Steven Chu – Autobiography
My father, Ju Chin Chu,
came to the United States in 1943 to continue his education at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology in chemical engineering, and two years later, my mother,
Ching Chen Li, joined him to study economics. A generation earlier, my mother's
grandfather earned his advanced degrees in civil engineering at Cornell while
his brother studied physics under Perrin at the Sorbonne before they returned
to China. However, when my parents married in 1945, China was in turmoil and the
possibility of returning grew increasingly remote, and they decided to begin their
family in the United States. My brothers and I were born as part of a typical
nomadic academic career: my older brother was born in 1946 while my father was
finishing at MIT, I was born in St. Louis in 1948 while my father taught at Washington
University, and my younger brother completed the family in Queens shortly after
my father took a position as a professor at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute.
In 1950, we settled in Garden City, New York, a bedroom community within
commuting distance of Brooklyn Polytechnic. There were only two other Chinese
families in this town of 25,000, but to our parents, the determining factor was
the quality of the public school system. Education in my family was not merely
emphasized, it was our raison d'être. Virtually all of our aunts and uncles
had Ph.D.'s in science or engineering, and it was taken for granted that the next
generation of Chu's were to follow the family tradition. When the dust had settled,
my two brothers and four cousins collected three MDs, four Ph.D.s and a law degree.
I could manage only a single advanced degree.
In this family of accomplished
scholars, I was to become the academic black sheep. I performed adequately at
school, but 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 studied, but not in a particularly efficient manner. Occasionally, I would focus
on a particular school project and become obsessed with, what seemed to my mother,
to be trivial details instead of apportioning the time I spent on school work
in a more efficient way.
I approached the bulk of my schoolwork as
a chore rather than an intellectual adventure. The tedium was relieved by a few
courses that seem to be qualitatively different. Geometry was the first exciting
course I remember. Instead of memorizing facts, we were asked to think in clear,
logical steps. Beginning from a few intuitive postulates, far reaching consequences
could be derived, and I took immediately to the sport of proving theorems. I also
fondly remember several of my English courses where the assigned reading often
led to binges where I read many books by the same author.
Despite
the importance of education in our family, my life was not completely centered
around school work or recreational reading. In the summer after kindergarten,
a friend introduced me to the joys of building plastic model airplanes and warships.
By the fourth grade, I graduated to an erector set and spent many happy hours
constructing devices of unknown purpose where the main design criterion was to
maximize the number of moving parts and overall size. The living room rug was
frequently littered with hundreds of metal "girders" and tiny nuts and bolts surrounding
half-finished structures. An understanding mother allowed me to keep the projects
going for days on end. 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. One summer, we turned our hobby
into a business as we tested our neighbors' soil for acidity and missing nutrients.
I also developed an interest in sports, and played in informal games at
a nearby school yard where the neighborhood children met to play touch football,
baseball, basketball and occasionally, ice hockey. In the eighth grade, I taught
myself tennis by reading a book, and in the following year, I joined the school
team as a "second string" substitute, a position I held for the next three years.
I also taught myself how to pole vault using bamboo poles obtained from the local
carpet store. I was soon able to clear 8 feet, but was not good enough to make
the track team.
In my senior year, I took advanced placement physics
and calculus. These two courses were taught with the same spirit as my earlier
geometry course. Instead of a long list of formulas to memorize, we were presented
with a few basic ideas or a set of very natural assumptions. I was also blessed
by two talented and dedicated teachers.
My physics teacher, Thomas
Miner was particularly gifted. To this day, I remember how he introduced the subject
of physics. He told us we were going to learn how to deal with very simple questions
such as how a body falls due to the acceleration of gravity. Through a combination
of conjecture and observations, ideas could be cast into a theory that can be
tested by experiments. The small set of questions that physics could address might
seem trivial compared to humanistic concerns. Despite the modest goals of physics,
knowledge gained in this way would become collected wisdom through the ultimate
arbitrator - experiment.
In addition to an incredibly clear and precise
introduction to the subject, Mr. Miner also encouraged ambitious laboratory projects.
For the better part of my last semester at Garden City High, I constructed a physical
pendulum and used it to make a "precision" measurement of gravity. The years of
experience building things taught me skills that were directly applicable to the
construction of the pendulum. Ironically, twenty five years later, I was to develop
a refined version of this measurement using laser cooled atoms in an atomic fountain
interferometer.
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. My younger brother seemed to have escaped the family pressure
to excel in school by going to college without earning a high school diploma and
by avoiding a career in science. (He nevertheless got a Ph.D. at the age of 21
followed by a law degree from Harvard and is now a managing partner of a major
law firm.) As I prepared to go to college, 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. I enrolled in a two-year,
introductory physics sequence that used The Feynman Lectures in Physics
as the textbook. The Lectures were mesmerizing and inspirational. Feynman
made physics seem so beautiful and his love of the subject is shown through each
page. Learning to do the problem sets was another matter, and it was only years
later that I began to appreciate what a magician he was at getting answers.
In my sophomore year, I became increasingly interested in mathematics and
declared a major in both mathematics and physics. My math professors were particularly
good, especially relative to the physics instructor I had that year. If it were
not for the Feynman Lectures, I would have almost assuredly left 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. My heroes were Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, up to the contemporary
giants such as Feynman, Gell-Man, Yang and Lee. My courses did not stress the
importance of the experimental contributions, and I was led to believe that the
"smartest" students became theorists while the remainder were relegated to experimental
grunts. Sadly, I had forgotten Mr. Miner's first important lesson in physics.
Hoping to become a theoretical physicist, I applied to Berkeley, Stanford,
Stony Brook (Yang was there!) and Princeton. I chose to go to Berkeley and entered
in the fall of 1970. At that time, the number of available jobs in physics was
shrinking and prospects were especially difficult for budding young theorists.
I recall the faculty admonishing us about the perils of theoretical physics: unless
we were going to be as good as Feynman, we would be better off in experimental
physics. To the best of my knowledge, this warning had no effect on either me
or my fellow students.
After I passed the qualifying exam, I was
recruited by Eugene Commins. I admired his breadth of knowledge and his teaching
ability but did not yet learn of his uncanny ability to bring out the best in
all of his students. He was ending a series of beta decay experiments and was
casting around for a new direction of research. He was getting interested in astrophysics
at the time and asked me to think about proto-star formation of a closely coupled
binary pair. I had spent the summer between Rochester and Berkeley at the National
Radio Astronomy Observatory trying to determine the deceleration of the universe
with high red-shift radio source galaxies and was drawn to astrophysics. However,
in the next two months, I avoided working on the theoretical problem he gave me
and instead played in the lab.
One of my "play-experiments" was motivated
by my interest in classical music. I noticed that one could hear out-of-tune notes
played in a very fast run by a violinist. A simple estimate suggested that the
frequency accuracy, times the duration of the note,did not satisfy the uncertainty
relationship. In order to test the frequency sensitivity of the ear, I connected
an audio oscillator to a linear gate so that a tone burst of varying duration
could be produced. I then asked my fellow graduate students to match the frequency
of an arbitrarily chosen tone by adjusting the knob of another audio oscillator
until the notes sounded the same. Students with the best musical ears could identify
the center frequency of a tone burst that eventually sounded like a "click" with
an accuracy of .
By this time it was becoming obvious (even to me)
that I would be much happier as an experimentalist and I told my advisor. He agreed
and started me on a beta-decay experiment looking for "second-class currents",
but after a year of building, we abandoned it to measure the Lamb shift in high-Z
hydrogen-like ions. In 1974, Claude and Marie Bouchiat published their proposal
to look for parity non-conserving effects in atomic transitions. The unified theory
of weak and electromagnetic interactions suggested by Weinberg, Salam and Glashow
postulated a neutral mediator of the weak force in addition to the known charged
forces. Such an interaction would manifest itself as a very slight asymmetry in
the absorption of left and right circularly polarized light in a magnetic dipole
transition. Gene was always drawn to work that probed the most fundamental aspects
of physics, and we were excited by the prospect that a table-top experiment could
say something decisive about high energy physics. The experiment needed a state-of-the-art
laser and my advisor knew nothing about lasers. I brashly told him not to worry;
I would build it and we would be up and running in no time.
This
work was tremendously exciting and the world was definitely watching us. Steven
Weinberg would call my advisor every few months, hoping to hear news of a parity
violating effect. Dave Jackson, a high energy theorist, and I would sometimes
meet at the university swimming pool. During several of these encounters, he squinted
at me and tersely asked, "Got a number yet?" The unspoken message was, "How dare
you swim when there is important work to be done!"
Midway into the
experiment, I told my advisor that I had suffered enough as a graduate student
so he elevated me to post-doc status. Two years later, we and three graduate students
published our first results. Unfortunately, we were scooped: a few months earlier,
a beautiful high energy experiment at the Stanford Linear Collider had seen convincing
evidence of neutral weak interactions between electrons and quarks. Nevertheless,
I was offered a job as assistant professor at Berkeley in the spring of 1978.
I had spent all of my graduate and postdoctoral days at Berkeley and the
faculty was concerned about inbreeding. As a solution, they hired me but also
would permit me to take an immediate leave of absence before starting my own group
at Berkeley. I loved Berkeley, but realized that I had a narrow view of science
and saw this as a wonderful opportunity to broaden myself.
A
Random Walk in Science at Bell Labs
I joined Bell Laboratories in the
fall of 1978. I was one of roughly two dozen brash, young scientists that were
hired within a two year period. We felt like the "Chosen Ones", with no obligation
to do anything except the research we loved best. The joy and excitement of doing
science permeated the halls. The cramped labs and office cubicles forced us to
interact with each other and follow each others' progress. The animated discussions
were common during and after seminars and at lunch and continued on the tennis
courts and at parties. The atmosphere was too electric to abandon, 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.
Bell Labs management
supplied us with funding, shielded us from extraneous bureaucracy, and urged us
not to be satisfied with doing merely "good science." My department head, Peter
Eisenberger, told me to spend my first six months in the library and talk to people
before deciding what to do. A year later during a performance review, he chided
me not to be content with anything less than "starting a new field". I responded
that I would be more than happy to do that, but needed a hint as to what
new field he had in mind.
I spent the first year at Bell writing
a paper reviewing the current status of x-ray microscopy and started an experiment
on energy transfer in ruby with Hyatt Gibbs and Sam McCall. I also began planning
the experiment on the optical spectroscopy of positronium. Positronium, an atom
made up of an electron and its anti-particle, was considered the most basic of
all atoms, and a precise measurement of its energy levels was a long standing
goal ever since the atom was discovered in 1950. The problem was that the atoms
would annihilate into gamma rays after only 140x10-9 seconds, and it
was impossible to produce enough of them at any given time. When I started the
experiment, 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, but in the end, he helped me solve the laser and metrology
problems while I helped him with his positrons. We finally managed to observe
a signal working with only ~4 atoms per laser pulse! Two years later and with
20 atoms per pulse, we refined our methods and obtained one of the most accurate
measurements of quantum electrodynamic corrections to an atomic system.
In the fall of 1983, I became head of the Quantum Electronics Research
Department and moved to another branch of Bell Labs at Holmdel, New Jersey. By
then my research interests had broadened, and I was using picosecond laser techniques
to look at excitons as a potential system for observing metal-insulator transitions
and Anderson localization. With this apparatus, I accidentally discovered a counter-intuitive
pulse-propagation effect. I was also planning to enter surface science by constructing
a novel electron spectrometer based on threshold ionization of atoms that could
potentially increase the energy resolution by more than an order of magnitude.
While designing the electron spectrometer, I began talking informally with
Art Ashkin, a colleague at Holmdel. Art had a dream to trap atoms with light,
but the management stopped the work four years ago. An important experiment had
demonstrated the dipole force, but the experimenters had reached an impasse. Over
the next few months, I began to realize the way to hold onto atoms with light
was to first get them very cold. Laser cooling was going to make possible all
of Art Ashkin's dreams plus a lot more. I promptly dropped most of my other experiments
and with Leo Holberg, my new post-doc, and my technician, Alex Cable, began our
laser cooling experiment. This brings me to the beginning of our work in laser
cooling and trapping of atoms and the subject of my Nobel Lecture.
Stanford
and the future
Life at Bell Labs, like Mary Poppins, was "practically
perfect in every way". However, in 1987, I decided to leave my cozy ivory tower.
Ted Hänsch had left Stanford to become co-director of the Max Planck Institute
for Quantum Optics and I was recruited to replace him. Within a few months, I
also received offers from Berkeley and Harvard, and I thought the offers were
as good as they were ever going to be. 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 such as fleshing out the details of
polarization gradient cooling, the demonstration of the atomic fountain clock,
and the development of atom interferometers and a new method of laser cooling
based on Raman pulses was done at Stanford with my students as collaborators.
While still continuing in laser cooling and trapping of atoms, I have recently
ventured into polymer physics and biology. In 1986, Ashkin showed that the first
optical atom trap demonstrated at Bell Labs also worked on tiny glass spheres
embedded in water. A year after I came to Stanford, I set about to manipulate
individual DNA molecules with the so-called "optical tweezers" by attaching micron-sized
polystyrene spheres to the ends of the molecule. My idea was to use two optical
tweezers introduced into an optical microscope to grab the plastic handles glued
to the ends of the molecule. Steve Kron, an M.D./Ph.D. student in the medical
school, introduced me to molecular biology in the evenings. By 1990, we could
see an image of a single, fluorescently labeled DNA molecule in real time as we
stretched it out in water. My students improved upon our first attempts after
they discovered our initial protocol demanded luck as a major ingredient. Using
our new ability to simultaneously visualize and manipulate individual molecules
of DNA, my group began to answer polymer dynamics questions that have persisted
for decades. Even more thrilling, we discovered something new in the last year:
identical molecules in the same initial state will choose several distinct pathways
to a new equilibrium state. This "molecular individualism" was never anticipated
in previous polymer dynamics theories or simulations.
I have been
at Stanford for ten and a half years. 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.
From Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel
Prizes 1997, Editor Tore Frängsmyr, [Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 1998
This
autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and later published
in the book series Les Prix Nobel/Nobel Lectures. The information
is sometimes updated with an addendum submitted by the Laureate. To cite this
document, always state the source as shown above.
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