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

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3 To Be an Engineer T hat summer, while the children were away, Charles courted his secretary, Ruth Hames. The children already knew Ruth from visits to their father’s office and because she was the sis- ter of John’s Boy Scout semaphore signaling partner. At twenty- eight, Ruth was more than twenty years younger than Charles. “I have played some golf but have at times neglected it in favor of motor rides with Ruth,” Charles wrote C. W. in late August. “Ruth and I expect to be married October 6.” Ruth worked patiently to reduce the chaos of the family. Bill, John, and Helen accepted her presence calmly. But Tom, eight years old when Althea died, resented Ruth and became even more diffi- cult when Ann, a new half-sister, was born less than a year after Charles and Ruth were married. John often acted as Ann’s “savior” when Tom’s teasing became unbearable. John’s grades at Uni High fell in the year following Althea’s death, especially in French. In later years he claimed to have had no talent for languages, but in 1919 Althea had written to C. W. that John “stood at the head of his class” in French. A year after Althea’s death, John’s French teacher wrote Charles that, although John was “not actually failing now, I have felt all year that he is not in the right class to get the most out of his work.” Bardeen’s high school records do not hint at his great future accomplishments. At Uni High he received many more marks of “good” and “fair” than of “excellent,” even in some mathematics 28 

To Be an Engineer 29 courses. But the record cards offered no space for teachers’ com- ments, and his permanent record card fails to reflect anywhere that he was often working three to five years ahead of his age group. Charles believed that Uni High nurtured John’s mathematical talent. He explained to C. W. that students there were “allowed to go ahead in any line they take up as fast as they show ability and the hard and fast grade system does not exist.” He felt that had John attended public school he would “not only be several years behind where he is now, which in itself would not be so serious, but he would be deadened mentally by routine instead of enjoying healthy mental exercise.” John’s seventh-grade mathematics teacher, Walter W. Hart, helped him to recognize his talent for math. “He saw that I was interested so he gave me a lot of extra work and instruction.” Hart, who also taught in the University of Wisconsin’s Department of Education, had kept alive for over fifty years his famous popular mathematics textbook series, Mathematics in Daily Use. On one occasion Hart noticed that his youngest student’s atten- tion had wandered away from the class discussion. John was “in the front seat of the row near the door . . . fully occupied with some personal project.” When Hart asked John what he was doing, the boy said he was “solving examples on a page far ahead of that on which the class was occupied.” Hart gave John permission to sit in the back of the room and work through the book’s problems at his own pace. He “invited others in the class to undertake to ‘get in sight of your dust.’” Some students took him up on it. Hart referred to the activity as “legalized inattention.” In later years Bardeen would remember Hart with fondness, writing to him in 1962 to “express my deep gratitude to you as a teacher for first exciting my interest in mathematics.” Even with the disruption of Althea’s death, John completed all his Uni High course work by age thirteen. But as he was “a little leery about graduating so young,” he and Bill decided to attend Madison Central High School for two years, taking additional mathematics, science, and literature courses not offered at Uni. By the time John had turned fifteen and Bill seventeen, the two had completed every course of interest at Madison Central. There was no longer any reason to postpone entering college. In the fall of 1923 they both entered the freshman class at the University of Wisconsin. 

30 TRUE GENIUS John lived at home while trying to be a “college man.” Perhaps to appear older, he began to smoke cigarettes, which his father’s generation had referred to as “coffin nails.” Sports eased John’s social adjustment. Despite his age and rela- tively small stature, he made the varsity swim team in his sopho- more, junior, and senior years. He also lettered on the varsity water polo team. During his junior year, he was mentioned in the Wisconsin Badger Yearbook as having swum “some beautiful races in the 200-yard breast stroke to cop first place.” The yearbook swim team photo shows a fit young man standing in a relaxed pose by the pool. In John’s sophomore year he joined the Zeta Psi social frater- nity. Frowning on fraternity high jinks, Charles refused to pay the membership fee. John raised the money himself by working summers and playing poker or billiards. He discovered he had a talent for billiards and became a three-cushion champion. His unassuming manner probably helped him work up games with unsuspecting students who were surprised to find they had been hustled. He could not earn enough to cover room and board, so he continued to live at home, occasionally taking a meal at the house. That Zeta Psi was a social, rather than an academic, fraternity may have attracted Bardeen. The university “had little trouble with Zeta Psi on the score of conduct or morale,” reported the dean of men. But he had to admit that “they do not stand very well scho- lastically.” John’s academic performance was not distinguished. His college transcript shows grades ranging from “poor” to “excellent.” His friends did not remember him as a student who spent long hours studying, although he performed better than most of his fra- ternity brothers. Walter Osterhoudt, “Dutch” to his friends, belonged to the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity, whose house sat on the shore of Lake Mendota, down the street from the Bardeens. When Dutch and John were in an engineering course together, Osterhoudt had the im- pression that John “just floated in and out” of his classes. “I don’t think he ever studied.” Nor did John always make it to class. “He didn’t have to stay on the treadmill like we did.” Osterhoudt did recall that some of Bardeen’s professors were impressed with his academic work. Bardeen knew many of the men in the Pi Kappa Alpha frater- nity, as he and his siblings had often played in the water and on the 

To Be an Engineer 31 dock behind the PiKA house. It was not uncommon to find John there in his college years drinking beer and getting a little rowdy with some of the PiKA brothers, several of whom had at one time or another been “sweet” on John’s sister Helen. Osterhoudt recalled one PiKA adventure that included Bardeen in the summer of 1928. Someone (the PiKAs suspected a rival fraternity) had called the local police to complain about a noisy party at the PiKA house. The police raided the fraternity, carting the revelers down to the city hall, where they were “booked.” The offenders were led to the drunk tank, where they were to spend the night. But after they had settled in, a pre-med student discovered that one of the supine old men in the room was not sleeping but was actually dead. The horrified students raised a ruckus and managed to get themselves sent home, albeit with a bad case of the heebie-jeebies. Another incident during Bardeen’s college years reveals some- thing of how he experienced the world in his teens. At seventeen, while he was driving down University Avenue, the vehicle in front of his dropped an axle. John plowed into it. The impact threw him into the windshield, and he sustained some bruises and lacerations that proved more frightening than life threatening. He arrived at the hospital with a bloody face, but it appeared the doctors and nurses had more important things to do than tend to him immedi- ately. Frightened and bruised, he stood up, stomped his foot, and declared, “My father’s the dean of medicine and I want service!” Mathematics remained Bardeen’s favorite academic subject. He enjoyed its puzzle-solving aspect. But he was also convinced that he didn’t want to “end up being a university professor.” An aca- demic career sounded stodgy to him and to his friends, who were mostly children of local businessmen. He decided to major in electrical engineering because he “had heard that that used a lot of mathematics,” and he knew that engineers stood a better chance of earning a good living than did mathematicians. But after his chal- lenging studies with Hart, Bardeen was bored by the analytical geometry and other mathematics used in the engineering courses. He began to study calculus on his own. Bardeen found mentors at the university who recognized and encouraged his mathematical talent. The short, round-faced, and genial Warren Weaver, later head of the Rockefeller Foundation’s science program, guided Bardeen in an independent mathematics 

32 TRUE GENIUS study and in courses on boundary-value problems and differential equations. In Weaver’s courses Bardeen encountered an operational approach to formulating the relationship between mathematical theory and observation. Weaver saw theory as merely an analogy generated by the observed facts, which were more basic. On the first page of his notebook for Weaver’s course on electrodynamics, Bardeen wrote, “In a detailed theory of a group of physical phenomena an analogy is exhibited between observed facts and the logical consequences of a self-consistent mathematical structure. The analogy constitutes the theory.” Edward Van Vleck, a mathematics professor at the University of Wisconsin from 1906 until 1929, also mentored Bardeen. This “dignified, formal and reserved” professor was a forbidding figure when riding his bicycle around campus, “with his reddish beard in advance and the coat tails of his cut-away streaming out behind.” Having studied in Germany, Van Vleck was a member of the small group of American scholars who had helped to import advanced research in mathematics from Europe. He had a reputation for taking more interest in bright students than average ones and for pushing them to their limit. He influenced mathematics not only through his own scholarship and teaching but also through his lead- ership of the American Mathematical Society. Ultimately more important to Bardeen than either Edward Van Vleck or Weaver was Edward’s son, the physicist John Van Vleck. Nine years older than Bardeen, “Van” brought modern quantum physics to the University of Wisconsin when he came to teach there in the fall of 1928. “The University was strong in applied math- ematics,” Bardeen recalled, “but there was little interest in atomic physics until Van Vleck arrived.” Like Bardeen, John Van Vleck grew up in Madison, where he was born in 1899. His Harvard doctoral thesis, a computation of the energy of the helium atom, had been supervised by Harvard’s first theoretical physicist, Edwin C. Kemble. One of the early stud- ies of atoms more complex than hydrogen, Van Vleck’s thesis was a first step toward understanding heavier atoms, molecules, and later solids. In his early work on the “old quantum theory,” Van Vleck had applied pre-1925 notions of the quantum to classical physics problems. Van Vleck’s graduate course with Harvard experimentalist Percy W. Bridgman may have contributed to his subsequent inter- 

To Be an Engineer 33 est in solid structures and magnetism. Van Vleck would later put the fields of paramagnetism and ferromagnetism on a firm founda- tion with his pivotal text, The Theory of Electric and Magnetic Susceptibilities (1932), a careful review of the weaknesses of classical physics theory and both the weaknesses and strengths of quantum mechanics. At the University of Wisconsin, Van Vleck presented the new quantum physics in a two-semester course, Physics 212, which Bardeen took during the 1928–1929 school year. One of the “earliest of its kind offered in the United States,” the course was Bardeen’s first serious introduction to quantum mechanics. He found it fascinating. Developed in Europe during 1925 and 1926, quantum mechanics treated phenomena on the scale of the atom and nucleus, a realm where classical physics breaks down. The revolutionary theory shook the foundations of the classical physics fields of mechanics, electricity, magnetism, optics, and thermodynamics, among others. Old debates, such as whether light is a particle or a wave, dissolved. Light was recognized as something different, a phenomenon having the properties of both a particle and a wave. How one made mea- surements made a great difference to how light was perceived. The most radical change was the loss of strict causality. Within the new framework, particles and their properties are governed by probability laws. They are specified by a mathematical entity known as a wave function. To determine some physical property— for instance, the mass or speed of an object—one must find the wave function, usually by solving a wave equation. By squaring the amplitude of the wave function, one obtains a measure of the prob- ability that the property in question has any particular value. Bardeen also took a research course from Van Vleck based on the latter’s 1926 textbook, Quantum Principles and Line Spectra. Both text and course conveyed the excitement of research at the frontiers of a field undergoing revolution. There was a clear sense of an old and a new world in collision. Among the tools Van Vleck discussed was Niels Bohr’s “correspondence principle,” a heuristic for connecting the known physics of the old domain with the unknown physics of the new one by requiring that in the over- lapping region the physics should agree. Decades later Bardeen would employ an analogous bridging principle in his work on inter- acting electron gases in metals. 

34 TRUE GENIUS Van Vleck encouraged Bardeen to seriously consider a career in physics. Although he was “intrigued by physics,” Bardeen was not yet ready to commit to it. It appeared that “the only opportunities in physics and mathematics were teaching in a university—and I thought that was the last thing in the world I wanted to do!” He did, however, take a year of German to meet an anticipated gradu- ate school requirement, should he change his mind. And he con- tinued to take graduate-level physics courses. Peter Debye, the eminent Dutch theoretical physicist, spent a semester in Madison. Bardeen took “a very stimulating course from him” covering statistical mechanics and a number of research topics in modern physics. He found Debye an “excellent teacher” who gave dynamic lectures and “had everything very well orga- nized.” Bardeen especially appreciated Debye’s willingness to present parts of his own current research on dipole moments and the diffraction of X rays and electrons. He thoroughly enjoyed the fact that Debye was up-to-date in quantum mechanics. Another of Bardeen’s physics mentors at Wisconsin was Paul Dirac, then twenty-seven, one of the inventors of quantum mechanics, who visited Madison for six weeks during the summer of 1929. Like Bardeen, Dirac had loved mathematics as a student but had chosen to train as an engineer. When he failed to find an engineering position, he took graduate courses in mathematics at the University of Bristol and then Cambridge. Dirac’s course in Madison covered much of the material later published in his classic text, The Principles of Quantum Mechanics. Bardeen was im- pressed by Dirac’s “elegant formalism” but felt that “much remained mysterious.” He nevertheless earned an A in the course. Other well-known European theoretical physicists who passed through Madison while Bardeen studied there included Werner Heisenberg and Arnold Sommerfeld. Bardeen heard Sommerfeld speak on electrons in metals shortly after the appearance of the great physicist’s pathbreaking quantum theory of metals. “I heard the lectures but I wasn’t stimulated at that time to go into that field.” Bardeen would later change his mind. As Bardeen was so much younger than his peers, he did not think twice about taking extra courses to explore other fields out- side his course of study. He could afford to take a semester off and did so in the fall of 1926 to extend the summer work he was doing as a requirement for his engineering degree. The job, in the Western 

To Be an Engineer 35 Electric Company’s Inspection Development Department, “con- sisted of developing inspection methods for certain items of inter- est to the company.” Bardeen thought it was interesting work. “Being young I was in no hurry to graduate.” He stayed on until Christmas. By taking extra courses and working at Western Electric, Bardeen delayed his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering by a year, but he was still only twenty when he graduated in June 1928. At that point, as he had already completed some of the course work for the master’s degree, he decided to finish the degree before mov- ing on. During 1928–1929 he earned his tuition by serving as a research assistant to Leo J. Peters, who supervised Bardeen’s master’s thesis. A quiet, pleasant-faced man respected in the field of electrical engineering, Peters squinted at the world through unusually thick glasses, the result of being struck by lightning as a child. Peters had become interested in the emerging field of electrical prospecting for oil, a branch of geophysical prospecting that related geological conditions with the presence of oil. In electrical pros- pecting the problem was to relate measured variations of the elec- trical constants in the earth’s crust to minerals below. Geophysical prospecting was then still an art, one Peters hoped to make into a science. A popular book on the Gulf Oil Corporation’s first half century characterized the old-fashioned oil prospector as one who often “had a muddy nose from sticking it into a handful of black earth and sniffing for oil.” He was a man who “studied creeks and water holes for seepages and gas bubbles, held lighted matches to the bubbles to see if they would burn and scuffed the ground for paraffin dirt.” The new prospector, on the other hand, used state-of-the-art measurements by instruments, such as magnetometers to measure variations in the magnetic field, gravimeters to measure differences in gravity, or seismographs to measure tiny artificial earthquakes set off to explore the materials below the surface. Because the demand for oil was ever increasing, both for automobiles and for other technologies, companies such as Gulf Oil were investing heavily in geophysical prospecting. For Bardeen’s master’s thesis, he designed a problem that simu- lated conditions likely to occur when oil is present. In a long article based on his thesis, coauthored with Peters and published in 

36 TRUE GENIUS 1930, Bardeen discussed how “from the geological and other infor- mation which is available concerning the region, the conductivity picture is converted into a picture of subsurface structure or of mineralization of the region.” The method is initiated by sending an electrical current through the earth at some promising location or by inducing currents in the particular region by establishing a varying magnetic field. In the next stage, measurements are made of electrical quantities at the surface of the earth. These measure- ments entered calculations based on geological information and applied classical electromagnetic theory to draw conclusions about the minerals below the surface. In the spring of 1929, after Bardeen completed his master’s thesis, he tinkered with the idea of changing his field of study “to physics, and in particular going to Europe for further study.” He applied for a research studentship in physics at Trinity College in Cambridge, England. In a glowing recommendation, Peters said that “in analytical ability Mr. Bardeen surpasses any student that I have known. He treats difficult problems in a masterly and often in a unique way.” Weaver described Bardeen as “a very independent young man, doing most excellently the work that interests him and at times slighting that which does not appeal to him.” He added that the Wisconsin Mathematics Department judged Bardeen to be “the strongest candidate for such a position we have had in years.” Weaver personally thought there was “a real chance that Mr. Bardeen may turn out to be a genius.” Van Vleck also supported Bardeen’s application to Trinity with a letter to the physicist Ralph H. Fowler, who had presided over Dirac’s graduate work. “Mr. Bardeen is an exceptional student, unquestionably one of the two or three best I have ever had. He is taking my course in quantum mechanics and grasps the subject so quickly that I feel that he is at times bored because I cover the ground so slowly, and is never forced really to exert himself in order to easily lead the class.” Fowler forwarded Van Vleck’s letter on to the senior tutor with a handwritten note describing Van Vleck as “a man of sound judgment and European standards.” But Bardeen did not get the studentship. He drifted into another year of graduate study. When Peters left Madison to work in Pittsburgh, Bardeen took a research assistant- ship for the 1929–1930 term with Edward Bennett, head of the engineering department at Wisconsin. At Bennett’s suggestion, Bardeen worked on the diffraction of radio-length electromagnetic 

To Be an Engineer 37 waves and the design of antennas. The calculations relied on classi- cal electromagnetism. At first Bardeen was enthusiastic about them because of their predictive power. “The principal aim in pursuing any branch of science is to acquire the power of prophesy with reference to the events treated in that branch,” Bardeen had read in Bennett’s course notes. Bennett was struck by Bardeen’s “modest acceptance of his own powers” and hoped that he would continue his advanced studies at Wisconsin. But with time Bardeen’s interest in antennas waned. When he sought additional mathematics courses, he found that the only advanced courses left for him to take were those taught by Rudolph Langer on the theory of differential equations and analytic functions. Bardeen did not find these subjects particularly interest- ing. It was time to move on. In the fall of 1929 the American Telephone and Telegraph Cor- poration (AT&T) was seeking engineering staff to study wave propa- gation and antenna design. Thornton Fry, an AT&T recruiter, had heard about Bardeen’s antenna work and approached him about a job. But the offer dissolved as the country slid into the Great Depression. By the spring of 1930, AT&T, like many firms, had put a freeze on new hiring. Another opportunity soon arose when the research laborato- ries of the Gulf Oil Company in Pittsburgh offered Bardeen a job as a geophysicist. The offer was probably made at the urging of Peters, who had recently moved there. Peters encouraged Bardeen to accept Gulf’s offer. The decision was not difficult for John. Not only was Gulf one of the few places in the country still able to hire, he also found the work far more interesting than antenna design. “These were the days when geophysics was just opening up,” Bardeen later reflected. “Oil companies were still reasonably prosperous even in depression days. People had to buy gas to run their cars.” Years later Bardeen claimed that had he had the luxury to choose between AT&T and Gulf, “I may have chosen that job (at Gulf) anyway.” The rolling hills of Appalachia had a beauty that welcomed Bardeen as he drove to Pittsburgh during the summer of 1930.. The verdant countryside concealed the grinding poverty of farmers who battled with the region’s rocky soil. The dangerous working conditions of coal miners and steelworkers were also hidden from view. 

38 TRUE GENIUS As Bardeen entered the city, distinguished by its steel mills and other heavy industry, he noticed a cloud of choking smoke that hung over the buildings. He headed over to Craft Avenue in Oak- land, the section that housed the university complex. Then he found the Gulf Research Labs. They were at that time based in a modern, three-story, steel-and-concrete structure, elegantly trimmed around the top-floor windows with bronze. The blocky building was just a year old. Bardeen asked for Peters, who intro- duced him to a few colleagues. Bardeen needed a temporary place to live while he looked for an apartment. The process took time, for affordable housing was at a premium. Another new Gulf employee offered John a dormitory bed. “He was tired, dirty, with rumpled clothes and no place to rest. I, with my new B.S. degree from Carnegie Tech, had just started with Gulf and was living in Engelbrecht Hall at Tech. I asked John to go there with me; there were spare beds during the summer.” Bardeen gratefully accepted. Engelbrecht Hall was one of seven dormitories maintained for men by the Carnegie Institute. Its rooms were spartan and small, roughly eight by fourteen feet. Each was furnished with a bed, wardrobe, table, and chairs. And there were bathing and toilet facilities on each floor. After a brief stay at Engelbrecht, Bardeen moved into a modest red brick apartment building in an east-end, working-class neigh- borhood. After living there for two years, he would move again into a better building on a hill not far from the University of Pitts- burgh and the Carnegie Institute. According to legend, the Gulf Oil Corporation emerged from a wildcat well in Texas, which came in on January 10, 1901, “with such fury that it wrecked the drilling rig and covered the surround- ing countryside with a lake of oil.” The driller and two prospec- tors borrowed $300,000 from the Pittsburgh banking firm of T. Mellon & Sons and formed a partnership, the J. M. Guffey Petro- leum Company. In 1907 the Mellons bought out Guffey and a year later formed the Gulf Oil Corporation. William L. Mellon, the nephew of the banking brothers Andrew W. and Richard B. Mellon, became presi- dent of the new Gulf Oil Company. He wanted to create a firm that would integrate “everything from sink drills into land and sea to 

To Be an Engineer 39 filling the customer’s gas tank at a service station.” In 1913 Gulf opened the world’s first drive-in service station. By the 1920s the company also began to invest in research. On the premise that finding and extracting oil was done best “when the experience and knowledge of the geologist are combined with the tools of the physicist,” the laboratory began seeking leading scientists. The administration soon recognized that to retain the best scientists it had to offer working conditions competitive with those at universities. Gulf’s hiring policies were successful in attracting the best and the brightest. In 1925 the geologist K. C. Heald came to Gulf from Yale and negotiated a position in which he was paid to conduct basic research. Heald attracted Paul D. Foote, a physicist then at the U.S. Bureau of Standards. Gulf allowed Foote, who eventually became the vice-president of Gulf’s research division, to hold a con- current research position at Pittsburgh’s Mellon Institute. Two years later Foote was joined by the geophysicist E. A. Eckhardt and then in 1929 by Peters. Around this nucleus of research scientists— Heald, Foote, Eckhardt, and Peters—grew the Gulf Research Labo- ratory. Through its aggressive strategy of hiring promising young scientists and engineers, the number of employees in Gulf’s re- search division grew from twenty-eight in 1928 to roughly 1,700 by the early 1950s. Using constantly improving measuring equipment Gulf’s geologists kept records of the geophysical properties of each hole drilled, whether or not the workers struck oil. From this informa- tion, Bardeen and other scientists on the staff calculated the likeli- hood of finding oil in a particular location. Although Bardeen mainly worked on electromagnetic prospecting, and on the inter- pretation of magnetic surveys, he also studied electrical, gravita- tional, and seismic methods. He recalled, “It was the early days in geophysics when lots of new ideas were under development and lots of new physics was involved.” Soon he was directing a group of more than fifteen employees. For several years he found the prob- lems encountered in his work interesting and challenging. In the magnetic prospecting work, “We’d get the results in from the field and try and interpret them,” Bardeen explained. But he was bothered by the skaky basis of this work. “One may assume that the rocks that give rise to the magnetization are uniformly magnetized and then one can calculate what structure would give 

40 TRUE GENIUS rise to the field observed on the surface.” He was very well aware that “the assumption of uniform magnetization is by no means valid.” Bardeen also worked on electrical prospecting, in which infor- mation about oil deposits came from measurements of resistivity variation. The basic assumption was that “changes of resistivity follow the bedding planes.” In their 1932 article in Physics, Bardeen and Peters warned that the information gained from such electrical measurements could not be relied on for depths of more than 2,000 feet. Peters described the theory in more detail in a later paper, which won the Society of Exploration Geophysicists’ Best Paper Award for 1949. Bardeen balanced his professional life in Pittsburgh with a relaxed social life limited to inexpensive pastimes, such as bowl- ing. He didn’t know at first that, Dutch Osterhoudt, his PiKa friend from Mendota Court, had also been hired by Gulf Labs. Osterhoudt had initially turned down Eckhardt’s offer of $150 per month on the grounds that it was not enough. A month later, when Eckhardt renewed his offer, he asked Osterhoudt whether he knew Bardeen, who had just accepted a position at $175 per month. “Do you think you’re any better than young Bardeen?” Osterhoudt struck a bar- gain at $160. As it turned out, Dutch and John hardly saw each other at work. “Johnny worked in magnetics in a small room at the rear side of the laboratory building. I worked in a small room on the second floor in the seismograph [department].” Soon Osterhoudt was spending most of his time prospecting for oil in faraway places. But the two friends often had a beer together when Osterhoudt came in from the field. In his third year at Gulf, Bardeen again found himself at a cross- roads. He faced up to his growing conviction “that if I wanted to do geophysics in the long run I would have to learn more geology.” The subject had never captured his interest as fully as mathematics or theoretical physics. Probably through either Foote or Arthur Ruark, who both held joint positions at Gulf and the University of Pittsburgh, Bardeen learned of a seminar on modern physics held at the university. He decided to attend. “It was on my own time, out- side of regular working hours.” 

To Be an Engineer 41 Organized by Ruark and Elmer Hutchinson, the seminar of “at most eight or ten people, faculty members from Pitt and Carnegie Tech and a few graduate students” focused on current research problems. Meetings were sometimes led by one of the regular mem- bers, occasionally by an out-of-town visitor. Bardeen found the discussions more stimulating than his engineering work at Gulf. Bardeen soon realized that to change careers and apply himself to mathematics or physics would require more education. He con- sidered only one graduate school—Princeton—“because there was an outstanding mathematics department as well as the Institute for Advanced Study that had just gotten started there a couple of years before.” He argued, “I was going on my own money, so I could pick the university where I wanted to go.” Late in the fall of 1932, John discussed his plans with his father, Charles. He explained that he had “decided that university life wasn’t so bad after all” and that he was interested in studying mathematics. In December Charles wrote a letter to Abraham Flexner, the founding director of the Princeton Institute, and told him he was pleased that his son John would “take a try at higher things” before his “arteries begin to harden.” Flexner in turn brought Bardeen’s case to the attention of the mathematician Oswald Veblen, one of the first appointees to the new institute. To involve Veblen in Bardeen’s application was probably unnecessary, as Bardeen’s record and recommendations were outstanding. Moreover, even a university as prestigious as Princeton was underenrolled just then. Bardeen later claimed that he would have stayed on at Gulf had Princeton not accepted his application. It was an unlikely scenario. Bardeen asked the two Wisconsin professors who had had the most influence on him, John Van Vleck and Warren Weaver, to write to Princeton on his behalf. Van Vleck described Bardeen “as a student of outstanding ability” and one who “easily led the class.” He estimated that his former student had a “native ability in math- ematical physics comparable with that of many National Research Fellows.” Bardeen’s “personality is good,” Van Vleck wrote, “although he is inclined to be a little reticent.” Weaver, by now at the Rockefeller Foundation, said that as a “general rule” he avoided writing recommendations. He was making an exception for Bardeen because he had “never had a stu- dent whom I could recommend to the graduate mathematics group at Princeton with as much enthusiasm or with as little reserve.” 

42 TRUE GENIUS He cautioned that it would be difficult to evaluate Bardeen’s “ac- tual state of advancement” from the written record. “He is so mod- est that he often fails to report on things which he has accomplished.” Weaver wrote that whenever he questioned Bardeen, it would become apparent that Bardeen had not only solved the problems but had done so “by methods which were sur- prisingly simple and mature.” Weaver said he had “a strong suspi- cion that [Bardeen] is the most able student with whom I have ever had contact.” He also mentioned that Bardeen was “somewhat shy, and not particularly communicative,” but said he was nevertheless “attractive socially.” Princeton admitted Bardeen in mathematics for the fall semester of 1933 but without financial support, complicating his decision to leave Gulf. He was not yet twenty-five, but returning to academia was risky. “It was 1933 when jobs were hard to get. I had a good job at Gulf. I didn’t know if I would be able to get a good job again if I quit this one to go back to school.” By the spring of 1933 he had concluded that he should not, indeed could not, “resist any longer” following in his father’s aca- demic footsteps. Like his mother who had taken a comparable risk at about the same age when she broke from her family to study art, John decided to follow his passion. “I quit my job not knowing if I’d ever get another.” As for money, he could draw on his small inheritance from his grand- father, C. W., who died in August 1924, a week before his seventy- seventh birthday. At the time, C. W. was still actively at work. John also had some additional savings that his frugal lifestyle in Pittsburgh had allowed him to accumulate. So “I could take a gamble.” Peters and Eckhardt hated to lose Bardeen. Gulf Research was then preparing to move into a larger facility in Harmarville, eight miles up the Allegheny River. Bardeen was in their plan. Eckhardt asked Osterhoudt to “drop down and see your friend John Bardeen and try to talk him into staying with us.” Dutch found John adamant. “Bardeen swiveled his chair around and pointed to his small old blackboard.” He replied, “I’m tired of sitting here in this little office, staring at the same damn black- board and the same four walls. I’m going back to school and get my doctorate.” He eyed Osterhoudt, “Why don’t you come with me?” 

To Be an Engineer 43 But Dutch shook his head. He loved prospecting and would remain at Gulf for another eighteen years. By the time Bardeen arrived at Princeton, some of the world’s leading mathematicians and theoretical physicists would be there or arranging to come. In March 1933, Hitler had come to power and Jewish physicists and mathematicians working in Germany had abruptly lost their positions. A large number emigrated to Great Britain or the United States. A few ended up at Princeton. When Bardeen heard that Einstein had accepted a lifetime appointment at Princeton’s new Institute for Advanced Study, he thought perhaps he would study with him! The night before John left Pittsburgh, he attended a small dinner party in the apartment of a Gulf colleague, Bruce Reline. There he met Jane Maxwell, a slim and articulate twenty-six-year-old woman who was renting a room from Bruce and his wife Mary Margaret. Jane and Mary Margaret had grown up together in their hometown of Washington, Pennsylvania, about twenty-five miles southwest of Pittsburgh. Their families had known each other for years. Jane held a teaching position at the women’s college of Carnegie Tech and was also taking graduate courses at the Univer- sity of Pittsburgh toward her master’s degree in zoology. Bruce had told Jane that he hoped she would stay home for dinner that evening. John Bardeen would be coming. “I think you ought to meet him,” said Bruce. The Relines’ matchmaking had a number of elements in its favor. Jane’s and John’s fathers were both medical doctors—hers practiced in Washington, Pennsylvania. Like Althea, Jane’s mother, Elizabeth “Bess” Patterson Maxwell, had had a career before mar- riage as a teacher and school principal. Like Althea, Bess had given up her career to raise her children and help her husband in his office. And like John, Jane had had her share of childhood misfortunes. The eldest of five, she became the caregiver for the younger children when her mother became debilitated by arthritis. Jane had done well in her studies, despite the extra responsi- bilities. She had initially studied history at Wellesley College after graduating from the Washington Female Seminary. But before long she wrote home, “I’ve decided that I’m really interested in science 

44 TRUE GENIUS and so the thing to do is to find out something about it.” She decided to study medicine but, like John’s sister Helen, could not convince her father to allow her to become a physician. She couldn’t even convince him to let her attend nursing school, as Helen had done. So Jane moved to Pittsburgh after completing her bachelor’s degree and continued studies toward a master’s degree in zoology. She supported herself by working at Carnegie Tech, first as a laboratory assistant and then by teaching. She often visited her close-knit family on weekends. In the Relines’ tiny kitchen, John and Jane sat on one side of the rectangular table. Bruce and Mary Margaret were on the other. Jane eyed John surreptitiously. She saw a trim, athletic, twenty- five-year-old man with intense eyes and a gentle smile. That he was brilliant was obvious to her, despite his reticence. She was attracted by his thoughtful demeanor, dry wit, and quiet con- fidence. John, in turn, was struck by Jane’s warmth and energy. She spoke easily, with detached humor, about her life and views. Some- thing about her eyes, her self-assurance, perhaps a hint of sadness, arrested him. Before leaving, he unobtrusively captured her hand for a quick squeeze, just enough to let her know he was interested in getting better acquainted. Soon he would be miles away. On the long drive east, his thoughts often returned to the lively biologist he had met at the Relines’. As he crossed the forested peaks of the Appalachians, he planned a trip back to Pittsburgh, maybe over Christmas.