Cooper, Leon Neil

Cooper, Leon Neil,

1930–, American neuroscientist, b. New York City, Ph.D. Columbia, 1954. Cooper was a researcher at the Univ. of Illinois from 1955 to 1957 and at Ohio State Univ. from 1957 to 1958, when he joined the faculty at Brown, where he is now director of the Institute for Brain and Neural Systems. Cooper, John BardeenBardeen, John
, 1908–91, American physicist, b. Madison, Wis., grad. Univ. of Wisconsin (B.S. 1928, M.S. 1929), Ph.D. Princeton, 1936. He was a research physicist at the Bell Telephone Laboratories from 1945 to 1951.
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, and John Schrieffer were awarded the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physics for their jointly developed theory of superconductivitysuperconductivity,
abnormally high electrical conductivity of certain substances. The phenomenon was discovered in 1911 by Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, who found that the resistance of mercury dropped suddenly to zero at a temperature of about 4.
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, now known as the BCS Theory. Although superconductivity was first described by Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh OnnesKamerlingh Onnes, Heike
, 1853–1926, Dutch physicist. He was, from 1882, professor of physics at the Univ. of Leiden. He made important studies of the properties of helium and, in attempting to solidify it, produced a temperature within one degree of absolute zero.
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 in 1911, its underlying mechanism was not understood until the three scientists provided a complete theoretical explanation of the phenomenon in 1957.