Winners of the 1996 Nobel Prize in physics, professors Robert C. Richardson, right, and David M. Lee, toast each other at a celebration in their honor in Clark Hall last Thursday. All photographs by Robert Barker, Cornell University Photography
Faced with hundreds of e-mail messages, "in" boxes overflowing with congratulatory messages from all over the world, telephones ringing off the hook with calls from reporters, producers, former students and colleagues, Cornell's two newest Nobel laureates took time to be feted by their own department last Thursday.
David M. Lee, professor of physics, and Robert C. Richardson, the Floyd R. Newman Professor of Physics, who share the 1996 Nobel Prize in physics with their former doctoral student, Douglas Osheroff, were the subjects of considerable accolades and entertainment at the top of the Clark Hall of Science, home of the physics department and its Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics. Faculty, staff, graduate and undergraduate students and university administrators enjoyed Swedish meatballs and other fare while honoring the physicists who learned a day earlier that they had won the Nobel Prize for a discovery they made 25 years earlier.
"This continues a very great tradition in the physics department," said Cornell President Hunter Rawlings, with Richardson and Lee grinning at the side of the assembled throng. The pair, Rawlings said, illustrate "the highest standards of teaching and research" that mark the department.
The universal response among colleagues was: "It's about time; what took them so long?" when commenting on the Nobel committee's selection. N. David Mermin, the Horace White Professor of Physics, had nominated the trio to the Nobel committee three times in the past 15 years -- in 1983, 1988 and 1993. Dozens of other distinguished scientists, invited by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, had nominated them for the discovery as well.
On Oct. 9, three years after the last nomination letter and 30 years to the week after Richardson began teaching here, the Nobel came to the trio. And the party was the cap on a whirlwind 36 hours for the Cornell pair, that began with early morning phone calls the day before.
Lee didn't have to be awakened on Wednesday morning; he already was awake doing exercises for a bad back when the phone rang at about 5:30 a.m..
"There was a very nice man from Sweden on the line, and he told me the news, and then another nice man who is on the Nobel committee, whose name I recognized, got on the line, and I knew it wasn't a prank," Lee said. "When I got off I went in to my wife, who was still asleep, and I said, 'Did you hear the phone ring?' She said yes, she had heard it, and I said, 'Good, then I wasn't dreaming."
Then the phone kept ringing for the next two hours as reporters learned of the prize. Lee made it to campus just a touch late to teach his 8 a.m. class, a freshman and sophomore physics section.
"Just a minute while I finish getting dressed," he told the students as he tucked in his shirt. After explaining why there were photographers and others in the room, he discarded his lesson plan and spent the session describing his discovery of the superfluidity of helium-3, the find that the Nobel committee had cited as a major breakthrough in low-temperature physics. Then Lee spent the morning doing telephone interviews and posing for photographs in the laboratory in the Clark Hall basement where the discovery was made.
President Hunter Rawlings, right, congratulates Robert Richardson at a party in Clark Hall Oct. 10 honoring Richardson and
David Lee for winning the 1996 Nobel prize in physics.
Richardson was in Washington, D.C., for a condensed matter physics meeting of the National Research Council that morning. But his wife, Betty, a physics lecturer at Cornell, got the news at home in Ithaca first and then had a difficult time reaching her husband.
"I got a phone call from Sweden. He said, 'I have urgent news, but I guess we can tell you,'" she said. She gave the caller the phone number for her husband's hotel in Washington.
"I called our daughter, and she said, 'Did you call Daddy yet?' I said no, I was waiting for Sweden to call him. It was a very exciting morning," Betty Richardson said.
By that time, Richardson had received the call in his hotel room.
"My first thought was that something bad happened; you don't really get good news in the middle of the night," Richardson said. "It must have been three or four sentences before I realized what he was saying. I tried calling Betty for the next hour. She had left a message with the front desk clerk saying congratulations. He said, 'what for, did he win the lottery?' She said no, the Nobel Prize. He said, 'What's that?'"
A common reaction among those on campus was that it could not have happened to two nicer gentlemen, or any better scientists.
"I couldn't imagine a better Nobel Prize," said Dale Corson, Cornell president emeritus and former physics department chairman who hired Lee in 1958. "You richly deserve what's happened, and we're all the richer for it."
Jeevak Parpia, physics professor in the same Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics, was an undergraduate in Chicago when he heard Lee give a talk about the discovery in 1972. "That's what brought me into the field," he said excitedly. "I heard Dave give a talk, and I thought, that's what I want to do, and there's no place better to do it than at Cornell. This is a very big boost, a recognition of the very fundamental piece of physics that defined a field. This is a big, big moment."
Another big moment came when another of Cornell's Nobel laureates, Roald Hoffmann (1981), the Frank H.T. Rhodes Professor in Humane Letters and professor of chemistry, embraced Richardson and then Lee at the party on Thursday. The number of Nobel Prize winners at Cornell had doubled the previous day, as Lee and Richardson joined Hoffmann and Hans A. Bethe (1967), the John Wendell Anderson Professor of Physics Emeritus, who could not attend the party.
Professors Robert Richardson, left, and David Lee hold the large brass rings
given to them by two former students in honor of their winning the 1996 Nobel Prize
in physics. Behind them, at a party in their honor, is Norm Scott, left, vice
president for research and advanced studies, and Dale Corson, president emeritus.
Students and former students also contributed to the festive event to honor their mentors. John Denker, a former doctoral student now at Bell Labs, and Nick Bigelow, another former student, presented Richardson and Lee with large brass rings that were fabricated in the Clark Hall machine shop the night before, signifying that the scientists had just earned the big brass ring that many believe is unreachable.
Doctoral student Brendan Plapp delights the Clark Hall gathering with
his singing of "The Nobel Blues" in honor of Lee and Richardson.
Brendan Plapp, a doctoral student, came on stage with guitar and sang "The Nobel Blues" while imitating Lee, much to the delight of the audience.
Also attending was Lee's family. In addition to his wife, Dana, were his son, Eric Lee, who earned a bachelor's degree from Cornell in 1984 and is now an attorney in Binghamton; his daughter-in-law, Lori DiCaprio-Lee, and their daughter, Christina Lee, who turned one month old the day her grandfather won the Nobel Prize.
Douglas Fitchen, professor and chair of the Department of Physics, said the prize was overdue.
"We are delighted at this recognition of something that we knew in the first minutes, or the first few weeks, was a really important discovery," he said. "It is recognition not only of the two professors, but of the work of the graduate student who was the one there doing the experiment late at night."
Mal Kalos, professor of physics and director of the Cornell Theory Center, who also works in low-temperature physics, said there does not have to be a readily apparent application to the discovery.
"It's the web of science," he said. "While there is no current direct application, the contribution to the scientific understanding of things that do have applications is immeasurable."
And no, the balloons decorating the entranceway to 700 Clark Hall were not filled with helium-3 . . . just plain old helium.
Two questions kept dogging Robert C. Richardson and David M. Lee in the
days immediately following announcement that they had won the Nobel Prize in physics
for their discovery 25 years ago of the superfluidity of helium-3:
What would they do with their share of the money ($1.12 million), and what is
their discovery good for?
The first one was easy -- pay taxes, set up charitable foundations, maybe fund
some research, buy something for the family. But the second question was more difficult.
After all, the super-cooled, strange-behaving liquid form of a rare helium isotope is not
a discovery that, shall we say, comes readily to most peoples' minds.
"It is true, it's not something you would have lying around your
refrigerator," Richardson said. "Dave (Lee) had this
crazy plan to squeeze helium enough so that it would cool. It was a ridiculous idea
because I thought it would heat, but he hired me
and I went along with it. Just to humor him."
The discovery that they made in 1972, with their doctoral student, Douglas
D. Osheroff, now a physicist at Stanford University, earned them the 1996 Nobel Prize
in physics, announced last week by the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences.
But first, go back to 1958, when David Lee made a visit to Cornell on the
Lehigh Valley train from New Haven, Conn. Dale Corson, Cornell president emeritus,
was chairman of the physics department. The faculty decided that it ought to have a
laboratory for low-temperature physics and Corson embarked on a recruiting mission
to find someone to work in that area. Lee was a bright young graduate student at
Yale University, and he got the job, beginning here as an instructor in 1959 even before
he finished his Yale dissertation.
Dale Corson, left, Cornell president emeritus and former chairman
of the physics department, congratulates Lee, right, whom he hired
in 1958, and Richardson. "I asked Dale if I could delay it a year
so I could finish my thesis, but he told me that I come in February to teach a class, or not
at all," Lee recalled.
Lee hired Richardson in 1966 for the express purpose of researching
low-temperature physics and, specifically, to find the phase transition -- the point at
which solid helium-3 becomes a nuclear magnet. As other labs around the country were
doing similar work, the race was on.
"We were going to try everything we could to find it," Richardson said. "And
we thought that we had."
What they thought they had discovered was the phase transition in
solid helium-3. That was Thanksgiving week, 1971,
and Osheroff was using the equipment just to practice the experiment that he would
run after the break. But Osheroff, "a
brilliant observational scientist," Lee said,
noticed tiny little squiggles in the data. He
thought they were just glitches and delayed
telling his professors about them. But, "he got
them every time he ran the experiment. He looked carefully and noticed these wiggles
happened at the same pressure every time. That meant there was some kind of
change," Richardson said. "These were the
signatures of an important phase transition in solid helium-3. At least, we thought
that's what it was, and we published it. Of
course, it was in the liquid, not the solid."
The first paper, in Physical Review Letters in 1972, was corrected later that year to show that it was the liquid state.
Said Lee: "We knew right away we had something big, something important. It was absolutely exhilarating. From then on, every day for eight months, it seemed, we found something new and exciting."
The next three to five years were full of discovery as labs raced to study the strange, new phenomenon. "We had a rival at UCSD, John Wheatley. He was looking, too. It made it very competitive, and there was a huge amount of research. It was very exciting," Richardson said.
"The other thing was that it provided a great deal of theoretical activity," Lee said. "There was a whole different symmetry here. What we found was another step in the way nature can work."
Superfluid helium-3
But the more rare form of helium, helium-3, could
not be converted to a liquid so easily. Lee thought such
a conversion could be made by subjecting the helium
to high-pressure, which cooled it. For a liquid to
become superfluid, the atoms or molecules making up the
liquid must be cooled, or "condensed" to the point at which
they all occupy the same quantum state (thus the term,
"condensed matter physics"). An atom of helium-3 has a nucleus made up of an odd number of particles and is
a type of particle known as a fermion. Groups of
fermions are not allowed to occupy the same quantum state.
By cooling the liquid to a low enough
temperature, helium-3 atoms can pair up. Cooled to about
two-thousandths of a degree above absolute zero,
helium-3 did in fact become a superfluid. Not only that, but
it had magnetic properties and a structure much
different from superconductors or helium-4, with
these paired atoms.
"From the time superfluid helium-3 was discovered,
it has been apparent that it is an even stranger
substance than superfluid helium 4 or superconductors," Lee and
N. David Mermin, the Horace White Professor of
Physics, wrote in a 1976 Scientific
American article about the discovery. Its study consumed low-temperature
physics researchers across the country for the next 20 years.
Later, in one of three letters Mermin wrote to
the Nobel committee in nominating Lee, Richardson
and Osheroff for the Nobel Prize, he wrote: "The
discovery of the superfluid phases of liquid helium-3
completes the triad of discoveries that collectively
constitute the major achievement of low-temperature
physics in this century."
Mermin outlined the importance of the find.
"The discovery has also played a substantial role in what
are arguably the two major new areas of research in
condensed matter physics to have developed ...
heavy fermions and high temperature superconductivity."
That helium-3 can be a superfluid, Mermin wrote,
has "served as an existence proof that it is possible to
have superconductivity" in such a material and that it
"[opens] the way for the variety of theoretical models that are
now being contemplated for these strange materials."
The discovery was quickly embraced by the
physics community. Although there was a slight reservation
in publishing the first papers on it, physicists soon saw
the discovery's importance, and Cornell's role was
cemented. Awards began to roll in.
In 1976, Lee, Richardson and Osheroff shared
their earliest recognition for studies of superfluidity, the
Simon Memorial Prize of the British Physical Society.
The Buckley Prize of the American Physical Society
followed for the trio in 1981.
Lee was elected a Fellow of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1990 and a member of
the National Academy of Sciences in 1991. He was
elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of
the American Association for the Advancement of
Science, both in 1982.
Richardson, now director of Cornell's Laboratory
of Atomic and Solid State Physics, was elected to
the National Academy of Sciences in 1986 and chaired
its Physics Section from 1989 to 1992. He was elected
a Fellow of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science in 1981, a Guggenheim Fellow in
1982 and a Fellow of the American Physical Society in
1983. In 1993, he was elected a Foreign Member of the
Finnish Academy of Science and Letters.
In addition to having implications for superconductivity, superfluidity of helium-3 showed
that nuclear magnetic resonance could work. NMR now
is widespread in the medical diagnosis field, also
known as magnetic resonance imaging, to see
non-invasively inside the body. In recent years, cosmologists
have thought that liquid helium-3 may be the stuff
cosmic strings, if they exist, are made of. Cosmic strings
are immense hypothetical objects thought to play a role
in galaxy formation. Rotating neutron stars may
exhibit this material as well. If so, it could yield insight
into the beginning of the universe.
Or, try the easy answer: "People have been asking
me whether it explains something about how the
universe began," Richardson said by telephone at the
Cornell news conference on Wednesday. "Does it?" asked
Douglas Fitchen, the physics department chairman.
"Sure!" replied Richardson, barely missing a beat.
Five of six Nobel laureates in science for 1996 are in Washington, D.C.,
today to help tell the story of how federal basic research funding allowed them to
break new ground to make their discoveries.
At the invitation of the National Science Foundation (NSF), they are scheduled
to meet with media at The Washington Post, National Press Club and National
Public Radio, and they will brief the National Science Board on their discoveries.
Cornell's David M. Lee and Robert C. Richardson, professors of physics,
are among the group, in part to describe how the federal government's funding of
basic research is critical to future knowledge. The grants that allowed them to
discover the superfluidity of helium-3 in 1972
came from the National Science Foundation and the Advanced Research Projects Agency
-- a Defense Department agency -- through Cornell's Materials Science Center.
Douglas Osheroff, who is joining them today in the nation's capital, was a doctoral
student in their lab on an NSF fellowship when they made the discovery that earned
them this year's Nobel Prize in physics.
Since then, the low-temperature physics laboratory at Cornell has continued
to be funded through the NSF, and the Materials Science Center also has been
renewed for another five years.
"NSF funding has been and continues to be an essential ingredient in the
success of low-temperature research at Cornell," Lee said.
"The phone rang and I thought, 'Who on
earth would be calling me at this hour of the morning?'
I answered the phone and there was this very nice gentleman from Sweden."
-- David M. Lee, Nobel laureate in physics,
on receiving word about 5:30 a.m. about the prize. "I heard from a high-school classmate I last
heard from in 1959."
-- Robert C. Richardson, Nobel laureate in
physics, on one of the hundreds of congratulatory e-mail
messages he received after the announcement. "I remember seeing Dave (Lee) the morning after
the discovery. He said they had been up all night working
on it, and that it was going to be really important."
-- Dale Corson, Cornell president emeritus
and physics chairman emeritus "I should point out that the first thing that David
Lee did after learning of this award was to teach Physics
213 at 8 a.m. . . . It's another outstanding example of
the merging of the interests of teaching and research at
a great university and in a great department."
-- Hunter Rawlings, Cornell president "For some of us it feels as if this award has been
fairly long in coming, but we think it has arrived at a
very opportune moment."
-- Philip Lewis, dean of the College of Arts
and Sciences "It's a pleasant reflection on the school that this
kind of research is being honored and that everyone
is recognizing it."
-- Ilarion Melnikov, sophomore, from Chicago "Everyone around here was smiling at the same
time; this is great. It really adds to the prestige."
-- Scott Johns, grad student, from New Hope, Minn. "I think it's great that they recognized the
graduate student for the work. Graduate students are important
to note. That is, everyone who worked on it got credit for it."
-- Robert Schirmer, grad student, from
Sacramento, Calif. "What a boost of energy. This was the most
exciting news I've heard, and it's got a lot of people
thinking about research."
-- Veronique Boisvert, grad student, from Montreal "Talk about a morale builder."
-- Kris Poduska, grad student, from Mount
Vernon, Iowa
Alfred Nobel -- the Swedish inventor of dynamite and
the holder of 355 patents -- left a surprising codicil in his will
when he died in 1896. From his vast fortune, he bequeathed funds
for prizes for the world's top scientists, economists, pacifists
and literary authors.
Nobel's executors Ragnar Sohlman and Rudolf
Lilljequist, themselves two young engineers, soon created the Nobel
Foundation to take care of the inventor's financial assets and
to coordinate the work with the prize-awarding institutions.
The Nobel peace prize is selected by the Norwegian
Nobel Committee; the prize in literature by the Swedish Academy;
in physiology or medicine by the Nobel Assembly at the
Koralinska Institute; and in physics, chemistry and economics by the
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Each year, committees from the respective institutions
send thousands of invitations soliciting nominations from
distinguished scientists around the world. Universities and
institutions are on a five-year rotation for nominations, so that a wide
variety of countries and institutions are represented. For example,
Cornell submits physics nominations every five years.
In the case of the 1996 physics prize winners --
Robert Richardson, David Lee and Douglas Osheroff -- they had
been nominated by dozens of scientists over the past 15 years
for their 1972 discovery at Cornell.
Nominations reach the Nobel committee before Feb. 1.
From there, the committee conducts an exhaustive review for the
prize winners. Members of the committee include scientists who
have won previous awards, academy members and the holders
of corresponding chairs from universities around the world.
After months of scrutiny, the award committee narrows
the field. In the case of physics, the nominees are then presented
to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, where a vote for
the final choice is made. Immediately after the vote, the winners
are notified and the decision is announced.
Twenty-six Nobel Prize winners have been affiliated
with Cornell as alumni or faculty members.
'We knew right away we had something big, something important'
Professor Roald Hoffmann, left, the 1981 Nobel laureate in chemistry, gives David
Lee a congratulatory hug at the Clark Hall party.
By Larry Bernard
Winners: Federal funding is crucial
By Larry Bernard
Nobel reactions
How winners are chosen
Cornell's Nobel laureates