Steven Chu – Biographical

(Excerpt from Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Prizes 1997, Editor Tore Frängsmyr, [Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 1998)

Foreword

Education in my family was not merely emphasized, it was our raison d'être. My two brothers and four cousins collected three MDs, four Ph.D.s and a law degree. However, I could manage only a single advanced degree. In comparison to my older brother, who set the record for the highest cumulative average for our high school, my performance was decidedly mediocre. I approached the bulk of my schoolwork as a chore rather than an intellectual adventure. Geometry was the first exciting course I remember. Instead of memorizing facts, we were asked to think in clear, logical steps.

High School Years

My life was not completely centered around school work or recreational reading. As I grew older, my interests expanded to playing with chemistry: a friend and I experimented with homemade rockets, in part funded by money my parents gave me for lunch at school. I also developed an interest in sports, and played in informal games at a nearby school yard.

In my senior year, I was blessed by two talented and dedicated teachers. I applied to a number of colleges in the fall of my senior year, but because of my relatively lackluster A-average in high school, I was rejected by the Ivy League schools, but was accepted at Rochester. By comparison, my older brother was attending Princeton, two cousins were in Harvard and a third was at Bryn Mawr. I consoled myself that I would be an anonymous student, out of the shadow of my illustrious family.

The Rochester and Berkeley Years

At Rochester, I came with the same emotions as many of the entering freshman: everything was new, exciting and a bit overwhelming, but at least nobody had heard of my brothers and cousins. In my sophomore year, I became increasingly interested in mathematics and declared a major in both mathematics and physics. The pull towards mathematics was partly social: as a lowly undergraduate student, several math professors adopted me and I was invited to several faculty parties.

The obvious compromise between mathematics and physics was to become a theoretical physicist. Hoping to become a theoretical physicist, I went to Berkeley and entered in the fall of 1970. I had spent all of my graduate and postdoctoral days at Berkeley. I loved Berkeley, but realized that I had a narrow view of science.

A Random Walk in Science at Bell Labs

I joined Bell Laboratories in the fall of 1978 and I never returned to Berkeley. To this day I feel guilty about it, but I think that the faculty understood my decision and have forgiven me.

When I started the experiment on the optical spectroscopy of positronium, there were 12 published attempts to observe the optical fluorescence of the atom. People only publish failures if they have spent enough time and money so their funding agencies demand something in return.

My management thought I was ruining my career by trying an impossible experiment. After two years of no results, they strongly suggested that I abandon my quest. But I was stubborn and I had a secret weapon: his name is Allen Mills. Our strengths complemented each other beautifully, two years later, we refined our methods and obtained one of the most accurate measurements of quantum electrodynamic corrections to an atomic system.

Stanford and the future

My management at Bell Labs was successful in keeping me at Bell Labs for 9 years, but I wanted to be like my mentor, Gene Commins, and the urge to spawn scientific progeny was growing stronger.

Ted Geballe, a distinguished colleague of mine at Stanford who also went from Berkeley to Bell to Stanford years earlier, described our motives: "The best part of working at a university is the students. They come in fresh, enthusiastic, open to ideas, unscarred by the battles of life. They don't realize it, but they're the recipients of the best our society can offer. If a mind is ever free to be creative, that's the time. They come in believing textbooks are authoritative but eventually they figure out that textbooks and professors don't know everything, and then they start to think on their own. Then, I begin learning from them."

My students at Stanford have been extraordinary, and I have learned much from them. Much of my most important work was done at Stanford with my students as collaborators.

The constant demands of my department and university and the ever increasing work needed to obtain funding have stolen much of my precious thinking time, and I sometimes yearn for the halcyon days of Bell Labs. Then, I think of the work my students and post-docs have done with me at Stanford and how we have grown together during this time.

This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and later published in the book series Les Prix Nobel/ Nobel Lectures/The Nobel Prizes. The information is sometimes updated with an addendum submitted by the Laureate.