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At event celebrating the 100th anniversary of the first PhD awarded in the CU �Ǹ�Թ� Department of Physics, researchers reflect on how the department shaped them as scientists

Of the four Nobel laureates seated in a row Saturday afternoon, none set out to win the highest honor in science.

Instead, the goal was doing the science—for the discovery, the limit-pushing, the pursuit of answers to questions as fundamental as “How?” and “Why?”

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Nobel laureates Carl Wieland, Eric Cornell, David Wineland and John Hall

At a celebration of the first PhD awarded in the �Ǹ�Թ� Department of Physics 100 years ago, the department’s four Nobel laureates gathered to share insights into the discoveries that the award recognizes and the role that CU �Ǹ�Թ� played in their growth as scientists.

“I think of CU as my physics home,” said Carl Wieman, who shared the with CU �Ǹ�Թ� colleague Eric Cornell and Wolfgang Ketterle. “This is where I did almost all my physics research and was very successful, and I'd like to hope that I had some impact on the department. I’ve really enjoyed watching it flourish.”

Wieman, who went on to professorships at the University of British Columbia and Stanford University, came to CU �Ǹ�Թ� with ideas about tuning lasers to control and cool atoms to temperatures close to absolute zero—a fifth state of matter that Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein predicted as Bose-Einstein condensates, but Wieman and Cornell proved.

“When I first showed up here, I had a bunch of ideas that I wanted to implement, and I was a little surprised that Carl was extremely enthusiastic,” Cornell recalled. “He’d say, ‘Let's try that.’ So, that worked super well.

“Anyway, I showed up here, started a lab on my own, and for about 10 years, Carl and I basically ran a joint group. I would wander into his labs and talk to his graduate students and postdocs—and even maybe try and tell them what to do, which they maybe would or wouldn't do—and then I would go back into my own lab. And it was the same with Carl.”

And through that long-term collaboration—which can be rare in science because egos easily get in the way, Wieman said—they saw Bose-Einstein condensation in June 1995.

For John Hall, winner of the with Roy Glauber and Theodor Hänsch, the CU �Ǹ�Թ� Department of Physics has been a science home that balances scientific thinking with imagination—the envisioning of what could be.��

“This university is a magnet for great people,” Hall said. “Our students, I can’t imagine having better. They come and they work hard, they have good imaginations,” adding that his students and science colleagues have been significant factors in his lifelong joy in the work.

David Wineland, winner of the with Serge Haroche and now the Knight Research Professor at the University of Oregon, credits his time at CU �Ǹ�Թ� with allowing him to explore beyond “junior-level physics” ideas of laser cooling and delve into properties of conservation, momentum and scattering.

“I come back to this idea that this place has been very, very, very good to me,” Cornell said. “It made me as a scientist.”

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