In June David Pines’s contributions to theoretical physics and international science were honored when the University of St. Andrews conferred on him an honorary Doctor of Science degree. St. Andrews, which is Scotland’s first university and the third oldest in the world (founded in 1413), has strong programs in several areas of physics and in interdisciplinary science. Professor Andrew Mackenzie, who introduced ICAM’s Co-Director to the Vice-Chancellor in the traditional Laureation, described both his theoretical work and his tireless advocacy for international cooperation in science. “Visionary” and “unstoppable” were the two words used by Professor Mackenzie to sum up David’s long and still ongoing career. A copy of the Laureation is posted at http://icam-i2cam.org/icamnews/?page_id=401.

The John Bardeen Prize for Superconductivity Theory was awarded to Pines in Tokyo on September 9, at the 9th International Conference on Materials and Mechanisms of Superconductivity (M2S-IX). It honored his contributions in two areas, phonon-mediated pairing of electrons in conventional superconductors and superfluidity in nuclear matter. As David remarked in his acceptance speech, the award has special significance to him because it recognizes John Bardeen, who played a key role in his life as mentor, colleague, and friend at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

David described the exciting period in the 1950s when he was part of the international effort to solve the puzzle of superconductivity. Notes from his Tokyo talk are posted at http://www.m2s-tokyo.org/award.html and include a photo of attendees at the 1954 Solvay Congress, a summit of theoretical physicists of that time. It was David’s first international meeting and he was more than a little anxious about giving the first talk. He writes that “the main message I wished to convey there was that superconductivity could not arise from electron–electron interactions alone, an approach Heisenberg had pursued, but that it would most likely come from a phonon–induced interaction between electrons (modified by that electron-electron interaction) that Bardeen and I had just derived. Pauli was the Nobel laureate in the audience about whom I was most concerned, and as soon as I finished, he happily announced to the assembled group, ‘I always told that fool Heisenberg he was wrong’”.

John Bardeen’s bottom-up, experiment-based approach to solving superconductivity has influenced David’s work to this day. He shared this 9-point approach with his listeners in Tokyo:

• Focus first on the experimental results via reading and personal contact.
• Develop a phenomenological description that ties different experimental results together.
• Explore alternative physical pictures and mathematical descriptions without becoming wedded to any particular one.
• Thermodynamic and other macroscopic arguments have precedence over microscopic calculations.
• Focus on physical understanding, not mathematical elegance, and use the simplest possible mathematical description.
• Keep up with new developments in theoretical techniques—for one of these may prove useful.
• Decide on a model Hamiltonian or wave function as the penultimate, not the first, step toward a solution.
• Choose the right collaborators.
• DON’T GIVE UP: Stay with the problem until it is solved.

By Karie Friedman, ICAMNews, October 2009