William Bradford Shockley

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William B. Shockley, 1975

William Bradford Shockley (born February 13, 1910 in London , † August 12, 1989 in Stanford ) was an American physicist . In 1956 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics .

Life

William Shockley was born on February 13, 1910, the son of mining engineer William Hillman Shockley and his wife Mary, b. Bradford born in London. After the family moved back to the United States in 1913 , he trained in California and received his Bachelor of Science (BS) from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1932 . He received his doctorate in 1936 with John C. Slater at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on the structure of the energy bands in sodium chloride . He then went to Bell Telephone Laboratories , where he worked until 1955, except for brief interruptions. B. in Clinton Davisson's group . From 1945 he headed the semiconductor group there with the chemist Stanley Morgan . Members included John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, physicist Gerald Pearson, chemist Robert Gibney, and electronics expert Hilbert Moore. He was visiting professor at Princeton University in 1946 and at the California Institute of Technology in 1954. In 1954/55 he was Deputy Director of the Weapon Systems Evaluation Group of the US Department of Defense for one year.

After divorcing Jean, b. Bailey in 1954, with whom he had three children, he married Emmy Lanning . In 1955 he founded the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory , a new department of Beckman Instruments , in Mountain View (California) to further develop and produce the new transistor and other semiconductor components. His company attracted outstanding scientists and engineers, but they also came into conflict with the often difficult Shockley, so that in 1957 the departure of leading scientists ( Traitorous Eight ), who founded Fairchild Semiconductor .

Shockley was from 1951 a member of the scientific advisory staff of the US Army and from 1958 the US Air Force . He was appointed to the US President's Scientific Advisory Board in 1962 and was appointed Alexander M. Poniatoff Professor of Engineering at Stanford University in 1963 .

In 1989 he died of prostate cancer. The Shockley equation , which describes the current-voltage characteristic of semiconductor diodes, is named after him.

plant

Shockley dealt with the energy bands of solids, with alloys, the theory of vacuum tubes , with theories about dislocations and grain boundaries, with ferromagnetic domains and photoelectrons in silver chloride. After the development of the transistor (shortly before Christmas 1947) he dealt with the various aspects of transistor physics. In addition, he conducted Operations Research on the influence of salary on individual productivity in research laboratories.

From 1951 Shockley was a member of the National Academy of Sciences . In 1953 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Shockley was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956, together with Walter H. Brattain and John Bardeen, “for their research on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect”.

Occupation with psychology and genetics

After 1963, Shockley devoted himself, although he had received no training in psychology, to the study of connections between race and intelligence as well as topics in the field of eugenics . He was financially supported with at least $ 189,000 from the Pioneer Fund , which among other things has set itself the task of promoting research on heredity and eugenics.

Shockley saw the greater number of children among those with lower educational attainments as a threat to the future of the United States . He pointed out that, according to the American census of 1970, unskilled whites had an average of 3.7 children, while skilled whites had only 2.3. Among the black population, the ratio averaged 5.4 to 1.9 children. Considering intelligence hereditary, Shockley suggested that the general population might, on average, lose intelligence. In addition, according to Shockley, colored people are genetically less intelligent than whites, but today there is a lack of effort to touch the (according to Shockley) " Negro problem". He therefore predicted a reduction in the US's ability to survive in relation to other nations, which he called dysgenics . He called for the subsidization of sterilizations for people with an IQ lower than 100 and the increased reproduction of the smarter. His theses were supported by other researchers, e.g. B. Joshua Lederberg , criticized as flawed, pseudoscientific and racist . On the other hand, he received praise for his work from other employees of the Pioneer Fund. In the 1980s, Shockley donated his sperm to a sperm banking company on the grounds of spreading his superior genes.

Awards

  • Medal for Merit, 1946
  • Morris Leibmann Memorial Prize, Institute of Radio Engineers, 1952
  • Oliver E. Buckley Solid State Physics Prize, American Physical Society, 1953
  • Comstock Prize in Physics , National Academy of Sciences, 1953
  • Nobel Prize in Physics , 1956
  • Holley Medal, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers 1963
  • Wilhelm Exner Medal , 1963

Fonts (selection)

  • Electrons and holes in semiconductors, with applications to transistor electronics. Krieger, 1956, ISBN 0-88275-382-7
  • Mechanics. Merrill, 1966

literature

  • Roger Pearson (Ed.): Shockley on Eugenics and Race. The Application of Science to the Solution of Human Problems. Scott-Townsend, 1992, ISBN 1-878465-03-1 . (Anthology of Shockley's writings on inheritance, eugenics, and dysgenics).
  • Joel N. Shurkin: Broken Genius. The Rise and Fall of William Shockley, Creator of the Electronic Age. MacMillan, 2006, ISBN 978-0-230-55192-3 .

Web links

Commons : William Shockley  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Wolfgang Saxon: William B. Shockley, 79, Creator of Transistor and Theory on Race . In: New York Times , August 14, 1989. Retrieved August 19, 2011. 
  2. ^ William Shockley: On the Statistics of Individual Variation of Productivity in Research Laboratories . In: Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers , Volume 45, No. 3, 1957, pp. 279-290, doi : 10.1109 / JRPROC.1957.278364
  3. ^ Member Directory: W. Shockley. National Academy of Sciences, accessed December 5, 2015 (Biographical Memoir by John L. Moll).
  4. ^ Members of the American Academy. Listed by election year, 1950-1999 ( [1] ). Retrieved September 23, 2015
  5. ^ Claus-Peter Sesin: Sarrazin's dubious US sources. In: Michael Haller, Martin Niggeschmidt (eds.): The myth of the decline of intelligence. From Galton to Sarrazin: The Thinking Patterns and Mistakes in Eugenics. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2012, p. 33, ISBN 978-3-531-94341-1
  6. ↑ Joel N. Shurkin: Broken Genius. The Rise and Fall of William Shockley, Creator of the Electronic Age. , P. 214
  7. ^ William Shockley, Roger Pearson: Shockley on Eugenics and Race: The Application of Science to the Solution of Human Problems. Scott-Townsend Publishers, 1992, ISBN 1-878465-03-1 .
  8. ↑ Joel N. Shurkin: Broken Genius. The Rise and Fall of William Shockley, Creator of the Electronic Age. , P. 203
  9. ^ Epps, Edgar G: Racism, Science, and the IQ . In: Integrated Education . 11, No. 1, Jan-February 1973, pp. 35-44.
  10. ↑ Polly Morrice: The Genius Factory: Test-Tube Superbabies . In: The New York Times , July 3, 2005. Retrieved August 19, 2011. 
personal data
SURNAME Shockley, William Bradford
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist and Nobel Prize winner
DATE OF BIRTH February 13, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH August 12, 1989
Place of death Stanford, California , USA