William Shockley
William Bradford Shockley ( born February 13, 1910 in London, † August 12, 1989 at Stanford ) was an American physicist and Nobel laureate.
Life
William Shockley was born on 13 February 1910 as a son of the mountain engineer William Hillman Shockley and his wife Mary, born in Bradford in London. After the family had moved again in 1913 to the United States, he made his training in California and received in 1932 his Bachelor of Science (BS ) from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech ). He received his doctorate in 1936 at John C. Slater at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on the structure of the energy bands in sodium chloride. He then went to the Bell Telephone Laboratories, where he worked until the short interruptions until 1955, for example, in the group of Clinton Davisson. From 1945 he headed the semiconductor group with the chemist Stanley Morgan. Among the members were John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, physicist Gerald Pearson, chemist Robert Gibney and electronics expert Hilbert Moore. He was in 1946 a visiting professor at Princeton University and in 1954 at the California Institute of Technology. In 1954/55 he was deputy for one year director of the Weapon Systems Evaluation Group of the U.S. Department of Defense.
After divorcing Jean, born 1954 Bailey, with whom he had three children, he married Emmy Lanning. In 1955 he founded the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, a new division of Beckman Instruments in Mountain View (California ) to develop there the new transistor and other semiconductor components and produce. His company put on outstanding scientists and engineers, but also came into conflict with the often difficult Shockley, making it 1957 to the departure of leading scientists ( Traitorous Eight ) came who founded Fairchild Semiconductor.
Shockley was from 1951 Member of the Scientific Advisory Staff of the U.S. Army and in 1958 the U.S. Air Force. He was appointed in 1962 in the scientific advisory board of the U.S. president. He was appointed in 1963 to Alexander M. Poniatoff professor of engineering at Stanford University.
In 1989, he died of prostate cancer. The Shockley equation describing the current - voltage characteristics of semiconductor diodes, is named after him.
Work
Shockley was concerned with the energy bands of solids, with alloys, the theory of vacuum tubes, with theories of dislocations and grain boundaries, with ferromagnetic domains and photoelectrons in silver chloride. After the development of the transistor ( just before Christmas 1947), he dealt with the various aspects of transistor physics. In addition, he conducted operations research on the influence of the content to individual productivity in research laboratories.
Shockley was awarded in 1956 together with Walter H. Brattain and John Bardeen received the Nobel Prize in Physics "for their research on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect".
Employment with psychology and genetics
After 1963, Shockley was dedicated, although he had enjoyed no training in psychology, the study of correlations between race and intelligence, as well as topics related to eugenics. He was financially assisted by the Pioneer Fund (but unknown amount ), who made himself among others, the promotion of research on heredity and eugenics to the task.
Shockley saw in the larger number of children of persons with a lower level of education a threat to the future of the United States. He pointed out that according to the U.S. Census from 1970 unqualifizerte White had an average of 3.7 children, qualified whites, however, only 2.3. Under the black population the ratio was an average of 5.4 to 1.9 children. As he looked at intelligence as hereditary, suspected Shockley, the total population could lose intelligence on average. Also, are, according to Shockley, Colored genetically less intelligent than whites, but today there is a lack of desire to touch the ( so Shockley ) " Negro problem". Therefore, he predicted a reduction in the viability of the U.S. relative to other nations, which he named with the term Dysgenik. He called for the sterilization subsidy for people with a lower IQ than 100, and the enhanced reproductive Smart. His theses were by other researchers, such as Joshua Lederberg, as erroneous, pseudo-scientific racist and criticized. By contrast, other members of the Pioneer Fund, he received praise for his work. In the 1980 Shockley to spread on the ground his superior genes donated his sperm to a sperm bank company.
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