Leon Cooper

thumb|Cooper with his wife, Kay Allard, in 1972 Leon N Cooper (February 28, 1930 – October 23, 2024) was an American physicist and Nobel Prize laureate who, with John Bardeen and John Robert Schrieffer, developed the BCS theory of superconductivity. He is also the namesake of the Cooper pair and co-developer of the BCM theory of synaptic plasticity. Quotes Consider a pair of electrons which interact above a quiescent Fermi sphere with an interaction of the kind that might be expected due to the phonon and the screened Coulomb fields. If there is a net attraction between the electrons, it turns out that they can form a bound state, though their total energy is larger than zero. The properties of a noninteracting system of such bound pairs are very suggestive of those which could produce a superconducting state. 10.1103/PhysRev.104.1189 Bound Electron Pairs in a Degenerate Fermi Gas Physical Review 104 4 1189–1190 15 November 1956 1956PhRv..104.1189C Relativity, from one viewpoint the beginning of twentieth-century physics, is from another the capstone of classical physics, the final and most elegant variation of the world view initiated by Galileo and Newton. In a sense, after Einstein, classical physics, just as after Mozart classical music, could go no further. https://books.google.com/?id=fiwoAQAAIAAJ&q=mozart An Introduction to the Meaning and Structure of Physics 301 1970 Harper & Row The fundamental qualitative difference between the superconducting and normal ground state wave function is produced when the large degeneracy of the single particle electron levels in the normal state is removed. If we visualize the Hamiltonian matrix which results from an attractive two-body interaction in the basis of normal metal configurations, we find in this enormous matrix, sub-matrices in which all single-particle states except for one pair of electrons remain unchanged. These two electrons can scatter via the electron-electron interaction to all states of the same total momentum. We may envisage the pair wending its way (so to speak) over all states unoccupied by other electrons. Microscopic Quantum Interference Effects in the Theory of Superconductivity, Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1972 by Leon N. Cooper nobelprize.org https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2018/06/cooper-lecture.pdf The long and imposing list of physicists (among them Bohr, Heisenberg and Feynman) who had tried or were trying their hand at superconductivity should have given me pause. Even Einstein, in 1922 — before the quantum theory of metals was in place — had attempted to construct a theory of superconductivity. Fortunately, I was unaware of these many unsuccessful attempts. So when John invited me to join him (he, somehow, neglected to mention these previous efforts), I decided to take the plunge. Remembrance of Superconductivity Past by Leon N. Cooper 3–19 https://books.google.com/books?id=cC5EWBhsqV8C&pg=PA3 BCS: 50 Years 9789814304658 Cooper, Leon N. Feldman, Dmitri 2011 World Scientific Publishing Co (quote from p. 4) How do we get emotions and feelings out of neurons which, presumably, don't have emotions and feelings? On Consciousness: Leon Cooper 22 June 2017 Brown University Department of Physics, YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3af6kEMCBGY External links Category:1930 births Category:2024 deaths Category:Academics from the United States Category:Physicists from the United States Category:Nobel laureates in Physics Category:Jews from the United States Category:People from New York City Category:Nobel laureates from the United States Category:Columbia University alumni Category:Brown University faculty