Los Gatos Weekly-Times Photograph by George Sakkestad Stanford Professor Doug Osheroff shows off the low-temperature properties of liquid nitrogen, which boils at room temperature, by using it to drive a tiny steam engine. Nobel prize winner speaks at LGHS By Jeff Kearns Doug Osheroff was pretty steamed when the phone woke him up. Even though the man with the accent called him by name, he still thought it must be a wrong number. It was 2:30 a.m. But when the man said "Royal Swedish Academy" and "Congratulations," Osheroff knew what it was all about. By 3 a.m., reporters were calling from Germany, Venezuela and around the world. An hour later, a photographer was in his house, snapping pictures of him in his PJs. That's part of the story Osheroff, winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize for Physics, brought to a handful of Los Gatos High School students Nov. 30. He came down from Stanford, where he's taught for nine years, to speak as a favor to Sandy Chang, a student of his who graduated from LGHS. Chang is Osheroff's advising associate, and a sophomore who hasn't picked a major yet. Osheroff and two colleagues, David Lee and Bob Richardson, were awarded the prize for their research on superfluidity in Helium3 in 1971-72, when Osheroff was working on his doctorate at Cornell. Cooling the HE3 to within a few thousandths of a degree above absolute zero--273 below 0 Fahrenheit or 0 Kelvin, the point at which molecular activity ceases--Osheroff found that HE3 was the only substance that needs heat in order to freeze. Osheroff showed his notes from that night on the overhead projector, recorded at 2:40 a.m.--the time, he joked, at which all great discoveries are made. During his lecture, Osheroff brought out a series of demonstrations. In one, he set a brick-shaped copper plate supercooled in liquid nitrogen, and dropped a magnet shaped like a hockey puck over the steaming brick. The magnet, he said, induced circular currents that generate a magnetic field, which cause the brick and the magnet to repel each other. Osheroff also levitated a small magnet above a disc of supercooled yttrium barium copper oxide sitting in the bottom of a Styrofoam cup, by pouring -200 F liquid nitrogen on the disc. "Don't any of you try this," the Nobel Laureate exhorted. In his third demonstration, Osheroff brought out a tiny steam engine designed to run on water, which he filled with liquid nitrogen. Because the boiling point of liquid nitrogen is well below room temperature, the tiny steam engine puffed away. As the editor of his high school newspaper, Osheroff thought he heard the journalism world calling him, and still remembers an editorial about LBJ going down the road to vice-presidential obscurity. That was 1962. But when he was admitted to CalTech, everything changed. He ruled out astrophysics, he said, because he didn't just want to observe, but rather wanted to get his hands dirty, so to speak, and got involved with low-temperature physics as an undergrad. Osheroff urged the students to do what they liked, not necessarily what they thought they ought to do. "Don't decide to do something because of some lofty ideal, because if you don't enjoy the day-to-day activities, then you won't be good at it," he said. [ Back to Contents Page | Los Gatos Weekly-Times Home Page | Archives ] This article appeared in the Los Gatos Weekly-Times, December 9, 1998. ©1998 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.