The only person ever to win two Nobel Prizes in physics, Bardeen deserves special regard not only from the scientific community but also from consumers who use products arising from his work, including "boom-box" radios and desktop microcomputers. Bardeen's invention of the electrical transistor opened the door to today's electronic age, and his research on the phenomenon of superconductivity is now being used to develop more powerful computers and artificial intelligence.

Born in Madison, Wisconsin, Bardeen earned his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering at the University of Wisconsin. Although he did some graduate research, he left school to work for the oil industry as a geophysicist in Pittsburgh. After a few years, however, the attraction of pure science lured him to Princeton University, where he was awarded a Ph.D. in physics and mathematics in 1936. There he was introduced to the rapidly developing field of solid-state physics--the study...