Leo Szilard: The Genius Behind the Bomb
. Source. 1992. TODO an external link to the production? Producers credited at end: Helen Weiss and Alain Jehlen. As indicated at: archive.org/details/TheGeniusBehindtheBomb it was apparently produced by WGBH, public radio station from Boston.He was a leading figure at the MIT Radiation Laboratory, and later he was head at the Columbia University laboratory that carried out the crucial Lamb-Retherford experiment and the anomalous magnetic dipole moment of the electron published at The Magnetic Moment of the Electron by Kusch and Foley (1948) using related techniques.
This seems like a cool dude. Besides a hardcore scientist, he also made many important contributions to the French education and research system.
Richard Feynman's mentor at Princeton University, and notable contributor to his development of quantum electrodynamics.
Worked with Niels Bohr at one point.
Web of Stories interview (1996): www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFzVlqiUh95Q881umWUPjQbB. He's a bit slow, you wonder if he's going to continute or not! One wonders if it is because of age, or he's always been like that.
The Story of John Bardeen at the University of Illinois (2010)
Source. - youtu.be/OyV8qSwGUHU?t=976 of when Bardeen demoed the transistor in class is particularly memorable
- youtu.be/OyV8qSwGUHU?t=1105 some of his golf colleagues didn't know he had won a Nobel Prize!
- youtu.be/OyV8qSwGUHU?t=1260 good jokes about receiving the second Nobel Prize
Congratulations on the second prize. With the third you get to keep the king!
The king asked my mother [Bardeen's son speaking]: "Where's he family"? The mother answered: "Well, they're at home or school". And the kind replied: "Well, next time, bring them!"
This is the one Ciro Santilli envies the most, because he has such a great overlap with Ciro's interests, e.g.:
Extremely precocious, borderline child prodigy, he was reading Dirac at 13-14 from the library.
He started working at night and sleeping during the moring/early afternoon while he was at university.
He was the type of guy that was so good that he didn't really have to follow the university rules very much. He would get into trouble for not following some stupid requirement, but he was so good that they would just let him get away with it.
Besides quantum electrodynamics, Julian worked on radar at the Rad Lab during World War II, unlike most other top physicists who went to Los Alamos Laboratory to work on the atomic bomb, and he made important contributions there on calculating the best shape of the parts and so on.
He was known for being very formal mathematically and sometimes hard to understand, in stark contrast to Feynman which was much more lose and understandable, especially after Freeman Dyson translated him to the masses.
However, QED and the men who made it: Dyson, Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga by Silvan Schweber (1994) does emphacise that he was actually also very practical in the sense that he always aimed to obtain definite numbers out of his calculations, and that was not only the case for the Lamb shift.
The bald confident chilled out particle physics guy from Stanford University!
One can't help but wonder if he smokes pot or not.
Also one can't stop thinking abot Leonard Hofstadter from The Big Bang Theory upoen hearing his name.
Leonard Susskind lecturing in 2013
. Source. 