Three Americans, William Shockley,
John Bardeen, and Walter Houser Brattain received the Nobel Prize in 1956 for their discovery of the transistor effect.
According to this theory, once
John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley gave us a shove with their discovery of the transistor, we just followed Gordon Moore's famous law down the cost curve, like a skier going down a jump ramp.
Each of the interviewees was chosen because he or she made a difference in a major domain of culture, e.g., Robertson Davies, Mark Strand, Nadine Gordimer in the arts;
John Bardeen, Stephen Jay Gould, and Rosalyn Yallow in the sciences; John Read, Robert Galvin, Irving Brooke Harris in business.
The theoretical starting point is a model, proposed in 1957 by
John Bardeen, Leon N.
1910), Walter Houser Brattain (1902-1987), and
John Bardeen (b.
Brattain, and
John Bardeen, all of Bell Telephone Laboratories, for their discovery of the transistor effect in semiconductors and the development of the transistor.
However, some of the fundamental papers, such as
John Bardeen's 1947 classic dissertation, "Surface States and Rectification at a Metal Semi-conductor Contact," have also been included.
Second, just a year later, in 1947, at Bell Labs,
John Bardeen, William Schockley and Walter Brattain check the apparatus which they used to discover the transistor.
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John Bardeen -- Bardeen, a professor for almost 40 years at the University of Illinois, is the only person to win the Nobel Prize in physics twice: first for helping invent the transistor, then for research into superconductivity.