; he could calculate statistical mechanics results in ways that really seemed alien at the time. He was understood to be completely right, years later; his method was similar to Feynman diagrams.

When we were told these stories by my stat mech professor during my PhD, the [tongue-in-cheek] end of the story was “The only reasonable explanation is that Onsager was sent back in time.”

John von Neumann definitely comes to mind. He was jokingly suspected to be an alien by his world-class intellectual peers.

What would be some good ways to distinguish a time traveler from a top-0.01% individual (of whom there are a million people on the planet)?

Having fun with this:

The elsewhere-mentioned "not making a big deal out of your success" might be a reasonable filter, because while a time traveler might almost unavoidably produce surprising advancements, they also wouldn't necessarily try to draw attention to themselves.

You know, lest they fall awry of any wandering time cops.

(Maybe not even to hide from them per se, given that for the hypothetical fun of it, we believe we could find them, but just to avoid some kind of prime-directive-rule against egregious self-enrichment, i.e. a "no playing god" kind of thing.)

The Man Who Fell To Earth.

Or 'Mother of Learning'.

I guess I'm too stupid to imagine that even the top 0.01% of individuals could think of some of the really out-of-left-field ideas.

The invention of Calculus might be another. That must have really made waves in the press. You know, when two time travelers set out to "invent Calculus" and by some unexplained coincidence they go back to roughly the same time in history. I mean, how does that happen?

If you read some older textbooks calculus is explained in a more intuitive way, to where you could see how someone like Newton might've arrived at it geometrically. Mathematics has gotten increasingly formalized/rigorized, which has trickled down into the teaching of calculus, at the expense of obscuring the origin of some of the ideas.

It depends very much on how you define "calculus".

If it's just a question of the fundamental theorem of calculus, then people like Isaac Barrow had already noticed that integration and differentiation were in some sense inverse operations, Fermat provided evidence of this by calculating integrals of polynomials, and I'm sure others did as well.

But they did not supply a clear statement of a theorem with an accompanying proof, I believe mostly because of a lack of proper definition of the derivative, which was provided by Fermat, and almost immediately this was what Newton needed to prove exactly how differentiation and integration were related.

I think it's no accident that once Fermat's definition (really, his method) of finding tangents was widely publicized, both Leibniz and Newton came up with the fundamental theorem. It was "hanging in the air", as all the pieces were on the table.

Newton was not shy in crediting Fermat for giving him the definition he required.

Math has many examples where the real breakthrough is identifying the precise definition of something that can be useful to form proofs. Once you have that, a flurry activity results in many proofs by other mathematicians. Cauchy's definition of limit triggered many results in analysis. Galois's discovery of a group or Enrico Betti's formulation of topology are other examples.

Winning the lottery to get clean funds.

Leonardo Da Vinci then?

Calling someone who got a PhD in Mathematical Physics from Princeton an "engineer" is a bit rich. Yes, his undergrad degree was in engineering, but we don't call Ed Witten a "historian" because his undergrad degree was in history, most people would focus on the PhD and years spent as a tenured professor in Physics at various universities and research institutes.

Unless you believe that later work cancels prior work, it's fair to call someone with an undergraduate degree in engineering an "engineer" regardless of their subsequent activities.

Lucent, AT&T etc. are like NASA in their failure to use these amazing achievements as part of their popular story/narrative. Imagine if the Nike marketing agency had, instead of 'shoes', literally 'space' to work with? It would be like crack for an agency creative. They would make 'Avengers' quality stuff.

IBM, at this point largely a purveyor of 2nd tier enterprise consulting, has an entire advertising narrative that they have been coasting on for decades.

They pushed the narrative very heavily before the breakup. As a regulated monopoly, lobbying the public was an important function.

what a very strange message to vote down. You can see any number of pre breakup publicity videos touting their contribution to society on Youtube and any history of the Bell system will discuss this topic. The topic itself is not in any way controversial.

> Their relationship, however, soured when Shockley tried to take most of the credit for the invention.

The article mentions BBT and one the constant jokes on it is whose name goes first and who gets the most credit. Guess some scientists really are that way! :)

I'd say that the big enabling invention was the PN junction diode. From an application point of view it wasn't as important as a transistor of course, but from a theoretical perspective it was a much bigger leap than from diode to transistor. Most texts on semiconductor physics spend much more time explaining the PN junction than explaining transistors.

Wikipedia lists him as a Physicist though, so someone forgot to sneak in a few edits before publishing their article...

Anyway, the ultimate "engineering" Physics Nobel prize remains with Nils Gustaf Dalén, who got it for inventing an automatic valve. But probably really got it for being a good friend that had his face blown up in an accident shortly before the winner was to be announced.

In fairness he did have a PhD in mathematical physics so characterizing him as an engineer instead of a physicist is not quite accurate. That said people in academia routinely downplay the qualifications and abilities of people who work in industry. It’s not hard to imagine colleagues dismissing his work as mere engineering and not real science before he won the Nobel prize. Perhaps calling him an engineer is fair in light of such practices.

I think you've invented quite a backstory about him being marginalised, but consider that when he left Bell labs he got offered a wage 17% short of a US congressman or the top 3% of engineer or "natural scientists" wages. This is not the pay for someone whose work is being dismissed.

My point was that actually he was mainly a physicist that simply started by studying engineering.

Before obtaining his Nobel prizes, he first obtained his PhD in physics (under Eugene Wigner, no less).

That said, Bardeen taught as a professor of electrical engineering and as a professor of physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign from 1951-1975, so I think it's fair to call him both.

>under Eugene Wigner, no less

So you could say he was... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wigner%27s_friend ?

Fields of study often have very hazy demarcations. Venki Ramakrishnan got a Nobel Prize in Chemistry, something he finds quite amusing because he has never worked on chemistry. He spends a bit of time explaining his background and his amusement in his book, "Gene Machine".

Britannica lists him[0] as physicist as well.

[0]: https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Bardeen

His Bachelor's and Master's were in Electrical Engineering.

"However, his love for physics was intact and urged him to go back to school. Therefore, he enrolled at Princeton University to study physics and mathematics in 1933.

There he wrote a thesis on solid-state physics under the guidance of Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner."

The title is fairly misleading ...

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