Steven Chu

Many people may not have heard of Steven Chu. Many of you that will be reading this, may have heard of him, but don’t know much about him. Well I can assure you that he was and is a very important man. You may ask yourself, “If he’s so important, then why have I not heard of him?” After reading this paper, I hope that you have a little better understanding of who he is, and what he’s done for the world that’s made him worthy of the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Steven Chu’s father, Ju Chin Chu, made his way to the United States in 1943 so that he could continue his education at MIT.(Massachusetts Institute of Technology) He studied chemical engineering, and was later joined by Steven’s mother, Ching Chen Li, who came to the United States to study economics. In this time, China was very economically unstable which made the decision to move to the United States a wise one. After Steven’s parents had moved to the United States, they decided to start a family. They became married in 1945, and had their first child in 1946.
Steven was born in St. Louis on February 28, 1948. (Marquis Who’s Who in the World) In 1950, the family settled in Garden City, New York. Steven said, “There were only two other Chinese families in this town of 25,000, but to our parents, the determining factor was the quality of the public school system.”(Nobel Prize Autobiography Para. 2) In Steven’s family, education was highly looked upon. Out of his family of scholars, Steven became the educational “Black Sheep”. (Nobel Prize Autobiography Para. 2) When compared to his older brother, who set the record for highest cumulative average in their high school, Steven simply couldn’t compare. He was a relatively average student. “Occasionally, I would focus on a particular school project and become obsessed with, what seemed to my mother, to be trivial details instead of apportioning the time I spent on school work in a more efficient way.” (Nobel Prize Autobiography Para. 2)
Even though it seemed so, his life did not completely revolve around school. He, like many other children, got the chance to enjoy plastic model airplanes, erector sets, and eventually homemade rockets. His parents didn’t know that the money they thought was going towards school lunch actually went towards the funding of the homemade rockets he and a friend were making. He also devoted some of his time to sports. He played football, baseball, basketball, and sometimes ice hockey. He also taught himself how to pole vault by using bamboo poles that he accumulated from the local carpet store. Even though he was able to clear 8 feet by his own teaching, he did not make the track team.
On the academic side of his high school career, he took AP(advanced placement) physics and calculus his senior year. He enjoyed these classes because they were similar to his geometry course, which didn’t have many formulas to remember, but instead had basic ideas and sets of assumptions. He admired his physics teacher Thomas Miner greatly. Steven said “To this day, I remember how he introduced the subject of physics. He told us we were going to learn how to deal with very simple questions such as how a body falls due to the acceleration of gravity. Through a combination of conjecture and observations, ideas could be cast into a theory that can be tested by experiments.”(Nobel Prize Autobiography Para. 8) Personally I wish that my physics teacher in high school would have taught with the same mentality, but I guess not everyone sees physics in the same way.
Steven applied to many colleges in the fall of his senior year. But because of his standard A-average, he was rejected from the Ivy League Schools. Although he was accepted at Rochester, he still did not compare with the rest of his family. His brother attended Princeton, two cousins attended Harvard, and a third cousin attended Bryn Mawr. His younger brother got away from the family standard and avoided getting his high school diploma or any sort of scientific degree. Instead he obtained a Ph. D at age 21, and eventually went to Harvard and obtained a law degree, which led him to become a partner at a major law firm. I’m not entirely sure how he obtained the Ph. D or any sort of degree without obtaining a high school diploma. But if I could do the same, I definitely would have.
Steven’s sophomore year in college at Rochester, he became much more interested in mathematics, so he declared his majors to both mathematics and physics. His goal when choosing these majors was to become a theoretical physicist. He applied to Berkeley, Stanford, Stony Brook, and Princeton. He chose to go to Berkeley, and entered in the fall of 1970. While attending Berkeley he had spent much of his time trying to determine the deceleration of the universe with experiments that his professor Eugene Commins gave to him. He worked on this for many months, but decided for 2 of the months to take a break to tinker around in the lab. He had many “play” experiments, one of which he noticed that he could pick out the out-of-tune notes played in a fast run by a violinist. “A simple estimate suggested that the frequency accuracy, times the duration of the note, did not satisfy the uncertainty relationship . In order to test the frequency sensitivity of the ear, I connected an audio oscillator to a linear gate so that a tone burst of varying duration could be produced.” (Nobel Prize Autobiography Para. 16) Steven worked with many people. One in particular, Art Ashkin, had a dream to eventually cool and trap atoms by use of a laser. “Uncharged particles such as neutrons or atoms are manipulated by higher-order moments of the charge distribution such as the magnetic or electric dipole moments.” (Particle Trap Para. 6) This began an experiment that would be known worldwide. Eventually, Steven ended up going to Stanford to work on his world famous experiment.
This experiment that Steven, Claude Cohen, and William Phillips began is what brought them to be nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physics. In 1997, their hard work finally paid off. They had won the Nobel Prize in Physics “for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with a laser light”. They are now known worldwide for their accomplishments. While Steven still continues to trap and cool atoms, he decided to stay at Stanford where he has been working for over 2 decades. “As a scientist, he made major contributions to laser spectroscopy, analysis of positronium atoms, and studies of gaseous sodium at temperatures approaching absolute zero” (Chu, Steven(1948-) Para. 1) He has truly shown what you can do if you set your mind to it.