Biographical Memoirs Volume 81 (2002) / Chapter Skim
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William L. McMillan
William L. McMillan
Pages 198-213
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w _QQ of .~ a UO .
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by a prestigious prize lectureship for young conclensecl matter physicists. A group inclucling Bill's father's progenitors left the Isle of Skye in ScotIancl in IS20 en cl founclecl the small community of Union Springs, Alabama.
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He took a degree in electrical engineering, spencling summers at RCA (where he first conceived the ambition to builcl his own computer using Bell Labs transistors)
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helium. It starts out from a brief remark of Onsager's, that a {astrow-type product wave function for helium is exactly equivalent in its clensity-clensity correlations to a classical BoTtzmann gas with an artificial two-particle potential energy.
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of theorist. He was as comfortable as the previous generation of formalistic theorists with the mathematical methods en cl concepts of many-bocly theory, but he had the additional dimension afforded by the sophisticatecl use of the electronic computer, not by the brute force method of direct simulations at the atomic level but in tandem with the best formalisms available at the time.
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to us inconceivable to clo the problem the other way round: given the experimental tunneling characteristic, to try to clecluce the phonon coupling constant ant! the entire phonon spectrum.
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By this time Bill hac! become a full member of staff at Bell Labs en cl was working with a wicle variety of people: Bob Dynes, as well as Rowell en cl his postcloc Lawrence Shen, on superconductivity, with me, teaching me to program (but not to make serious errors)
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This in turn was the basis on which Cohen en cl I estimated possible upper limits for TC from the BCS phonon mechanism, violates! by the new cuprate superconductors.
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He continues! to publish significant results on liquicl crystals for a number of years, culminating in two significant review articles on phase transitions en cl on molecular theories of the various phases.
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(the spin glass) , for which he built a special purpose computer in his basement using special high-speecl chips and all of his programming wiles.
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flowing mustache, another a bushy full Stracheyan beard, the next clean-shaven with long reel hair. He started right out at Bell Labs in the iconoclastic vein.
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An early exponent of the graphic T-shirt, he couIcl be counted on to grace any occasion with some inappropriate piece of clothing: stocking cap, baggy corduroys, or whatever. For our formal celebration of the award of the London Prize he gave his talk in a T-shirt reacting, "Where in Hell is Urbana Illinois," the rest of us being in ties en c!
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the intellectual health of our fielcl of conclensecl matter physics.
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Lead phonon spectrum calculated from superconducting density of states.
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B 14:1007-27. Theory of discommensurations and the commensurate incommensurate charge density wave phase transition.
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B 30:476-77. 1 985 fermi liquid theory for very dirty metals.
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