A doctor’s son in a logging town
Douglas Dean Osheroff was born on August 1, 1945, in Aberdeen, a logging town on the coast of Washington State, the second of five children. He came, as he put it, from a mixed family. His father, William Osheroff, was the son of Jewish immigrants who left Russia shortly after 1900; his mother, Bessie Anne Ondov, a nurse, was the daughter of a Lutheran minister whose parents came from what is now Slovakia. His parents met in New York, where his father was a medical intern and his mother a nurse, and after the Second World War they settled in Aberdeen, where doctors were scarce. Almost everyone on his father’s side became a physician or married one.
Osheroff grew pale at the sight of blood and never considered medicine. From the age of six he took his toys apart for their electric motors, and his teenage years were a parade of mechanical, chemical and electrical projects, some of them dangerous. A homemade muzzle-loading rifle once went off in the house; an improvised acetylene lamp exploded and embedded glass in his face, narrowly missing his eye. In his senior year of high school he built a 100,000-volt X-ray machine. His father, who stitched up the wounds, shared with him a love of photography and gardening that Osheroff kept all his life.
Feynman’s lectures and the cold
He chose Caltech, partly to avoid being compared with his older brother at Stanford, and arrived in time for Richard Feynman’s famous introductory physics course, which he said did more than anything to build his physical intuition. The workload was a shock; his maths grades climbed slowly from C+ to A+. Research saved him: in his junior year he joined Gerry Neugebauer’s survey of the infrared sky, and as a senior he worked in a low-temperature laboratory, where two visiting professors filled his mind with the wonders of the cold. He graduated in 1967.
He went to Cornell for graduate school, largely to escape the Pasadena smog. There he met Phyllis Liu, a fellow student from Taiwan whom he married in 1970, and David Lee, head of the low-temperature laboratory, who encouraged him to join his group.
The kinks in the curve
For his thesis Osheroff studied solid helium-3, the rare light form of helium, using a device called a Pomeranchuk cell that cools the helium by slowly compressing it until part of it freezes. The group, led by Lee and Robert Richardson, hoped to find a magnetic transition in the frozen helium at temperatures a couple of thousandths of a degree above absolute zero.
In November 1971 Osheroff noticed small extra changes in slope in his recordings of pressure against time. They would have been easy to dismiss as quirks of the equipment. Instead, as the Nobel committee later put it, the student’s vigilant eye and his conviction that the effect was real led the team to investigate. Their first paper in 1972 attributed the features to the solid. A rapid series of further measurements that same year showed that they came from the liquid instead, which was passing through two new phase transitions. Liquid helium-3 had become a superfluid: a liquid with no internal friction, governed directly by quantum mechanics. It was something many groups had sought for a decade and many doubted could happen. Osheroff received his PhD in 1973.
Bell Labs and Stanford
Osheroff joined Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, in 1972, in what he called its golden era, when the laboratory’s management backed basic research generously. Over the next five years his group measured many of the key properties of the superfluid phases and, with Bell theorists Philip Anderson and William Brinkman, helped show that they were well described by an extension of the theory of superconductivity. He went on to discover antiferromagnetic resonance in nuclear-spin-ordered solid helium-3 and, with Gerry Dolan, to find experimental evidence of the weak localisation of electrons in thin disordered conductors that Anderson and colleagues had just predicted.
His hiring at Bell Labs came at a lucky moment. A two-year hiring freeze was lifted in December 1971, weeks after the discovery, and at his interview on January 6, 1972, which began like a thesis defence, his enthusiasm carried the day. He was offered not a temporary post but a permanent position that let him keep studying helium-3. He later said he had worried that all the pioneering work would be done before his new laboratory was running, but when it was ready, most of the questions that interested him were still open.
In 1987, after fifteen years, he moved to Stanford University, encouraged by his wife, who saw in him, he wrote, a teacher waiting to be born; she took a post at Genentech. At Stanford he studied how one superfluid phase of helium-3 forms inside another, magnetism in solid helium-3 and the low-temperature behaviour of glassy materials. He chaired the physics department from 1993 to 1996.
His Stanford group also developed a programme on the low-temperature properties of amorphous solids such as glass. They showed that interactions between defects in these materials create a hole in the distribution of their energies, just as in the magnetic materials called spin glasses, and that it might be possible to measure the size of clusters of coupled defects. He has said he enjoyed every aspect of university life except applying for research funding.
What the discovery gave science
Superfluid helium-3 became one of the most studied systems in physics. Its atoms pair up in a more complicated way than the electrons in an ordinary superconductor, so it has several distinct superfluid phases, direction-dependent properties and a rich variety of vortices. It has served as a laboratory model for unusual superconductors, for the interiors of neutron stars and even, in experiments reported in 1996, for theories of how cosmic strings may have formed in the early universe. The Nobel committee said the discovery showed that the quantum laws of the microscopic world can directly govern the behaviour of large bodies.
The lesson of how it was found, that a careful researcher should take small anomalies seriously, is one Osheroff has spent decades teaching to students.
The foamologist
On February 1, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia broke apart on re-entry, killing its seven astronauts. Osheroff was appointed to the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, a role often compared to Richard Feynman’s on the Challenger commission in 1986. He took on the question of why insulating foam broke off the shuttle’s external fuel tank, introducing himself at a public hearing as the board’s foamologist.
In work done back at Stanford, including tests on foam in a kitchen sink using red ink, he examined the idea that liquid nitrogen trapped in the foam and then heated during flight, a process called cryopumping, made pieces of foam break away. His tests showed that cryopumping produced flat cracks in the foam but was not enough on its own to shed it, contrary to earlier claims, and might work together with other factors. The board concluded that a piece of foam striking the left wing during launch had doomed Columbia, that foam shedding had long been known and wrongly accepted as normal, and it made 29 recommendations to make future flights safer. NASA adopted them before the shuttle flew again in 2005.
At the board’s public hearing in June 2003, Osheroff also described tests NASA was running in which an arc jet heated air to about 8,000 degrees Fahrenheit and directed it at aluminium plates thicker than the spar inside the shuttle’s wing, to study how superheated gas could have damaged the wing’s structure. The board’s final report was released on August 26, 2003.
Family background and character
Osheroff’s heritage is Jewish on his father’s side; his paternal grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Russia. He was raised in his mother’s Lutheran tradition and confirmed in the Lutheran church, but chose to stop attending. He has said that at some emotional level he accepts the idea of God but does not know how God would manifest itself.
He is left-handed and likes to blame his quirks on it. An avid photographer, he has taught Stanford freshmen the technical side of photography with medium-format film; on the morning he learned of his Nobel Prize, after two and a half hours’ sleep, he went to teach his class on the physics of photography. He won Stanford’s Gores Award for excellence in teaching in 1991, took part in science festivals for school students and served on the board of Scientists and Engineers for America, which promotes sound science in government.
He released to the public the recording from his answering machine of the early-morning call from Stockholm, which captures his initial annoyance at being woken at 2.30 a.m. He and Phyllis Liu-Osheroff, a biochemist, have been married since 1970.
Legacy
Osheroff shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics with Lee and Richardson, having received the Simon Memorial Prize, the Buckley Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship earlier. He is now professor emeritus at Stanford. His career joins two kinds of service: patient discovery at the coldest temperatures ever reached in a laboratory, and the practical, public work of finding out why a spacecraft failed so that others might fly more safely.
Sources & further reading
Douglas D. Osheroff, Biographical, NobelPrize.org · Press release: The Nobel Prize in Physics 1996, NobelPrize.org · Watching the CAIB at work, The Space Review · CAIB public hearing transcript, June 12, 2003 · Columbia Accident Investigation Board, Wikipedia · Douglas Osheroff, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.