Science Heroes Home Page > Dr. Carl Wieman

Dr. Carl E. Wieman - Physicist

OMSI: Where did you grow up?

CW: I grew up in rural Oregon, several miles outside of the small town of Philomath in central coastal Oregon. I moved to Corvallis after seventh grade.

OMSI: As a child, did you have any hobbies, interests, or experiences that helped prepare you for success in science?

CW: Much of my youth was spent wandering around in the forests of towering Douglas fir trees. I also loved reading. Every Saturday, my family would make a long expedition to the nearest town to do the week's worth of shopping. A stop at the public library was always part of these trips. The librarians would overlook the normal five-book limit and allow me to check out a large pile of books each week that I would then eagerly devour. At the time I was quite envious that my friends had televisions while we did not, but in retrospect I am very grateful that I spent this time reading instead of watching TV.

OMSI: Please tell us about a mentor or teacher who helped to inspire your interest in science.

CW: I particularly remember my 7th-grade science teacher, Ron Tobias, who was just starting his first teaching job. Mr. Tobias did a great deal to kindle my interest in science with his enthusiasm and knowledge. I still remember his explanations (far better than any of the material from my college courses!) of the structures of atoms in the periodic table and how these structures determined the various chemical properties and molecular reactions.

OMSI: How do you feel about the current state of science education in the U.S.?

CW: Over the past several years I have become increasingly involved with trying to improve undergraduate physics education and have been balancing my time between that and my research. I have been examining alternative curricula and learning about the research in physics education as to how students do and do not learn. A particular concern has been improving how physics is taught to students who are not planning to become physicists, in the hope of one day making physics understandable, useful, and interesting to a large fraction of the population. My efforts have ranged from working with national organizations pursuing widespread change in undergraduate physics education to developing useful innovations in the individual courses that I teach.

OMSI: What do you like to do in your free time?

CW: When we are not working, my wife, Sarah, and I can usually be found running or hiking on the trails of the Boulder Mountain Parks. We can also occasionally (but not frequently enough) be found at our house on the central Oregon coast.

OMSI: As a student, did you participate in a science fair? If so, please tell us about your project, and your experience participating in the fair.

CW: Since I lived way out in the woods when I was young, the science fair was not a very big thing so I did not participate much. I do remember doing one project on the reflection of light from glass, but all I can remember is building the apparatus with my father. I do not remember how it did in the fair.

OMSI: Did you have to overcome any obstacles on your path to becoming a professional scientist?

CW: My high school grades, although not outstanding, were good enough to get me accepted into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). I suspect my admission was considerably helped by their being intrigued to have a student who had spent much of his life in the wilds of Oregon. As one might imagine, going from the woods of Oregon to MIT was quite a culture shock. I did not do particularly well in classes my freshman year.

OMSI: Who were the people you looked up to as heroes in your field?

CW: I have never spent much time thinking about "heroes", but perhaps Thomas Edison and Benjamin Franklin were the closest to being "heroes" to me. I have been interested in many successful people in order to understand what characteristics made them successful, and how I might use that knowledge to improve myself.

OMSI: Do you have any advice for students who are interested in pursuing a career in science?

CW: My undergraduate experience has always left me deeply suspicious of the claims of those who say a student cannot become a physicist without being required to take courses covering a whole list of specific topics. My education as a physicist came largely from interactions with scientists and students while working in the university lab. I also spent much time in physics discussions with an informal seminar group (the "physics family") at MIT. In spite of (or because of) this unorthodox education, I ended up far more enthusiastic about physics than most of my classmates, as well as having a much better grasp of many basic concepts such as quantum mechanics. Of course I was considerably weaker in the formal solving of problems, and I still have not learned much of the standard material of the undergraduate curriculum. However, when I needed to know some material, I was completely comfortable with going out and learning it myself in a way that I discovered was not typical for my classmates. I have had a pretty successful career in optics and atomic physics without having a course in either, for example. So perhaps if more students learned physics in the haphazard way that I did, many more of them might turn out as motivated and successful as I have been.

OMSI: When did you realize that you wanted to be a physicist?

CW: Although I had a general interest in physics at least since seventh grade, particularly the behavior of light and atoms, I was not totally convinced when I started at MIT that I wanted to go into physics. However, I greatly enjoyed an informal freshman seminar on physics that I had. Its casual, far-ranging discussions inspired me to work in my advisor's physics lab that summer, which solidified the direction of my career.

OMSI: Please tell us about your educational background.

CW: I went to primary school at a tiny rural school that had expanded from one to three rooms shortly before I enrolled. For the seventh grade I had to take the much longer bus ride to the small town of Philomath. Before going into eighth grade my parents moved to Corvallis, home of Oregon State University so that my siblings and I could both avoid the long bus rides and take advantage of the better school system. I became close friends with a boy whose father was a Professor of Mathematics at the university. One summer he gave my friend and I our own private course in geometry. It was a rewarding and eye-opening experience to get a glimpse of the richness of mathematics, even elementary geometry, as viewed by a true mathematician. And of course, at that age, I did not realize there was anything unusual about a University professor spending a few hours each day to provide personal instruction to two fourteen year olds. After high school, I attended MIT and graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in physics in 1973. I received a Ph.D. in physics from Stanford University in 1977. In 1997, I received an honorary doctorate from the University of Chicago.

OMSI: Please tell us about the research and work you have done as a physicist.

CW: In the 1980's I became interested in using laser light for cooling and trapping atoms. I pioneered the use of semi-conductor diode lasers for this purpose. This provided a means to trap atoms using only inexpensive diode lasers and a small glass cell, which was a dramatic advance towards making laser trapping a simple and widely useable technology. To me personally, this reduction in the cost and complication offered the opportunity to explore a variety of speculative directions involving laser cooled atoms with relatively little risk, since the cost and effort was now quite modest. One such quick experiment was to switch the laser cooled and trapped atoms to a magnetic trap in order to avoid the limits we had discovered were imposed by the photons in the optical trap. This worked so easily and so well - we obtained trapped atoms about 100 times colder than had been achieved previously, with a corresponding enhancement in phase space density - that it inspired me to pursue goals grander than just better trapping and cooling technology.

Working with Eric Cornell in 1990, we began developing techniques to cool atoms to a few billionths of a degree above absolute zero. This work allowed us to create a new form of matter that was originally predicted by Bose and Einstein, known as Bose-Einstein condensate, or BEC. Our work earned the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001. BEC research has now become an important field in physics worldwide. The BEC occurs when atoms are cooled to almost absolute zero. They then merge their identity, allowing a group of them to, in some respects, behave like one giant atom. The discovery could have many applications.

Read more about the Bose-Einstein Condensate.

OMSI: How does the research / work you do effect people's everyday lives?

CW: The discovery of the Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) may bring revolutionary applications in such fields as precision measurement and nanotechnology. Freezing matter into a new state could aid in developing smaller and faster electronics. It is the atom analogue of laser light, and just as laser light is useful because it can be so well controlled, the atoms in a BEC can also be controlled extraordinarily well, which should make it useful. However, we are still just learning about the strange and interesting behavior of this exotic material, so applications are quite a ways off in the future.

OMSI: Does your work or research require you to travel?

CW: Yes, I travel quite a lot to speak at conferences and colleges and to attend meetings of scientific and educational advisory boards around the world.

OMSI: What do you like most about your work?

CW: I like that there are very few hidden mysteries in nature or things that I have to just accept on faith because someone claims that they are true. I know that pretty much everything I encounter in nature, whether it is how a microwave oven works or why the sun produces light, I can understand and even test that my understanding is correct if I want to.

Also, it is exciting to see something in the lab that no one has ever seen before, or to have some insight on how nature behaves that no one realized before. What makes this special is knowing that this knowledge and understanding that I created will become a little part of the body of scientific knowledge that will be passed on to countless future generations of people. It is a lot like creating a piece of art.

OMSI: Is there a scientific issue or topic outside of your immediate field that you are particularly interested in?

CW: I am very interested in the general issue of science education. How can we do a better job of making science understandable, interesting, and relevant to people? How can we get more people to appreciate and use the power of a scientific approach to analyzing and solving problems?