Institute of Advanced Studies

The 2009 Marshall-Warren Lecture: How advancements in science are made.

Eminent scientist and Nobel Laureate Professor Douglas Osheroff from Stanford University will come to UWA in November to present this year’s Marshall-Warren Lecture. Professor Osheroff who is the 1996 recipient of the Nobel Prize for Physics, will talk about how advances in science are made and will illustrate some of the research strategies that lead to discoveries in science.

The Marshall-Warren Annual Lecture Series honours UWA Professor Barry J Marshall and Emeritus Professor J Robin Warren, joint recipients of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their ground-breaking discovery about stomach ulcers and their bacterial basis. Their work revolutionised the treatment of gastro-duodenal ulcers by enabling an antibiotic cure and has led to a significant reduction in the prevalence of gastric cancer. This is the first Nobel Prize to be awarded for research undertaken in Western Australia.

[Milka Bukilic:] Firstly, may I begin Professor Osheroff by welcoming you to the University of Western Australia. We are delighted to have you present the 2009 Marshall-Warren Lecture.


You’ve received many outstanding awards that honour your research in science, including the ultimate accolade of a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1996. Could you please tell us what is it like to be a recipient of such a ‘glittering’ prize, and how has being a Nobel Laureate changed your life?

[Douglas Osheroff:] First, let me say that people had begun telling me that they had nominated me for the Nobel Prize back in 1976. You are absolutely not supposed to do that, but I would guess it happens often. So I had 20 years to think about what it might be like to win a Nobel Prize, and to wonder if it would ever happen. Going back to the first major prize I won, I remember immediately thinking about those people in my life that had influenced my life and career. These most notably included my father, my high school chemistry teacher, Richard Feynman (as I was one of those who took his class in 1963-65), and Gerry Neugebauer and Robert Leighton, two professors at Caltech who were responsible for the infra-red astrophysics research study I participated in as an undergraduate. Indeed, I called up my high school chemistry teacher, Mr. Hock, the evening after that prize was announced, and when he answered I said: 'Mr. Hock, guess who!' This was almost 20 years after I had chemistry in high school (1961 to 1981). He replied immediately ‘Well, I guess that has to be Douglas Osheroff.' I suspect that Hock has seen the news that I had received the MacArthur Prize, and wondered if I would give him a call. I stayed in contact with Mr. Hock almost up until he died. However, he had a bad stroke and after a while it was impossible to carry on a phone conversation with him. My father had died very suddenly in 1977, and I doubt he could have imagined what the future held for his son. However, he was the first person who actively stimulated (or perhaps sustained) my interest in physics.

So, by the time the Nobel Prize came, I already had received the MacArthur Prize, the Simon Prize, the Buckley Prize, and was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. This is very different from Feynman, as the Nobel Prize was almost the first prize he received. Of course he was never happy about being a member of the National Academy of Sciences. But the bottom line is that I had looked over my life every time I received a major award and at those people in my life that had helped nurture and shape my interest in science. I knew that I would have many opportunities to stimulate young people's interest in science, and that it would be important for me to do so. Thus, while before the Nobel Prize I would travel perhaps 30,000 miles a year, after the prize I began travelling 150,000 miles a year. I think I do a fairly good job in stimulating students' interest in careers in research, but all this keeps me out of the lab pretty effectively. In addition, after the Nobel Prize I have ended up on several advisory boards, and some of them even are interested in my opinion on various matters. Now, when I meet someone rather than people saying 'It's nice to know you' or something like that they often say 'it is an honour to know you' or something like that. I am the same person now that I was before the Prize, and wish that people would treat me that way.

There are two ways to think about a Nobel Prize. One is that it is both a reward for work well done, and an encouragement for others to dive into the unknown. The other is that the prize confers great importance on the discovery or advance itself. I sort of doubt that the latter is very effective, but I am happy to have others think that superfluidity in liquid 3He, so close to absolute zero, is important. I suppose if it is important it is not because it allows one to devise an 'enabling technology' but because it has allowed mankind to better understand a particular kind of order that is rather common in Nature. For instance, we now believe that the bulk of matter in neutron stars is condensed into a superfluid state.

I should say that I regard the Nobel Prize to Warren and Marshall very differently than I regard my one prize. They had a great idea, and ultimately convinced the world that it was a correct one, that chronic stomach ulcers result from bacteria living on the inner lining of the stomach. This may not be important to neutron stars, but it sure is to us human beings!

[Milka Bukilic:] More specifically, you’ve received the Nobel Prize for your discovery of superfluidity in helium-3. For those of us with limited knowledge in Physics, could you explain in simple terms what this discovery means, and perhaps briefly, about the research strategies that led you to making such an important breakthrough?

[Douglas Osheroff:] Helium three atoms are examples of what are called 'Fermi particles', which means that they possess an intrinsic net spin of ½ , the same spin as that of the electron, proton and neutron. Such particles must obey the Pauli exclusion principle, which means that no two can occupy the same quantum state. In metals, however, the conduction electrons (that is the electrons which are free to roam around the interior of the metal) occasionally condensed into a macroscopically occupied state, at low temperatures, in which large numbers of conduction electrons participate. This was discovered by Kamerlingh Onnes at the University of Leiden in 1911, and seemed to violate the Pauli exclusion principle. It was not until 1957 that theorists were able to understand what was happening in these 'superconductors'. Bardeen, Cooper and Schrieffer published their theory explaining how the conduction electrons in superconductors formed 'correlated' pairs called Cooper Pairs, and that as a Cooper Pair had a net spin of either zero or one, the Cooper pairs would behave as Bose particles, which do not obey the Pauli exclusion principle. In these superconductors the 'attractive force' that produced the correlated pairs was mediated by distortions of the underlying lattice of the metals involved.

Liquid 3He was first produced at Los Alamos National Laboratory during the development of the hydrogen bomb in 1948, by a group headed by Ed Hammel. He published his measurements of the 3He vapour pressure as a function of the liquid temperature in 1949, and this attracted the attention of many scientists on both sides of the iron curtain. Isaac Pomeranchuk in Russia proposed that one could cool liquid 3He by the adiabatic solidification of a portion of the liquid, and theorists on both sides of the Iron Curtain began calculating the properties of this 'Fermi' liquid. In 1959, just two years after the publication of the BCS theory of superconductivity, theorists began to speculate that liquid 3He might condense into a superfluid state based on arguments somewhat similar to the BCS theory. This ignited a race to see who could be first to find this novel superfluid. Initial estimates were that the superfluid transition temperature should be about 80 mK, but by 1965 experimentalists had cooled 3He to just below 2 mK without any evidence for a phase transition to a superfluid state. I became active in the field as a second year graduate student in the fall of 1968. By that time the common wisdom was that superfluidity in liquid 3He was a 'pipe dream' by the theorists, and it would not exist. By my third year of graduate study I had designed and built a 'Pomeranchuk' cooler, not to search for superfluidity in liquid 3He, but to study nuclear spin ordering in solid 3He. It was in the process of testing my Pomeranchuk cooler that I discovered the 3He superfluid phase transition. I succeeded where many others had failed because I was forced to work at the melting pressure by my cooling technique, where the superfluid transition temperature is almost three times as high as it is at zero pressure. Clearly this was a serendipitous discovery! But there was not just one but two phase transitions and two rather different ordered states. However, it was at that time not clear that these transitions were in the liquid. Indeed, we felt that the higher temperature transition was in the solid. It was not until I developed an early form of MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) that I was able to show that both transitions were in the liquid 3He, not the solid. My development of an early form of MRI came at the same time that Paul Lauterbur in the US and Sir Peter Mansfield in England were doing their own work on medical MRI, which resulted in their receiving the 2003 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. We (me and my thesis advisors) further found that the liquid 3He had very strange NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) properties. When we submitted these results for publication, they seemed so strange and unlikely that the reviewer of the paper rejected it from publication. However, that summer we had sent a pre-print of our paper to Tony Leggett at the University of Sussex in England, and in less than a month Leggett was able to show that the NMR behaviour we had reported could be explained if the liquid had undergone a BCS transition to a state in which the correlated pairs formed, the 'Cooper pairs', had a net spin and a net orbital angular momentum. The spin dynamics of the 3He superfluids are indeed remarkable, and have allowed us to probe these ordered states with remarkable clarity. In 2003 Leggett shared the Nobel Prize for Physics for his explanation of the remarkable spin dynamics of superfluid 3He.

[Milka Bukilic:] Reading from your very interesting biography, I was surprised to find out, that not only being a ‘wild child’, you also come from a long line of medical professionals. Did you not have any interest in medicine as a young student, or was your interest in experimentation and physics mainly spurred by your desire to do something different to what your family has done?

[Douglas Osheroff:] Although my father was a physician, he was also very interested in science. Like Richard Feynman's father had done with his son, my father played an active role in my science education from a very early age. He also showed me how to create magnetic fields, build motors and generators, and electric sparks and all manner of electromagnetic behaviour. He had gotten a masters degree in chemistry, and I think he wanted to get a Ph.D. in science, but it was during the Great Depression, and I think his father convinced him that a medical degree would lead to a more stable career at that time then a Ph.D. in science. My older brother did indeed become a medical doctor, but I never had any interest in medicine, and was absolutely fascinated by physics. Since my father actively stimulated my interest in physics, there was never a question as to what I would do in life. My parents very clearly allowed me to choose my career.

[Milka Bukilic:] So this leads me into my final question – what would be your words of advice to young students aspiring to pursue science, and Physics in particular?

[Douglas Osheroff:] I think that my early childhood of tearing apart things to understand how they worked, and of build things of my own design, did a wonderful job of prepared me for a career in science. I don't know if this is advice to the child, but perhaps to the parents of the child. The advice I give my freshman advisees here at Stanford is the following: "The most important things you will learn here at Stanford are not things you learn that are written in books, but things you learn about yourself, in response to the stimulations and the pressures you experience in your classes and in your dorm. You must learn what subjects excite and motivate you, and how to motivate yourselves to study things that you don't find all that interesting. You must learn how to work efficiently, by being motivated, by getting enough sleep, and by understanding how to attack a problem. By learning these things you will become good managers of your own personal resources. Choose a profession that excites you, and that allows you to utilize your strengths and avoid as much as possible having to rely on your weaknesses. And finally, choose a profession that will allow you to contribute back to society for the advantages from which you have profited."

Douglas Osheroff will deliver the The 2009 Marshall-Warren Lecture: How Advancements in Science are Made, at UWA’s Winthrop Hall, on Tuesday, 24 November @ 6pm. Cost: Free, however a ticket is essential. Tickets are available from the Octagon Theatre Box Office. Tel (+61 8) 6488 2440, Monday – Friday, 12.00-4.15pm. All welcome.