True Genius: The life and science of John Bardeen by Lillian Hoddeson and Vicki Daitch, Joseph Henry Press, $27.95, ISBN 0309084083 Reviewed by Antony Anderson
JOHN BARDEEN was frying eggs one morning when he heard that Walter Brattain, William Shockley and he had won the 1956 Nobel Prize for Physics for inventing the transistor in 1947. He dropped the frying pan. At the time, he was developing a theory for superconductivity with Leon Cooper and John Schrieffer at the University of Illinois– a far more interesting topic, he thought, and something that was really worthy of a Nobel prize.
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