True Genius: The Life and Science of John Bardeen: The Only Winner of Two Nobel Prizes in Physics (2002)

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16 Last Journey B ardeen sat awkwardly, with a gentle half-smile, as he gazed obligingly into the video camera. His Loomis Hall office was crowded on that day in June 1990, with people and video equipment. It was unusually hot. Bardeen felt a heavy fatigue. He had not been feeling well since his recent trip to Japan and would not have initiated this filmed interview. But members of NHK, a major Japanese television cor- poration, had traveled a great distance to record his memories about the invention of the transistor. Also, Bardeen wanted the true story to be known. He had hoped to do the filming in the comfort of his home, but when the interviewer suggested his office instead he had politely acquiesced. Nick Holonyak, John’s long-time colleague and friend, was along for support. Holonyak recognized the invention of the transistor as a great transforming moment. The film captures Bardeen at eighty-two, his well-wrinkled face pleasant and calm. He sits at his desk where a lighted magnifying glass had been mounted on an adjustable arm, a gift lovingly crafted by Holonyak and his students to help alleviate some of the frustra- tion of Bardeen’s failing eyesight. The papers and journals stacked on Bardeen’s desk and the books arranged on the shelves above were obviously still in use. Bardeen gave a satisfied grin when the interviewer asked about his daily routine. “I come in most every day, but I don’t put in as 301 

302 TRUE GENIUS long hours as I used to. I come in later and leave earlier, but I still come in every day.” Asked whether he still was active in research, Bardeen’s eyes crinkled. “I’m still active in research,” he warbled, his lips curling into a beatific smile. “And the number of papers I’ve published per year has remained about constant. It hasn’t dropped off.” Patiently, in response to the interviewer’s questions, Bardeen told the short version of his years at the University of Wisconsin and at Gulf Labs, how he became interested in solid-state physics, and why he came to Bell Labs. Sorting methodically through the pile of papers in front of him, he found the one he wanted to illus- trate a particular experiment. He had prepared his notes and illus- trations carefully. The paper’s rattling betrayed the Parkinsonian symptoms that had been troubling him for years. Ignoring the tremor in his hand, Bardeen pointed slowly to the physics figures and indicated the most important features of each. Halfway through the taping, Holonyak asked Bardeen whether he was getting tired. John shook his head. He wanted to finish the story. A little later Holonyak interrupted to clarify a point that he believed was historically important. He asked Bardeen on what date he and Brattain understood that holes—the ghostlike positive charge carriers that were in the minority in the semiconductor with respect to the negatively charged electrons—were entering the ger- manium making the first transistor possible. The date, Bardeen said, was December 16, 1947, one week before the group’s demon- stration of their invention to the Bell Labs “top brass.” “But John,” Holonyak pointed out, “the junction transistor is a bipolar transistor based on the bipolar injection ideas that were yours and Brattain’s.” He wanted to point out several items to re- flect the fact that Shockley’s junction transistor, more easily manu- factured than the original point-contact transistor, was based on ideas that originated with Bardeen and Brattain. “So it’s sort of ironic,” Holonyak continued, “that the more manufacturable one for a certain time was the bipolar p-n junction device of Shockley’s, but nevertheless based on the injection principle that you and Brattain discovered on December 16, 1947. I think that’s key and a very important point.” Bardeen understood well the irony of the patent relations. “Brattain and I have the basic patent on the bipolar principle in which we used metal semiconductor contacts rather than p-n junc- 

Last Journey 303 tions, and Shockley has the basic patent on the junction transistor, which is the common type. And Shockley was the first one, at least at Bell, to suggest the field effect concept. And I have the basic patent on the use of an inversion layer.” He glanced at Holonyak and smiled, “which is used in the common type of field effect tran- sistor.” Bardeen’s dedication to order and accuracy surfaced when the interviewer asked a question about the use of silicon and germa- nium. The answer required going backwards in the story to the wartime research. In spite of his declining health, Bardeen had no lapses of memory and did not scramble his statements. After answering the interviewer’s query, Bardeen suggested that he edit this part of the account to an earlier spot in the tape. Then he picked up his narrative exactly where he had left off. Asked about Shockley’s reaction to Bardeen and Brattain’s dis- covery, Bardeen murmured, “of course he was very excited about the new principle.” Pressed for remarks about Shockley’s charac- ter, he refused to say anything more revealing than, “Well, I think that his personality changed over the course of time.” Shockley eventually “developed problems in relations with others,” Bardeen offered. Then he prevaricated, “during the time I was there, our relations were good.” Bardeen had no interest in publicly criticizing Shockley, who had died in August 1989 of prostate cancer. The two men had had their difficulties, but Bardeen genuinely admired Shockley’s facile mind. Shockley’s more recent behavior baffled, infuriated, and sometimes amused Bardeen. He thought it “a tragedy that he got involved in a field in which he had no expertise—human genetics.” Using statistics to bolster his theories, Shockley had argued since the 1960s that supposed social and intellectual deficits of African Americans are racially determined. Shockley thought that improv- ing externalities such as education, housing, or health care would make no difference. Bardeen strongly disagreed. In 1981 he told a newspaper journalist that “you have to judge people individually even if there are statistical differences.” Shockley, Bardeen once wrote, “could have accomplished much more in physics and elec- tronics if his interests had not been diverted.” In 1980 Shockley had publicized the fact that he was making contributions to a sperm bank, reckoning that his genetic material might ameliorate “the existence of tragic genetic deficiencies in 

304 TRUE GENIUS our society.” When the news came out about Shockley’s sperm donations, one of Holonyak’s West Coast contacts called him with a question for Bardeen. “He wanted to know,” Holonyak told Bardeen, “if you’ve been jacking off for the sperm bank.” Bardeen chuckled, then laughed out loud at the absurdity of it. “I’d never seen John laugh harder,” Holonyak recalled with a grin. Brattain had passed away two years before Shockley. He spent his last two decades, after retiring from Bell Labs in 1967, teaching at his alma mater, Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. There he became interested in biophysics while continuing to work on solids. Brattain “enjoyed teaching undergraduates,” Bardeen fondly recalled, especially in his course, “Physics for Nonscience Majors.” After a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease, Brattain died in October 1987. Bardeen was therefore not in the mood for cel- ebration two months later at the fortieth anniversary of the tran- sistor. “A part of my life is gone. We worked very closely together.” On the day Bardeen heard about Brattain’s passing, he tele- phoned Holonyak. Nick instantly knew that something was wrong. Usually if Bardeen wanted to talk, he would walk over to Holonyak’s lab and sit down for a while. “And I’d drop anything and everything I was doing then, because however long he wanted to stay or talk we would talk. But on this occasion, when Walter died, he called.” Nick was aware that his wife Kay was waiting outside, but he let John speak. “Gee,” he thought, “this is unlike John to stay on the phone this long.” It was obvious to Holonyak that John “was very upset,” for Brattain had been “really, truly, his partner.” At one point during the conversation, John whispered to Nick, “I’m next.” Nick replied, “John, we’re all next in a certain sense.” Bardeen missed Brattain. In a tribute to his friend, published in Physics Today, he wrote, “While history will remember Walter Brattain for his achievements, I will remember him as a close per- sonal friend, golf and bridge partner, and colleague.” Bardeen donated $5,000 to the Walter H. Brattain Lectureship at Whitman College, “in memory of a long-time friend and colleague.” Throughout 1990 Bardeen worked on preparing his scientific papers for deposit in the University of Illinois Archives. He spent many tiring hours organizing his papers with the help of Tonya Lillie, an undergraduate assistant who later helped with the early research for this book. Bardeen was preparing to turn over his accu- 

Last Journey 305 mulated scientific files to the university archives. He knew exactly how he wanted to organize them. By associating his working papers—his notes, reprints, and other materials from other scien- tists, as well as his own early drafts—with the end products, he hoped to contribute to a better understanding of how he had come to make his scientific breakthroughs. He wanted to demystify the process. Betsy Bardeen said that her father wanted scholars to be able to trace the evolution of “his scientific ideas and where the different contributions came from.” David Pines noted that Bardeen “wanted to emphasize what he’d done in science, how he went about doing it.” Equally important to Bardeen was to have his life and work remembered “in a way that would inspire the young.” Everything became more difficult for Bardeen as his eyesight failed. He could no longer read normal print and was dependent on his magnifying tool from Holonyak. As the trip that he and Jane took to Japan in the spring of 1990 had exhausted them both, he declined an invitation to return in the fall. Sony’s George Hatoyama wrote in October 1990 to say that he would miss them “coming to Japan this fall, but I believe it is good for you to have rest.” Hatoyama sympathized with Bardeen’s eye problem. “Although I have not suffered from eye disease, I can imagine how annoying it would be.” He added, “You know, you (and I) are not young, and we must rest when we have problems in health.” Painful attacks of gout in Bardeen’s legs made walking a chal- lenge, although with the aid of a golf cart he continued to enjoy his favorite sport. He still preferred to walk, but Bill Werstler noticed that he would sometimes “stop, take his shoe off, get his foot back in shape, and go on again.” The tremor in his hands had worsened with age. The high blood pressure that he had been fighting for years was controlled with medication. On top of that, he had re- cently learned that dangerous plaque had begun to build up in his arteries. His failing body had become oppressive to him. In late 1990 he developed a ragged cough that would not go away. Venting his frustration to Holonyak one day, about the gout and his poor eyesight, he gestured tightly toward his chest, “and now this!” In September Bardeen learned that he was to be named one of Life magazine’s “100 Most Influential Americans of the Twentieth Century.” He took the honor in stride. “Probably a few names are on everyone’s lists,” he said, “but beyond those few, there’s lots of 

306 TRUE GENIUS room for argument.” His colleagues, on the other hand, saw little room for argument about Bardeen’s accomplishments. Miles Klein told a journalist that “the invention of the transistor and every- thing that grew out of that has spawned a second industrial revolu- tion that is at least as important as the first industrial revolution.” In December 1990, Bardeen walked a copy of his Physics Today article, which had just appeared, over to Joyce McMillan, Bill McMillan’s widow. She was touched by the visit. “He wanted me to be sure and get a copy,” she recalled. “They had asked him to do a general overview of the history and the shaping of the super- conductivity theory. He said in doing that he had finally really acknowledged Bill McMillan’s work on that.” Bardeen made repeated visits to Carle Clinic in Urbana to have his cough checked out. That December, doctors there aspirated nearly a liter of fluid from his chest, a new and frightening development. Chest X rays revealed a mass in his lungs characteristic of cancer. When the local doctors wanted to do a chest biopsy to determine the extent of the tumors, John and Jane balked. Jane did not trust the local doctors. It was time to see a specialist. Bardeen made an appointment at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital which, according to a colleague, had one of the best thoracic surgery groups in the country. Dr. David Sugarbaker was the chief of thoracic surgery there. Bardeen hoped that Sugarbaker’s team could remove the mass in his lungs. In Boston he and Jane would also be close to Betsy and her family, a comfort for them both. John and Jane purchased airline tickets but had to cancel their reservation when doctors warned Bardeen not to fly. The opening in the chest wall from the pleural effusions in Urbana had not completely healed, leaving his lungs vulnerable to possible pressure changes in an airplane. They hired a limousine service to take them to Boston. At Betsy and Tom’s house they rested. As always, John enjoyed the company of his grandsons, Andrew and Matthew, who were now 12 and 6. Both children were very attached to their grandfa- ther. Andrew had recently written an essay about his favorite rela- tive. “He learned to swim before he could walk, and he still likes to swim. I do too, and when I was younger, I would ride on his back while he swam the breaststroke. We called these ‘loon rides’ since 

Last Journey 307 baby loons ride on their parents’ backs. He still swims, and when he is here, he comes to my swim team practices and meets.” While the Greytaks were away at work or school, Bardeen watched a little television and read as best he could with his failing eyes. He chatted on the phone once or twice with friends and fam- ily members. Holonyak recalled that they might have talked a little physics, but mostly Bardeen talked about the upcoming tests and health concerns that were then uppermost on his mind. The appointment with Sugarbaker fell on Martin Luther King Day, January 21, 1991. Appointments were scheduled lightly, and Bardeen did not have to wait long before seeing the doctor. Jane and Betsy accompanied him. After the examination, Sugarbaker gave Bardeen a thorough briefing on his condition and its possible treat- ments. John gently quizzed him. Sugarbaker recalled, “I was struck right away with his analytical approach to his problem, his seeking answers. And at the same time he was very much a patient, who knew that he was going to work hard with me to try to make this a successful approach.” Together they looked at the X rays. Sugarbaker told his patient everything he wanted to know. Bardeen asked about new innovative approaches to treating his cancer, surgical or other- wise, and participated fully in the process of his own medical care. “He had many questions about his diagnosis and what the poten- tial options would be.” They planned to do additional tests to find out whether the cancer had spread via the bloodstream and whether the tumor had metastasized to the lymph nodes. They agreed that, at the beginning of the following week, Sugarbaker would perform a bronchoscopy and a mediastinoscopy (an examination of the area around the lungs using an endoscope with a light and lenses). The procedures would determine whether the cancer had spread. If it had, surgery would not be an option. The procedure required an overnight stay in the hospital. The night before he went in, Bardeen spent a quiet evening with Jane, Betsy, Tom, and his grandsons. The surgery went smoothly. John awakened in the recovery room, where he was able to chat drowsily with the nurses. He remained in the hospital that night while the laboratory analyzed the biopsy. Sugarbaker knew what the results were shortly after the surgery, but preferred to give his patient time to recover fully from the anesthesia before discussing them. Jane and Betsy kept John company for a while that evening and promised to come back 

308 TRUE GENIUS the next day. They left him watching a basketball game on the television in his room. Early Wednesday morning, January 30, Bardeen was awake and exchanging pleasantries and small jokes with the nurses. When Sugarbaker came into the room, Bardeen asked how the doctor was doing. “How’s your day—are you busy?” he would ask. “We always started by him asking how I was doing.” It was, Sugarbaker re- called, “a unique aspect of Mr. Bardeen.” Then they got around to discussing Bardeen’s diagnosis. The cancer had spread to the point where surgery was not an option. They agreed to go forward with radiation treatments. Sugarbaker was not “overly pessimistic, but Bardeen was a highly intelligent person.” The doctor could see Bardeen “knew that this was not good news.” At best, they could try to slow the disease process and alleviate some of the symp- toms. Bardeen likely had no more than a few months to live. Sugarbaker checked Bardeen’s incision from the day before. It looked fine. He continued his rounds, marveling at Bardeen’s calm acceptance of his condition and his dignity in the face of his own mortality. As Sugarbaker was getting ready to step onto the eleva- tor, Bardeen’s nurse came running to get him. She had gone in to check on her patient and “found him unresponsive.” The record on the cardiac monitor revealed that Bardeen had suffered a massive heart attack. The team could not revive him. He died that morn- ing, January 30, 1991, at 8:45 A.M. Sugarbaker remembered that Bardeen had “expired very quickly, painlessly.” Of the thousands of patients he had treated, Bardeen stood out in his memory. For him it was a “very thought-provoking incident—I’ve never forgot- ten it.” Bardeen knew that he had a “very, very poor prognosis” and “that he had an incurable problem. And he died.” Sugarbaker considered Bardeen to be “a man with a lot of pres- ence.” You could tell “there was a lot to this person.” Thoracic surgeons often see people when “their backs are up against the wall.” At that moment courage is a precious commodity. Bardeen, he felt, had remarkable grace in his final days. “He was rock solid, and very calm” on getting the kind of news that caused others to “shift in their chairs and become uncomfortable.” Bardeen’s body was cremated at the Mt. Auburn Crematory in Cambridge. Jane brought his ashes back to Champaign. In the spring the family would bury him in Madison, the city of his youth. 

Last Journey 309 On Friday afternoon, February 8, several hundred friends and col- leagues honored Bardeen’s memory at a simple memorial service held at the Illinois Student Union of the University of Illinois. The service was followed by a reception at the university’s Krannert Center for the Performing Arts. Betsy, Bill, and Jim shared memo- ries of their father; a few of his friends and colleagues paid tribute to his scientific genius and to his humanity. Bill told the group it was no wonder the “children have all ended up in or close to physics.” Part of the reason “was the fact that we all felt the enthusiasm and intensity that Dad gave to physics.” The Bardeen children learned by example. “In our house, physics was considered the noblest of professions. We were not told this but just seemed to know it anyway. It was clearly indi- cated by Dad’s own approach to physics and the standards he set in his own life. Dad did not try to teach us physics but encouraged us to find our own way.” John didn’t mind teaching some physics at home when the occasion called for it. Bill recalled the time when “I was in danger of failing in a course on electricity and magnetism in college.” His father spent the Christmas vacation working on problems with him and Bill ended up passing the course. “I suppose you would not consider my father to be the typical American father,” Bill said. “However, for us kids he was always first and foremost our father. Of the three children, I must have been the one who helped Dad learn what it really meant to be a father.” He explained that Jim had been “calm and peaceful as a baby and was content to explore the world within his reach. How- ever, I was always the active one, always one step from disaster and one step ahead of anybody trying to catch me.” Jim told the group that when the children were young, “he rough-housed with us on the living room floor and later spent many hours playing catch and shagging flies with Bill and me.” “Most of all, my father enjoyed his grandchildren,” Betsy said. He “felt completely comfortable playing on the floor with little children, tussling with them, building with blocks, and entering their imaginative play.” She told one of her favorite stories, the one “when Andrew was about three, when I heard strange noises com- ing from Andrew’s room at our cabin in New Hampshire. When I looked in, I found them pretending to be loons, diving under the quilt to catch fish and coming up to call to one another. When Matthew came along, he joined in, and the three of them would 

310 TRUE GENIUS roll around on the floor in the loft.” Recalling her own childhood, she said, “Although we often sat together in a comfortable silence, he was very interested in everything I did, and could be counted upon to come up with odd bits of knowledge to fit in with my interests. When I learned to play jacks and challenged him to a match, he went right through the twenties, all in order and with no mistakes.” David Pines would profoundly miss his friend’s daily presence. He had returned to Urbana in 1959 because Bardeen was there. At the memorial he described John as “quiet, genuinely modest, instead of basking in the glory which a continuing series of seminal contributions to science brought his way, he preferred always to work on the next scientific challenge. He possessed a rare ability to see into the heart of a problem, to pluck out the key phenomena from a myriad of often conflicting experimental results and to isolate the elements required to develop a coherent description. Nowhere was this more evident than in his work on superconduc- tivity.” “John was a wonderful colleague, and a devoted and caring friend,” Pines continued. He recalled a trip that he, his wife Suzy, and their infant daughter once made “by car from Paris to Leiden— John at his request in the back seat with 21/2-year-old Catherine Pines, who found him so accessible she talked to him, non-stop, for 61/2 hours.” Nick Holonyak recalled how John’s letter of introduction to Makoto Kikuchi had influenced his experience in Japan during the mid-1950s. He told the story about receiving John’s card from Stockholm when he was working in Yokohama for the army, and his commanding officer’s reaction: “Holonyak! Who in the hell do you know by the name of John in Sweden?” Nick also told the others his theory about why John had misspelled the word “exist- ence” in the card—John had skipped the grades in primary school when he should have learned to spell! Charles Slichter recalled the moment when he learned from John that the mystery of superconductivity had finally been solved. “I was walking down the hallway of the physics building and John stopped me,” he recounted. “It seemed that we stood there for five minutes while I was waiting for him to speak and then he said, ‘Well, I think we’ve figured out superconductivity.’” For Slichter, “this was the most exciting moment in science that I’ve ever expe- 

Last Journey 311 rienced.” He fondly recalled how John brought his medal “around to the lab so the rest of us could see it.” Bob Schrieffer reminisced about the sixtieth birthday gift that he and his wife Anne had constructed for Bardeen, the collage of John’s students and violins. “And there was John in a set of tails with a red sash as the superconductor in his grand canonical ensemble.” Schrieffer told how he had “miscounted the number of students so everything was perfectly arranged as 27, but there were only 26 heads.” He decided to correct his error by adding a photo of Niels Bohr as a student, inserting it “right off center, so John wouldn’t notice it.” Bardeen instantly saw the ringer and said, dryly: “He was not my student. That’s Niels Bohr.” Letters from all over the world poured into 55 Greencroft and the Illinois Physics Department expressing heartfelt condolences and sharing warm memories of John. Images of Bardeen helping along a younger colleague or playing with children were familiar themes. His golfing buddies Bill Werstler and Lou Burtis planted a tree on the fifteenth tee of the Champaign Country Club’s golf course in memory of their friend. Fred Seitz wrote Jane about the last time he saw Bardeen, when he visited Urbana in October 1990. The two men had joined some physics colleagues for lunch. As the luncheon ended, it became clear that John wanted me to come to his office to talk. We must have spent one and a half hours discussing many things from the past as well as issues concerning the state of his health. He also told me that he was getting his papers in final order since he expected to lose his vision soon. Looking back, it is now clear that he was trying in his way to tell me that this would probably be our last meeting. At the time, that seemed unimaginable. During the visit, John and Fred had reminisced about the extra- ordinary period they had lived through at the University of Illinois. Bardeen said, “Well we owe a lot to Louis Ridenour.” They agreed that Ridenour, in collaboration with President George Stoddard and Provost Coleman Griffith, had been able to turn the place around, “taking advantage of the opportunities of the period.” Dutch Osterhoudt wrote to Jane from his wife Gretchen’s room at Durango Mercy Hospital, where she had undergone surgery three days earlier. “John was so quiet and modest, but the scientific world learned about him from his achievements. Gretchen and I miss 

312 TRUE GENIUS him already. We had hoped you and he would come down and stay with us this coming summer.” Their grandson Curtis had taken a liking to Bardeen. John Tucker wrote, “I will always remember the good times.” In May when the first flowers were in bloom and the trees were coming to life, Bardeen’s ashes were buried in Madison. John had asked that his remains be laid in the cemetery where Charles Russell and Althea Harmer Bardeen had been buried. They were interred in a plot adjacent to that of his parents. A place beside John was reserved for Jane. The family held a small service at the graveside. Bardeen’s nephew Tom came from California to wish his famous uncle Godspeed. He brought his infant son, John, Bardeen’s only namesake. Jane donated John’s medals—the two Nobel Prize medals, the Lomonosov, and the Franklin—as well as his papers to the Univer- sity of Illinois, as he had specified in his will. Most of the estate was held in trusts to be distributed to family members according to the rules of each trust. The family worked hard to preserve all of John’s relevant documents and artifacts. Bill and his wife Marge agreed to preserve important family papers in their home in Warrenville, Illinois. At the university, most of the documents in Bardeen’s office were moved to the University of Illinois Archives, where they were carefully arranged, boxed, and catalogued for re- search use according to archival standards. Jane carried on with her life, but it became difficult for her to get out as much as she would have liked. It was not long before the house on Greencroft became too much for her to look after. She moved to Clark-Lindsey Village, an assisted-living apartment com- plex in Urbana where some of her friends already lived. Gretchen Osterhoudt wrote Jane in May 1994 with the sad news that Walter, John’s old friend “Dutch” from the University of Wisconsin and Gulf Labs, had died. She, like Jane, was “learning to be a widow.” Declining health eventually forced Jane to move to the skilled care unit at Clark-Lindsey Village. She suffered intensely from the pain in her back. Even as her condition deteriorated, she contin- ued to make friends. She often talked about her long-ago days teach- ing biology, about her family and her travels. One night she told 

Last Journey 313 one of the staff members, “I’m going to die.” The woman lingered with Jane in her room for a while. Jane died that morning, March 31, 1997, at 4:00 A.M., seven days short of her ninetieth birthday. “Every time we attend a funeral service,” Jane had once told her sister Betty, “we decide again that we want no such ceremony when we die.” She and John agreed that the family could, if they wanted to, have a memorial service conducted by friends and fam- ily, “but not a sermon by a stranger, who, if a minister, is bound to dwell on life after death and other religious ideas in which we have no faith.” Jane’s family and friends honored her memory with a small memorial service on April 5, 1997. Bill Bardeen designed a single low stone monument for the graves of both his parents. The design includes two N’s to represent his father’s two Nobel prizes and two flower sprigs to symbolize his mother’s interest in the natural world. The stone marks the spot where Jane’s ashes now lie with John’s, on a low hill just west of Madison.