Career Planning in Science – Dreaming Allowed?
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:13
It's a great pleasure to introduce Professor Georg Bednorz,
00:20
who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1987. And he doesn't need any further introduction, so we'll jump right into the topic, which is not superconductivity, but career planning. And actually, to see the words career planning and dreaming
00:44
in the same sentence is very inspiring. And it's rather listening to an inspirational talk than seeking advice, because the advice you probably are the best individuals to give your own advice to, you're best supposed to do it,
01:03
but probably hearing a story and decisions made and risks taken will be very fruitful for you when pursuing your career. Please enjoy the talk. I'm Laura Sprechmann. I'm the CEO of Nobel Media, which is one of the outreach entities within the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm.
01:24
It's wonderful to be here in Lindau as a guest. Professor Bednorz. Good morning, everybody. I hope you all recovered from the terrific evening yesterday. And let's talk about career planning in science
01:43
and whether it's allowed to dream or not. So it's rarely the case that the start to a life as a scientist will take a straight path. Sometimes early decisions will need to be revised. While searching for a suitable topic already,
02:04
for a suitable direction, it's, however, encouraging to see that even in some established fields, unbiased and unconventional thinking is appropriate and can lead to tremendous changes and a strong impact.
02:21
When I was asked to talk about my career here, to give an Agora talk, I thought it might be appropriate to share my own experience with you by describing important encounters in my life and decisive circumstances which led to our success.
02:47
Well, let's start with the release to freedom at the university. The first question I asked myself was, what did I take along from my high school times?
03:00
Well, the first was the interest for science and the excitement, which had been preserved by my chemistry teacher, not by my physics teacher, because I abandoned physics during my high school time. And it was also the desire to create and to do experiments with sometimes surprising results,
03:24
which was encouraged by my teacher in arts. I think these were very important experiences. So full expectations, I started to study chemistry, while the first year was a real disaster.
03:43
So it was a hard landing. I came back to earth. Why? I didn't pass the first examinations. So I decided to look around for something different. Science was a given goal, but what to do next?
04:04
So while looking around, I stumbled over a small institute where people were teaching mineralogy. What is mineralogy? That was my question. Mineralogy, I learned, was divided in two disciplines.
04:25
Like one discipline was geology, the other discipline was crystallography. So crystallography was something I was aiming at. Crystallography was teaching chemistry,
04:45
more intense like physicists would learn. It was teaching physics, more intense like chemists would learn. So this was my soft approach back to chemistry and also to physics.
05:02
Now I was also enjoying these excursions. You see the picture and you see me in the center, keeping my eyes open for the jewelry, which we were looking for in the mass of a quark,
05:23
a quire, between all these rocks. But don't misinterpret this picture. I had also some eyes for young ladies. It doesn't look like, but this young girl became my wife later.
05:50
So we were all enjoying geology and the excursions while doing chemistry and physics as a main activity. And we were also somehow losing fear to dive into the dark.
06:05
To dive into the darkness, here it was the adventure, to spend one day in a coal mine. So it was really fun to do chemistry and physics and geology.
06:21
There came a situation where I acted according to the advice of Alexander Graham Bell. I didn't know him, but apparently I made the right decision, which he advised many years ago.
06:41
So don't continue forever on the public road, going where others have already gone. Or leave the beaten track and dive into the woods. So I was asked, somehow I was lucky, being asked after two years of doing crystallography,
07:02
whether I would be willing to go abroad, to go to Switzerland and join the IBM Research Laboratory in Zurich. So I started to widen my horizon from Münster and its Lake A
07:27
to the Lake of Zurich. So this was quite an adventure. I widened the horizon and started a new adventure,
07:43
a new country, a new environment in a real industrial research lab. This is the view of the research lab in the suburbs of Zurich, where the center part here is the original part,
08:04
which I met in 1972, and the rest is being built in the following years. This was a remarkable laboratory. This person, Alex Müller, joined the laboratory already in 1663,
08:25
so 10 years earlier, and was head of the physics department. The physics department has set its goal for research, to produce important scientific results of high quality,
08:42
in fundamental areas, and or of importance for IBM and its activities. He brought these compounds here, we see the structure of perovskites, which should play an important role in the further development of the laboratory,
09:03
and also the personal development. As a summer student, I was entering a scientific gold mine, studying the physics and chemistry of oxides. Fairly soon, I was given the control over a powerful generator,
09:20
and operating it for the crystal growth process. This was the first crystal I was growing with this machine, after I had several failures. This powerful generator was powerful enough to melt oxides at very high temperature.
09:48
For melting these oxides, you need crucibles made of platinum. Very expensive. And when I was impatient, it happened once, that I cranked up the power too high,
10:02
and in addition to melt the oxide powder, I melted the platinum crucible. So this was a disaster, because this was a very expensive material. The platinum crucible was something like $10,000.
10:22
It was a disaster, but I was lucky. My supervisor did it two times earlier. So he was impatient, and he wanted to start the melting process prior to the coffee break, which was a very important interruption of the day.
10:45
So he killed the crucible twice, and after that I was able to do it as well. I was soon integrated into the family. Here we have a family party.
11:00
You see me here with a trumpet, playing in the brass band. I enjoyed the laboratory culture and its spirit. So I was integrated, as I said, after a couple of weeks. But after three months, I had to leave again. So this was a limited stay. Back at the University of Munster, I started to dream about continuing this interaction.
11:26
So I was lucky enough that in the following year, I was invited for another four months. And even one year later, they asked me whether I would perform the experimental part of my diploma work there.
11:43
This was a very exciting time, which suddenly ended. Because after six months, I got a note from the Immigration Department. The request to extend this stay by three months was rejected.
12:02
And I had to terminate the activities and leave the country on January 22, 1975, at the latest. So back to Munster. I finished my Master's thesis and was waiting because in the meantime, somebody asked me,
12:28
somebody that was my supervisor in the future, Supervisor Alex Müller, asked me to join him for a PhD. Plan B was not to join the IBM Research Lab, but the Solid-State Physics Lab at the ETH in Zurich.
12:47
But still connected to the Zurich Lab because they were interested in what I was producing at the Physics Institute at the ETH. And knowing about these crystals, there was a young researcher, Gerb Binnick, who had the idea to dope this strontium titanate,
13:10
one of the periscopes we were working with, with niobium, to make the strontium titanate, which was a superconductor at low temperatures, 0.3 Kelvin,
13:21
dope it, increase the carrier density, and achieve higher TCs. That was my first encounter with superconductivity. We indeed could increase the temperature, the transition temperature, in niobium doped strontium titanate by 300%.
13:43
But from 0.3, a raise of 300% would bring us to 1.2. It's nothing. By further doping, we could even not further increase the TC, but TC dropped as it is observed nowadays in the high-TC superconductors as well.
14:07
Gerb was disappointed, and so was I. And he started instead with a work which is now known as a scanning tunnel microscope.
14:23
He was developing the microscope with Heinrich Rohrer and was skipping the superconductivity effort. Meanwhile, in 1982, I joined IBM as a researcher. So my task was to produce thin films of oxides by sputtered deposition,
14:46
and one of my managers had the idea we could combine the STM and the deposition process in order to study the early stages of film formation.
15:02
This was a very good idea. Nowadays, many people are doing this. It's a standard experiment. But at that time, the STM was not an analytical tool. It was still in the development. So the project was not suited to create satisfaction on the side of my management,
15:22
and also I was not satisfied with the project. And you know what happens if a manager is not satisfied with your work? Well, I was feeling unsecure, so I was looking around for another activity. Alex Müller approached me. He meanwhile had done some studies on superconductivity
15:46
and asked me whether I would join him for the search for high-temperature superconductors in oxides. This time as a researcher was not always like this.
16:02
I mentioned I was in a situation where I felt very unsecure. You may see this in the upper right picture. This changed when I decided to work with Alex Müller and to start with a new project.
16:21
What encouraged me? It was, first of all, the experience with the superconductivity in Strontium Titanate, the collaboration with Binik, but also that next door there was a theoretician, Tony Schneider, who made studies and came up with the results that if hydrogen could be made metallic under high pressures,
16:49
it could be superconducting at 200 Kelvin even, but under immense pressures. Somebody was talking about high-TC superconductivity except ourselves.
17:04
The quest for higher-temperature transition temperatures was dominated by a strong paradigm. You see the development in metals and alloys, and after a certain period of time in the 70s, this was somehow the end which was expected.
17:34
Superconductivity was no longer considered as a promising field of research. So that was the situation when we decided to start our research.
17:45
We were not very encouraged by Bernd Matthias, who was one of the great researchers who made many discoveries in the field of superconductivity, but he said present theoretical attempts to raise superconducting transition temperatures
18:03
are the opium in the real world of superconductivity. These speculations will persist unless it is accepted that there is no way beyond 21 or 23 Kelvin.
18:20
The others are the scientific opium addicts dreaming and reading one another's absurdities in the blue haze. Alex Miller and I, we decided to form a team connected by a shared dream. We started an adventurous project on the road towards uncertainty.
18:46
High-temperature superconductivity was our dream, and the idea was a very simple model. The idea was based on the Jahn-Teller effect. We speculated that an electron transfer in a system like in our periscope oxide,
19:08
which are formed by oxygen octahedra and in the center you have a transition metal ion, that materials with such an arrangement of atoms would show lattice vibrations
19:28
when an electron transfer from one position to the other would take place. So we were expecting to see effects like that in metallic oxides,
19:43
and copper and nickel were the candidates for the Jahn-Teller center in the oxygen octahedra. I make a short remark about the time of three years where there was no sign of success.
20:04
After a period of, let's say, growing doubts and disappointments, I went to the library to browse through a materials research bulletin,
20:21
and I found an article. And here I would like to cite the discovery of vitamin C, who says how he sees some discovery will happen.
20:42
Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everybody else, but thinking a different. Or a discovery is said to be an accident meeting a prepared mind. And this is exactly what happened, and you need also some luck. I mentioned that I did some browsing in the literature,
21:04
and here was a report which met a prepared mind. It was a compound like a perovskite. The only difference which I saw from the formula is the copper is the center of the octahedra,
21:22
and some modifications on the side next to it, namely by changing barium and lanthanum ratios, would change the valency in the center of the octahedra and would provide the Jahn-Teller effect on one of the octahedra.
21:44
And if we do this statistically, then we would expect an increased electron-phonon interaction, as it was found to be the responsible mechanism for the classical superconductors.
22:02
After three years, and now I'm finishing, after three years at the 75th anniversary of the discovery of superconductivity by Comerling Onnes, there was a breakthrough. We had a sudden increase in the TC by more than 50%
22:22
from 23 Kelvin to 35 or even 40 in a compound which was layered, was perovskite-related, and was showing the Meissner effect, which we could show later on.
22:44
And this was the start of a worldwide rally, which culminated in the discovery of superconductivity above liquid nitrogen temperature. The recipe which we proposed was slightly modified
23:01
in all the following materials where new structures had been discovered, but the copper oxide polyhedra was the essential part and that was brought from the perovskite work. So after 75 years, a dream has turned into reality
23:22
and has changed the life of many scientists worldwide. And hopefully also will soon have an impact on our everyday life. And this is another story what came out from the high TC superconductivity in the last 30 years. But what we should take home as a message is what has been stated by Justus Liebeck, a German chemist.
23:44
He says, Many breakthroughs in science and technology are achieved by people who regard nothing as impossible. So the lesson which I learned was, already as a summer student, when I started my scientific career,
24:03
get inspired by looking at barriers or limits of technology, think different and think unconventional. Thank you.
24:22
Thank you so much for this talk and these very inspiring last words, not least. You were awarded your Nobel Prize more than 30 years ago and right after the big breakthrough, if we were to look 40 years back
24:43
and you would look the Georg of that time in the face, what would you tell him in terms of career and dreams? Don't give up if you are failing, if you are making mistakes.
25:02
I made a lot of mistakes in my career and I would say try to learn from these mistakes. Any mistake will bring you further if you analyze and you take the message which is given by this experiment.
25:24
And, yeah, that's it. All right, thank you. Well, I'm more than happy to open the floor for questions. Please raise your hands. There are two mics also in the back, but you can just stay where you are.
25:40
I see you raised hands over there. Yeah, please go ahead. You might use the microphone. Okay, perfect. Thank you for your personal story. Since you are working close with the industry, I would like to ask you what would be your advice to change the mindset of the academic environment, especially the senior scientists, of seeing leaving the academia as failing in your career path,
26:05
especially when the success rate of getting a full professorship nowadays is about 5%. Well, I can say that I felt in this environment,
26:24
I always felt like being in academia. We had a lot of interactions with high schools and we had a lot of students performing their master thesis or their PhD thesis. There is not so much space also for physicists
26:42
in big industrial research laboratories like making fundamental research. It's hard to answer. I'm just talking about the mindset of telling that we are failing when we are leaving academia.
27:03
Mindset that professors very often are telling us that when you are leaving, you are not successful and we are seeing it as we are failing, leaving the academic environment and we are moving to industry or alternative, non-really alternative career paths.
27:34
Okay, another question.
28:06
Sorry to interrupt so that everybody hears the question. So what's your advice for people working in areas that face a lot of criticism like it was the case in Europe? This is a normal process that scientific discussions are,
28:21
when they are fair, they have to be accepted. This is a normal process in doing scientific work and presenting it to colleagues and maybe also competitors. We can be happy that when we are dealing with nature,
28:41
we have nature as a very fair referee and if we are doing a proper experiment and we are doing the right interpretation, nature is telling us you are right. Not the referee of a journal. So you can be sure that if you are right and if you do proper work, you will survive
29:04
and you will be successful. Let's see, more hands. Yeah, I see one over there. Please go ahead. Yeah, with the glasses.
29:35
Sorry, just to repeat the question. So thinking unconventionally is one thing, but how do you produce a paper and also get the funding
29:42
for actually pursuing your unconventional idea? The first thing I need to tell you is when we started this project, we had an agreement between the two of us, Alex Miller and myself,
30:01
that we would not talk about it to anybody else because we were afraid that we would lose our reputation as a serious scientist because it was so unconventional, this idea. Well, if you have these ideas, it's not necessary that you get a lot of money
30:22
and that you write a proposal. We were in the lucky situation that Alex Miller was IBM fellow. At that time, he could do what he wanted. I was a junior researcher. I had to have a basic project where I had solid ground under my feet,
30:42
a solid ground where I could present my work even to the director of research who came once a year to check what we were doing. So we were lucky also that the class of materials was in the oxide,
31:01
so all the equipment was there. So it was only a little money which we needed to do our work. Sometimes you have to find a way to get some spare time to do the testing of new ideas, and you have to count.
31:21
That's a risk, and you have to take into account that you are risking time, in the worst case, time for nothing when your idea doesn't work. So it's a question of trial and error.
31:41
Any more hands? Yes, you in the front. After the time with the superconductivity, there were some ideas which I tested.
32:00
I could afford, after the Nobel Prize, to go into another direction. I went back to the oxides again, and there I was somehow triggered by a problem, by a technical problem in the industry,
32:22
in the semiconductor industry. It was an approach to fabricate DRAM, dynamic random-access memories, which were non-volatile, but one step earlier, there was an attempt to have high dielectric constant materials
32:43
in these DRAMs. And it came to the point that the industry changed the design, and suddenly the perovskites became candidates. Perovskites, oxides with high dielectric constant,
33:01
like 300 instead of 4 in silicon oxide, which was a standard material. So strontium titanate was used as a DRAM material, and the process was such that it afforded the annealing in hydrogen. And everybody who knows the oxides
33:21
knows what happens if you anneal an oxide in hydrogen loses oxygen and gets conducting. That kills the DRAM capacitor. And I had some ideas from my earlier work at the ETH, when I did strontium titanate doping. A special doping would kill this process,
33:42
this reduction in oxygen. So I started to work on that for a time to investigate the field dependence of that. By that we discovered resistive memories and hysteresis, which was just another approach. But the story was also ended at a certain time
34:02
because there were competitive methods for non-volatile memories. Any further questions? Yes, in the middle.
34:29
This dream somehow originated during my first time as a summer student. I was so fascinated that I could,
34:41
with a minimum of knowledge, I could gain experience and could be on the same level as other people who had an academic career already behind them. So the first crystal I grew was lithium niobate,
35:02
and I was very proud of it. And I realized it was done by professional labs in the US already 10 years ago. But another approach I made was another experiment and said, oh, it's only five years ago that somebody did this.
35:22
And I got confidence that sometime maybe I'm the first. And luckily enough, it happened. On that note, being at IBM, did that change your idea paths
35:45
or your ways of seeing at research? No, I've been asked several times whether I would go to academia, to the university. After the Nobel Prize, it's easy to get the fellowship,
36:04
the IBM fellow, and then you can do what you want. I said this is something which I like. I'd like to be responsible for my career and to do what I want and guide a group
36:22
at the research laboratory to follow these ideas. Yes, in front.
36:51
No, you see, I mentioned that this way to uncertainty was only done part of my time.
37:01
So I had a very solid project which I was working on. And the only risk which I took was that I would waste time if we wouldn't have had success. Jumping forward, backward is not my advice.
37:20
I'm sorry if you understand it this way. Alright, we'll take one final question. Yes, I see a hand in the back. So would you have had a plan C?
37:45
Yeah, there was a time, I can talk about that, where that was prior to the two Nobel Prizes which came in 1986 and 1987, where the small lab was under pressure
38:03
from across the Atlantic. And there were colleagues who were afraid that we would be shut down. And I said I do my work as long as they let me do my work
38:22
and if everything goes wrong, I feel competent enough to open up a restaurant and be a cook. Oh, is there any more? We have one more minute if anybody's...
38:42
Okay, please go ahead.
39:07
I don't know whether... Do you want to repeat now? Did you hear that? Yeah, go ahead.
39:34
The amount of basic research, I would say, is pretty much reduced. Well, some of these companies which you mentioned,
39:42
or locations which you mentioned, are faded away. So the situation with IBM is such that there's still fundamental research being done on SPM microscopy, scanning probe microscopy in the field of magnetism. But as I told you, fairly reduced.
40:07
And what's a burden for the researchers is that they have to look for a certain amount of outside money financing by European Union projects and etc.
40:22
But the topics are changing. Let's say when I look back to the physics department, there were a broad spectrum of activities which was now shrinking. It's getting more to the devices.
40:40
And with the reduced demand for devices, also in the company like IBM, they are exploring new possibilities like quantum computing, wherever it will go, I don't know. But that's a strong activity at present. But there were strong activities before in history
41:02
on the superconducting switches like the Josephson project, the company spent millions and millions of dollars, and then it was terminated because of technical problems. And there will be other projects, maybe with some fundamental research aspects, but more and more applied.
41:25
Well, thank you so much for your inspiring talk and for sharing your story. And I wish you all a combination of luck, good risk-taking and big dreams. Thank you for attending. Thank you.