Ten Nobels for the future

Robert C. Richardson was born on June 26, 1937 in Washington, D.C. His parents, Lois Price Richardson and Robert Franklin Richardson, lived in Arlington, VA.

In 1954 he entered Virginia Polytechnic Institute, also called Virginia Tech, where he started out as an electrical engineer and then tried to become a chemistry major "but ran into great difficulty in a course called quantitative analysis because of my color-blindness". Finally, he turned to physics, in which he obtained a B.S. (in 1958) and an M.S. (in 1960).

In summers, while in college, Richardson worked in the Electricity Division of the National Bureau of Standards, calibrating electrical resistance standards, an experience which gave him "some notion of what a scientific research career could be".

In 1960, after a few months of military service in the US Army Ordnance Corps, he entered Duke University, where he met his wife Betty McCarthy and received a training that "put me in business for practically the rest of my research career". In 1966 he obtained his Ph.D. in Physics.

Together with his family, he moved to Ithaca in October 1966 to join the Cornell University Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics, where he was invited to work with Dave Lee and John Reppy on very low temperature helium research. He has remained ever since at Cornell, where he was named an assistant professor of physics in 1968, an associate professor in 1972 and a full professor in 1975, and where he is currently F.R. Newman Professor of Physics and Vice Provost for Research.

At the beginning of the 1970s Robert C. Richardson, David M. Lee and Douglas D. Osheroff discovered that the helium isotope helium-3 can be made superfluid at a temperature only about two thousandths of a degree above absolute zero. This superfluid quantum liquid has very special characteristics, which cannot be explained in terms of classical physics.

The discovery completed the triad of discoveries that collectively constitute the major achievement of low temperature physics in this century. The phenomenon in helium-3 resembles and yet differs remarkably from its other two manifestations in superconductors and in the more common isotope, liquid helium-4. The impact of the discovery on subsequent physics has been immense. It has transformed the direction of theoretical and experimental research in low temperature physics, stimulating advances in the understanding of the hydrodynamics of intricately ordered systems, the microscopic theory of electrons in metals, and the range of phenomena accessible to nuclear magnetic resonance probes. Some have even seen in it suggestive implications for phenomena in astrophysics".

In 1966 Richardson, Lee and Osheroff were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. "The experimental and theoretical developments went hand-in-hand in an unusually fruitful way" says a press release of the Nobel Foundation. "The field was rapidly mapped out, but fundamental discoveries are still being made".

Richardson was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1981, a Guggenheim Fellow in 1982 and a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1983.

He is the co-author, along with Eric N. Smith and 21 Cornell graduate students, of the book Experimental Techniques in Condensed Matter Physics at Low Temperatures (Addison-Wesley, 1988). He has also produced two instructional videos, "The World at Absolute Zero", and "Introductory Physics", a series of 20 video-taped lectures to accompany the introductory physics course taught at Cornell for students without a background in calculus.

1998
The Role of Accidental Discovery in the Advancement of Science and Technology