David Pines
Affiliation
From the New York Times:
Although David Pines never won a Nobel Prize, he contributed advances that directly led to others’ Nobels. In 1952, for example, after joining the physics department at the University of Illinois as a postdoctoral researcher for John Bardeen, he and Bardeen began tackling the problem of how certain materials could convey electricity with virtually no resistance. They correctly calculated that as an electron passes by positively charged ions, it would pull the ions toward it and set off vibrations; other electrons would then be attracted to that clump of ions would create an attractive force between electrons. A few years after his work with Bardeen, Pines collaborated with two other physicists, Aage Niels Bohr and Ben Roy Mottelson, on a paper describing excitations in nuclei. That work led to Bohr and Mottelson’s winning the 1975 Nobel in physics, shared with another physicist, Leo James Rainwater, who had independently come up with similar ideas.
A recurring theme in Pines’s nearly 70 years of research was the notion of “emergence.” For many physicists, the aim is to discover the smallest basic building blocks of the universe and write down the simplest equations that describe the fundamental forces of nature. In an article published in 2000, Pines and Robert B. Laughlin, a professor of physics at Stanford University, argued that this pursuit was “the science of the past.” They maintained that many crucial phenomena in nature arise as the collective behavior of a large number particles, and that these phenomena could not be readily understood by extrapolating from the properties of a single particle. “The central task of theoretical physics in our time,” they wrote, “is no longer to write down the ultimate equations but rather to catalog and understand emergent behavior in its many guises, including potentially life itself.”