John Bardeen walked slowly down the corridor of the physics building, his arms swinging oddly, as though he were paddling the air. He appeared lost in thought. It was the first of November 1956. He had been a professor of physics at the University of Illinois for five years now.

Everything about him projected modesty. He was of moderate height and solid build. His dark hair was thinning slightly. He wore thick glasses with plain, beige-colored rims. His bland, kind features matched his inexpensive blue suit, plain white shirt, and conservative tie, which he wore neatly tucked into his belt.

He was still struggling to absorb the morning’s news: that he and two colleagues, William Shockley and Walter Brattain, had won the Nobel Prize for Physics. When he heard the announcement he dropped the frying pan with which he was cooking eggs for breakfast, scattering its contents across the kitchen floor.

The prize was for the invention of the transistor, the tiny semiconductor device that would lead the way to what is now called the Information Age. The invention, in December of 1947, was the result of teamwork at Bell Telephone Laboratories, the research and development arm of the American Telephone and Telegraph Corporation. The company had wanted to replace vacuum tube amplifiers and relays in telephone circuits with a cheaper and more reliable technology.

Bardeen was deeply pleased by the recognition, but he harbored reservations about it. Close friends and colleagues gradually learned about them over the years.

One reservation concerned Shockley, the leader of the semiconductor group who had been absent from the invention itself. In late 1945, not long after Bardeen arrived at Bell Laboratories, Shockley had asked Bardeen to investigate why a particular design for a silicon amplifier did not work. Shockley had sketched the design some months earlier in his laboratory notebook. He had applied the best-available quantum mechanical theories; according to them his device should have amplified signals, but it didn’t. The explanation that Bardeen developed—that electrons on the surface can be trapped in surface states—led the team into a productive two-year period of intensive research into surface states that culminated in Bardeen and Brattain’s invention, subsequently named the transistor.

After the invention, Shockley had pushed Bardeen and Brattain rudely aside, so that he could design the second-generation transistor without them. Shockley had also revised the story of the invention to highlight his own contributions and downplay those of Bardeen and Brattain. It upset Bardeen that Bell Labs had, at least initially, supported Shockley. And it was Shockley, rather than Bardeen and Brattain, who received wide recognition for the discovery. Even today, popular magazines sometimes credit Shockley alone with the invention.

One reason for this error was the glamour that Shockley projected. A product of Hollywood High School in the era of the great silent movies, he became an articulate speaker and in many ways an eccentric character who enjoyed representing himself as a charismatic genius. Later in his career, Shockley would revel in the publicity attracted by his theories correlating race with intelligence. Bardeen rarely expressed anger openly, but those who knew him could read his contempt for the behavior of Shockley, whose brilliance as a physicist Bardeen respected.

More than that, Bardeen never felt sure the transistor deserved the world’s highest physics award. While he considered the physics behind transistors interesting and recognized its technological importance, he thought of the device mainly as a useful gadget, not as a major scientific leap. In 1956 the transistor had not yet revolutionized communication and commerce, nor had it yet ushered in

the Information Age. That it would do so was hard to imagine then. Bardeen also felt a little embarrassed to be awarded a Nobel Prize before his teachers, Eugene Wigner and John Van Vleck, had received theirs. He was keenly aware of how much they had done to shape his professional course.

From a research point of view, the timing of the award was poor. Bardeen was pretty sure that he and two younger collaborators—Leon Cooper, a postdoctoral fellow, and J. Robert Schrieffer, a graduate student—were at the brink of developing a theory for superconductivity, the exotic low-temperature state of matter in which all traces of electrical resistance vanish. That, Bardeen thought, would be worthy of a Nobel, for superconductivity was the most significant solid-state physics problem of the decade, perhaps since the 1920s. Bardeen had been working on the problem since the late 1930s. He was just then frantically preoccupied with leading his small team to the solution. He fretted in the knowledge that other extremely capable physicists, including Richard Feynman, were also on the trail. Although the Nobel celebrations of 1956 cut into their work, Bardeen, Cooper, and Schrieffer solved the problem several months after Bardeen’s return from Stockholm.

Today we can hardly imagine life without the transistor. The device transformed society in the last quarter of the twentieth century. As the fundamental building block of the microchip, it has become the “nerve cell” (Shockley’s phrase in 1949) of modern electronic technologies. We take for granted countless devices that were the stuff of science fiction half a century ago—from personal computers, cellular telephones, automatic teller machines, and microwave ovens to facsimile machines and satellites. Every day, billions of transistors are at work in the lives of almost everyone in the industrialized world.

The Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) theory of superconductivity was momentous in other ways. The theory was a pioneering step in the creation of the present quantum mechanical picture of many-body systems, liquids and solids whose behavior is determined by the interactions between their electrons and other microscopic components. The theory has also deepened our understanding of nuclear physics, elementary-particle physics, and astrophysics. For example, its notion of spontaneous symmetry breaking underlies the explanation of the fundamental and elusive question of why particles behave as if they have mass. Although superconductivity

has not yet had as wide an impact as the transistor on the day-to-day lives of most people, superconducting materials have begun to enter a few important technologies; for example, the cables of power grids and cellular telephone towers. Other superconducting technologies, such as commercial high-speed trains levitated by superconducting magnets, are still in the future.

In the competitive world of theoretical physics, the BCS theory was the triumphant solution of a long-standing riddle. Between 1911 and 1957, all the best theorists in the world, among them Feynman, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, and Lev Landau, had tried and failed to explain superconductivity. Felix Bloch’s tongue-in-cheek theorem—“Every theory of superconductivity can be disproved”—suggests the frustration of the many researchers who struggled unsuccessfully with superconductivity. When the Nobel Committee awarded Bardeen, Cooper, and Schrieffer the 1972 physics prize, it was the first time an individual was awarded a second Nobel Prize in the same field.

One could argue that Bardeen’s physics changed the modern world as much as Einstein’s, if only through the transistor’s wide range of applications. Yet while every schoolchild knows of Einstein, few people (other than solid-state physicists) have heard of Bardeen. The Chicago Tribune aptly titled Iris Chang’s profile of Bardeen: “To scientists he’s an Einstein. To the public he’s … John Who?” Why is a “father of the Information Age” so unknown?

In the popular mind, the word “genius” evokes the image of a man (rarely a woman) born with superhuman talents. He needs no training. His insights come magically from a place beyond normal experience. He is unbalanced, a bit mad perhaps, a recluse who works in isolation and whose personal relationships are troubled. Exemplified by such figures as Dr. Frankenstein or “the nutty professor,” the scientific genius is a well-known myth.

Consider, for example, the brilliant young mathematician portrayed in the popular 1997 film Good Will Hunting. An untrained and underprivileged janitor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Will Hunting takes a break from his nightshift maintenance duties to surreptitiously complete a mathematical proof posed by a famous math professor. Will is depicted as nonconforming, unstable, and outrageous. He works in solitude. He is alienated from ordinary society. And it is no wonder he is emotionally unstable.

This notion of genius, from which Bardeen differed in almost every way, dates back to antiquity when the Muses were thought to breathe creativity into men. Persisting during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the superhuman and sublime characterization of genius achieved full realization during the Romantic period. Writers such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Edgar Allan Poe, Percy Shelley, and Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, depicted the genius as solitary, unbalanced, untrained, and typically possessed by (rather than endowed with) creative power. More like spirits than people, as the historian Simon Schaffer described them, and often evil, these “Illuminati” merged with the awesome powers over which they brooded. Long after scholars became convinced that genius is an empty notion (a process that Francis Galton may have begun when he tried to connect genius with heredity), the romantic image of the genius sustained itself in popular iconography.

This myth is dangerous, for it can extinguish the confidence and enthusiasm of those who aspire to excellence. In particular, as historical studies show, the stereotype does not fit true geniuses in science. Among the great physicists of the twentieth century who have changed the domains of physics, or created new ones, is Richard Feynman. He deserves to be called a genius. Yet in his outstanding biography, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, James Gleick stressed the contingencies that contributed to Feynman’s success as a physicist, noting that “the history of science is a history not of individual discovery but of multiple, overlapping, coincidental discovery.” Although some people may be smarter than others in particular contexts, Feynman himself pointed out that “we are not that much smarter than each other” (emphasis added).

The public is confused about genius partly because a few of the greatest scientists, including both Einstein and Feynman, have enjoyed playing to its popular image, sometimes in the process obscuring the significance of their own work. The public is less aware of Feynman’s quantum electrodynamics than of his bongo drumming, or his entertaining tales of accidentally cracking scientific riddles as easily as he cracked safes filled with national security secrets. Similarly, the wild-haired Albert Einstein, who mugged for the camera with his tongue sticking out, engaged reporters less with his revolutionary physics than with his eccentricities and controversial politics.

The particular genius of Bardeen did not dramatically shatter or create new domains of physics, as did some of the work of Feynman and Einstein. Bardeen’s work did create new ways of solving problems and powerful ways to conceptualize real materials. As a creative scientist, he fit a less familiar profile, that of a genius grounded in the world.

Bardeen’s public (and private) persona had nothing outrageous, otherworldly, or magical about it. The mumbling Midwesterner was a calm, balanced family man and friend. He was more likely to be found playing on the golf course, or rooting at a University of Illinois home game, than expounding for reporters. He preferred picnicking with his family or working quietly in his office. Utterly unassuming in his personal life, Bardeen was uninterested in appearing other than ordinary. That is perhaps why journalists have found him difficult to write about, or even to comprehend. Most ignored him.

It did not help that Bardeen was not adept at verbal communication. He “doesn’t say much, but when he says something you really have to listen,” a close friend cautioned. He spoke sparingly, usually in a low warble that some found difficult to understand or even to hear. Some of his students called him “Whispering John” because he would lecture in a low murmur. And like a ventriloquist, he barely opened his mouth when he spoke.

Bardeen’s frugality with words extended to his emotional expression. Uncomfortable with flourishes of any kind, he appeared “flat” to some of his coworkers. Only close friends and colleagues could read his irritation from the subtle shake of his head or slight hiss that would occasionally enter his voice.

Even when Bardeen’s words were audible, their meaning often remained puzzling. And when asked a question, he often lapsed into a sort of trance while pondering his response. His companions would be uncertain about what to do during the awkward silence that could last many minutes.

When colleagues or students asked Bardeen to clarify an explanation, he would typically repeat an earlier one. Some eventually learned that this was actually a backhanded compliment; for Bardeen knew how to tailor his explanations to his notion of what the other could grasp. At the Naval Ordnance Laboratory, where Bardeen worked during the Second World War, he is said to have tirelessly rephrased his explanations until they could be understood

by each member of his group. Some of Bardeen’s students eventually found speaking with him to be “very easy.” James Bray came to experience the long silences in conversations with Bardeen as “very pleasant and very productive, and relaxing.”

Bardeen differed from the mythical scientific genius in many other ways. For instance, he was by no means self-trained. He spent much of his life engaged in strenuous professional studies through which he developed his legendary encyclopedic knowledge of physics. He learned a great deal from important leaders of modern physics. At least five of them also became Nobel laureates—Van Vleck, Wigner, Paul A. M. Dirac, Percy W. Bridgman, and Peter Debye. From such mentors Bardeen learned much about how to solve problems, how to recognize problems that are ripe, and how to find colleagues who were working at the cutting edge of physics. Nor did Bardeen usually work in solitude, like the mythical genius. He preferred to work in collaboration, usually as a member of a small team that included both theorists and experimentalists. And solutions did not come to him in a sudden flash. He often spent years working on problems, stubbornly holding on to them like a bulldog gnawing a bone. He differed from the stereotype as well in his sometimes plodding approach to complex problems. Rather than solving them as a whole, he would repeatedly break them down into manageable pieces.

The profile that emerges from this biography of John Bardeen differs greatly from the popular image of a creative genius, but its features are common to the profiles of many, perhaps most, real geniuses. Noted throughout the book and discussed more fully in the last chapter are the features of this profile. They include perseverance, motivation, passion, talent, confidence, focus, and effective problem solving. Educators, psychologists, and other scholars have often discussed them in the vast and contentious literature on creativity. All these features can be cultivated—as Bardeen’s life story illustrates.