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The Nobel Prize in Physics 1996
David M. Lee, Douglas D. Osheroff, Robert C. Richardson
The Nobel Prize in Physics 1996
Nobel Prize Award Ceremony
David M. Lee
Douglas D. Osheroff
Robert C. Richardson
Autobiography
I was born on June 26, 1937 in
Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, DC. My
parents, Lois Price Richardson and Robert Franklin Richardson,
lived in Arlington, VA. My sister and only sibling, Addie Ann
Richardson, was born on May 6, 1939, also in Georgetown
University Hospital.
My earliest memories are of the apartment building in Arlington
where my mother, sister, and I lived during the years of World
War II while my father was away in the US Army. He was an officer
in the Signal Corps. We lived across the street from the fire
department and became accustomed to the blast of the siren at all
hours of the day and night. It is fortunate that we lived so
close to the fire department because one morning while my mother
was visiting neighbors my sister set the apartment on fire while
playing with the gas stove. Little damage was done, though I am
certain that my mother was thoroughly embarrassed.
My father was a native Virginian. Branches of his family could be
traced back to the early colonial times. His father, Robert
Coleman Richardson, after whom I was named, owned a general store
in a small rural village, Penola, VA. My father attended Roanoke College
for two years during the Great Depression. When his mother became
seriously ill, he left college because of the increased family
expenses. He became interested in electricity and began work as a
'lineman' for the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company in
Richmond, VA.
My mother's family was from North Carolina. She was an orphan,
practically from birth, and was shuttled among relatives in North
Carolina. As was a common practice in the rural South, she was
taught at home by various aunts. She attended only one year of
public school before going off to college. The one year of high
school was in Reidsville, NC in 1918. She attended various
colleges - Gulf Park College, the University of Alabama, the
University of
Mississippi, and the University of Virginia. She was one of the
first women to attend the latter and obtained a Master's Degree
in History there. During her college career she was brought in to
the large and warm family of Ernest H. Mathewson in Richmond, and
thus gained three brothers and two sisters. The Mathewsons were
known by my sister and me as our other grandparents during our
youth.
My parents met in Richmond and were married there in 1935.
Shortly thereafter, my father was transferred by the telephone
company to their branch in Washington, DC. As an army reservist
my father was called to active duty during World War II and again
during the Korean War. During his service for the latter he was
assigned to the Pentagon so that it did not become necessary for
him to leave home. During his second tour of duty with the army
he took advantage of the educational benefits associated with the
'G.I. Bill of Rights' to finish college. He graduated from the
University of
Maryland in 1955.
I do not remember having any special scientific interests during
childhood but I did love school. In 1946, when I was in the
fourth grade, my family moved from the apartment building we had
lived in during the war years. My father bought a new house in
one of the housing tract developments so common to the postwar
suburbs of American cities. We still lived in Arlington, VA. My
new elementary school, Walter Reed, was overcrowded. The fourth
and fifth grades met in the same room with the same teacher. I
paid as much attention to the fifth grade instruction as the
fourth. I especially loved the history lessons because Mrs.
Walton, our teacher, was a remarkable storyteller. During the
summer between fourth and fifth grade, I went to summer school
just to have something to do. The teacher of the summer session
was confused about my grade status and inadvertently promoted me
to the sixth grade. The Arlington County School system accepted
her decision. So I skipped a grade. Had I remained in the same
grade, one of my classmates in Walter Reed School would have been
Warren Beatty (of film star fame), whose family had just moved to
our neighborhood in Arlington.
With my parent's encouragement, I became very active in the Boy
Scouts. Scouting did not exist in rural Virginia, where my father
grew up. In his youth, he had always envied boys from larger
cities who could be in scouting. My involvement gave him,
vicariously, the scouting experience he had missed. With his
help, I became an Eagle Scout in the minimum amount of time
permitted by the rules. I especially enjoyed the outdoor
activities of scouting, hiking, camping, and even
birdwatching.
I spent the enjoyable summers of my high school years working as
a counselor in Camp Letts, a Boy Scout Camp on the western shore
of the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. I was a nature counselor. I
spent my days leading tours on nature trails through the camp. My
ankles were covered with a minor poison ivy rash from June
through August. In the evenings I led groups in 'stargazing;' and
one morning each week I led a ten-mile canoe trip through the
Maryland marshland to look at birds. I liked the canoe trips
best. We would arrive at the entrance of the marsh just at
sunrise when the maximum number of birds would be out feeding.
The marshes had large water birds like egrets and herons, three
kinds of wrens, more than twenty different warblers, vireos, plus
large birds of prey like hawks and eagles. It was possible in a
single morning for a scout to spot enough birds on a single trip
to qualify for the birdwatching merit badge. I learned where all
of the birds hung out and how to tell them by their songs.
Although I am color blind, I memorized their descriptions in the
bird manual. I would describe subtle pastel features of warblers
and vireos flitting about in the tree tops 60 feet above the
ground to the amazement of even the adult scout leaders. There is
a famous painting by James Audobon of a bald eagle diving toward
an osprey just after the osprey has caught a fish. Each summer I
was fortunate enough to see that scene re-enacted at least once.
It made a special impression on the groups I led because I showed
them a copy of the painting before we left on the trips.
My high school class at Washington-Lee High School had 925
students in it. I graduated, as I recall, in a six-way tie for
19th place. There was nothing exceptional about the math and
science training at Washington-Lee. The idea of 'advanced
placement' had not yet been invented. I did not take a calculus
course until my second year of college. The biology and physics
courses were very old fashioned. The idea of a 'photon' was said
to be controversial. This in 1953! I was taught that absolute
zero is the temperature at which all motion stops. It is most
fortunate that the statement was wrong. Otherwise 3He
could not become a superfluid.
I entered Virginia
Polytechnic Institute, also called Virginia Tech, in the Fall
of 1954. In those days, the Reserve Officers Training Corps
program was compulsory for all physically fit entering students
at VPI. Moreover, all ROTC students lived in a cadet corps with
fairly rigorous military discipline. I surprised myself by really
enjoying life in the VPI Corps of Cadets. I learned an easy and
democratic camaraderie. As we were assigned to live in cadet
companies in alphabetical order, my closest friends were those in
the bottom third of the alphabet.
In class, I started out as an electrical engineer but soon became
bored and impatient with the mechanical drawing course and the
rote application of a single principle, Kirchoff's Laws, in a
five-hour course. I tried to become a chemistry major but ran
into great difficulty in a course called quantitative analysis
because of my color-blindness. I could not tell when the color of
the indicator solution turned from pink to blue unless I made a
very strong over-concentration of acid or base. When I complained
to the professor he told me that I was very fortunate to discover
my disability early in my college career because I certainly was
not suited to be a chemist.
Finally, I turned to physics as a major. I was not an especially
diligent student but nevertheless obtained a reasonable education
in physics. I graduated with a B average and fourth in a group of
about 9 physics majors. My education through the Cadet Corps was
at least as valuable as that in formal class training. I was a
leader in several campus organizations. The rigorous honor code
at VPI in those days was almost exhilarating. We were all very
proud of it. I never saw anyone cheat on a test in my years
there.
In summers, while in college, I had a very interesting job with
the National Bureau of Standards. I worked in the Electricity
Division calibrating electrical resistance standards which power
companies sent to NBS once each year. The NBS program for summer
students was quite wonderful. First, we were well paid. Next, we
actually did useful research. Finally, we attended a weekly
seminar series which was given at our level of understanding. In
my spare time at NBS, I read the scientific literature on
electrical instrumentation and even met some of the authors of
some of the classic articles. The experience at NBS gave me some
notion of what a scientific research career could be.
After graduating from college, I had a vague idea of going to a
graduate program in business - with hopes of becoming an
executive in a large corporation. First, though, I felt that I
had not quite given physics and research a chance so I decided to
remain at VPI for one more year to obtain a Master's Degree
before going off to military service as an Army Officer. The
project I worked on was the measurement of the lifetime of
photo-excited carriers in germanium. In the process I had to
build a great deal of equipment because Tom Gilmer, my advisor,
had just come to VPI to a practically empty lab. Tom was a good
mentor, but he was very busy as department chairman and VPI
professors had quite a large teaching load. I learned a great
deal about how to do things with my own hands - operate a lathe,
solder, make simple electronic circuits, etc. I knew about
keeping a lab book from my summer jobs at NBS. In that year I
became a good deal more confident that I could learn physics at
advanced levels, but still was not in any way special. I think I
was still fourth in the group of graduate students. With the
feeling that I would probably be a mediocre physicist, at best, I
left VPI with the intent of attending a Masters in Business
Administration, MBA, program after finishing military
service.
A great piece of good fortune fell for me during my year of
graduate work at VPI. The Army ran short of money. Thus, rather
than having to spend two years on active duty, I was only
assigned for six months of active duty in the US Army Ordnance
Corps between November 1959 and May 1960. This was a time well
after the Korean War and well before the Vietnam War. There was
no likelihood of actually having to see any combat. At Aberdeen
Proving Ground, the Ordnance Corps training base, I took courses
in how to manage a platoon which would do things like repairing
jeeps and tanks. I hated the course and the being in the Army.
Wearing a uniform and the military discipline did not bother me;
I had become used to both while in the VPI Cadet Corps. But I did
not enjoy the training in how to run a small business - for
that's what a repair platoon in the Ordnance Corps was.
Therefore, I decided to return to graduate school to obtain a Ph.
D. in physics.
I had no opportunity while in the Army to take tests like the
Graduate Record Exam to qualify me for admission to one of the
top graduate schools - like MIT, Harvard, or Cornell. Besides, I probably would not have
been admitted even if I had taken the tests. Therefore, I looked
for smaller research universities with strong specialties. In my
graduate research project, I had made a simple liquid nitrogen
dewar, and found the area of low temperature physics to be
interesting. I had read some articles about the work going on at
Duke
University so decided to apply there. I received a warm
letter from Horst Meyer, a new Assistant Professor at Duke,
encouraging me to come to work for him. The letter was very
flattering - the first strong encouragement I had ever received
about my potential as a physicist. Therefore, I entered Duke in
the Fall of 1960 as a full-time graduate student.
I had a glorious time at Duke. I made strong friendships which
have been maintained through the rest of my life. I met my wife,
Betty McCarthy, there. One of only two physics majors in her
class at Wellesley College, Betty was also a graduate student
in Physics. We were married in 1962 and our daughters Jennifer
and Pamela were born in Durham, NC, in 1965 and 1966.
Horst was a very conscientious mentor. He taught me a great deal
of the craft of low temperature technology he had learned as a
research associate at the Clarendon Laboratory in Oxford. In all of the
subsequent years he has been a valued friend. We had the best of
two worlds in our low temperature group at Duke in those days.
Bill Fairbank had been there but left before I arrived. Much of
the old equipment and the residue of the experimental technology
from Bill Fairbank remained. Horst brought a different set of
techniques with him and we had our choice of which way to do
things - for example the use of wood's metal to attach vacuum
cans along with Epiezon J-oil for thermal contact were the Oxford
technique. Indium O-rings and vacuum grease were the Fairbank
method. Both had advantages.
Horst put me on a good problem - the NMR study of the exchange
interaction in solid 3He. Earle Hunt came to Duke as a
research associate with Horst and taught me about the new methods
for pulsed NMR-spin echos and all of that. The combination of
training with Horst and Earle put me in business for practically
the rest of my research career.
I finished my thesis in 1965 and remained at Duke for another
year as a research associate in order to clean up some of the
loose ends of the research and to look for a good job. In the
latter, I was fortunate indeed. Cornell University, with its
special funding as an Interdisciplinary Laboratory (IDL) had
decided to expand its effort in low temperature physics. In the
Spring of 1966 the Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics
invited me to join them to work with Dave
Lee and John Reppy on very low temperature helium research.
As far as I was concerned, there could be no better career
opportunity.
I moved my family to Ithaca in October 1966 and have remained
there ever since. I received sound career advice from Dave and
John from the day I arrived. The research environment at Cornell
has been superb with an unbroken string of talented graduate
students, close colleagues in both theory and experiment, and a
team of technical support specialists who helped make everything
work. During my thirty years at Cornell I even learned how to
teach undergraduate physics courses, an activity which my wife
and I enjoy a great deal. After our daughters entered Junior High
School, Betty turned to teaching physics at Cornell also. She is
now a Senior Lecturer.
My children grew to adulthood in Ithaca. It is a wholesome
college town with few of the problems of large cities. Jennifer
went to college back at Duke and later attended a Master of Fine
Arts in Creative Writing program at Columbia
University. Jenny married James Merlis in June 1994. We had a
beautiful wedding reception among my large rhododendron bushes in
our back garden. In addition to her writing and other activities,
she now plays violin in an all female rock band called
Splendora.
Pamela went to college at Cornell. After graduation, she went to
the New York School of Interior Design for a year and then
decided to become a nurse. She returned home to take the science
courses she had skipped at Cornell. She spent a year at our local
community college taking chemistry, biology, anatomy, etc.,
displaying a surprising scientific talent. After the year at home
she went to Vanderbilt University where she entered a Masters of
Nursing program. In November of 1994 - after one year in the
Vanderbilt nursing program - she died tragically, of heart
failure. Though she had been born with a heart defect, her death
came without warning.
In an effort to drag ourselves out of our grief and despondency
over losing Pam, we have taken on a major family project in the
past year: the production of an introductory college physics text
book. Betty is the co-author of the book, with Alan Giambattista
of Cornell; and I have been working on a companion CD ROM. When
completed, the work will be published by McGraw Hill.
From Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Prizes 1996, Editor Tore Frängsmyr, [Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 1997
This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and later published in the book series Les Prix Nobel/Nobel Lectures. The information is sometimes updated with an addendum submitted by the Laureate.
Copyright © The Nobel Foundation 1996
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