Bulletin Spring‧Summer 1999

Steven Chu AB, Ph.D., Nobel Laureate in Physics Let us welcome back once more to the land of his forebears one of the most adventurous of experimental physicists in the world, Prof. Steven Chu. His lasers have brought not just light but precisely concentrated ligh t to what once was dark and unknown. Give n the nature o f his work, enabling us to measure more precisely than before the minuscule universe o f atoms, it is no exaggeration to say that he shares something with that visionary poet, Henry Vaughan, who, excited by the ne w sciences making headway in the seventeenth century, wrote: I saw Eternity the other night Like a great ring ofpure and endless light, All calm, as it was bright, And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years, Driv 'n by the spheres Like a vast s h a d ow moved; in which the world And all her train were hurled. In 1948, Steven Chu was born into an American Chinese family living in St. Louis, Missouri, in the United States. After graduating from the University of Rochester in physics and mathematics, he went to Berkeley, where, under the supervision of Prof. Eugene D. Commins, he gained his Ph.D. in physics from the University of California at Berkeley i n 1976. After two years as a research fellow at Berkeley, he joined Bell Laboratories i n New Jersey, later becoming head of the Quantum Electronics Research Department. In 1987, he moved back into academia as professor of physic s and applied physics at Stanford. Over the next three years he had been a Morris Loeb lecturer at Harvard, been named Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Stanford, a chair he still holds, been a special visitor to the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics in Colorado, and visiting professor at the prestigious College de France in Paris . Such things exact a price: lie was appointed chair of the Physics Department at Stanford between 1990 and 1993. Prof, Chu's work brought him the Stoddard Prize for both Physics and Mathematics at Rochester, suggesting his brilliance and potential, a promise fulfilled at home and abroa d by Chinese University Bulletin Spring • Summer 1999