Growing up in the woods of rural Oregon, Carl Wieman spent much time alone, pursuing interests that might have led him into a career as a writer or a professional chess player rather than a scientist. But as an undergraduate at MIT, he discovered his life-long love of building things, answering real questions, and solving real problems in the laboratory.

Wieman’s career has benefited from his ability to focus on the right topic at the right time. When color-adjustable lasers became available, Wieman envisioned the advances these less complicated and less expensive lasers could facilitate in physics and used the new lasers to study parity violation in atoms. This work eventually led to the 2001 Nobel Prize in physics "for the achievement of Bose-Einstein condensation in dilute gases of alkali atoms, and for early fundamental studies of the properties of the condensates."

Carl Wieman is a Distinguished Professor of Physics at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA) at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Aside from his landmark work in the laboratory, Wieman has been very involved in science education. He recently launched the Physics Education Technology Project, or PhET, which was funded in part with his Nobel Prize winnings.

Listen to the Interview (requires free RealPlayer software):

 Track 1: Self-Reliance in the Oregon Woods and the MIT Lab
In the relative isolation of rural Oregon, Carl Wieman had plenty of time to tinker, to devour the contents of the public library, and to play competitive tennis and chess.  Arriving at MIT on his first-ever plane trip, Wieman began to adapt to a very different culture and environment. Recognition in a special freshman seminar was an early turning point, which led to his joining the laboratory of Daniel Kleppner. Wieman’s decision to spend less time on coursework in the classroom and more time in the lab was a defining experience for him. (11 minutes)

 Track 2: Good Timing, Good Judgment
Work in the lab was absorbing enough for Wieman to stay on through the summer. Although not all the projects were interesting or successful, Wieman was honing his persistence and concentration, useful traits in an experimental scientist. The Kleppner lab began to explore color-adjustable lasers, which were becoming useful for studying atoms, enabling scientists to do things that were unrealizable before. When the senior student working on a new project left, Wieman took advantage of the opportunity to take over. It was a critical time in laser technology and the beginning of his work blasting atoms with lasers, a technology that would revolutionize atomic physics. (11 minutes)

 Track 3: Seeing the Bigger Picture
Wieman went to Stanford for his Ph.D., where the sunny climate as well as the relaxed academic atmosphere were more to his liking. After looking around, he joined Theodor H?nsch, who had made major advances in color-adjustable, tunable laser technology.  At this point, Wieman started on what turned out to be a general trend in his career—investigating the behavior of atoms to learn about the broader issues in physics. Some of this work included a laser-based test of QED (quantum electro dynamics) and other aspects of particle physics that hadn’t been tested. Still, his first love remained the study of how atoms respond to light, which he continued to pursue. (9 minutes)

 Track 4: Parity Spins Off
Moving from Stanford to the University of Michigan, Wieman began to study parity violation in atoms, which involves their “handedness” or lack of symmetry. Blasting the atoms just right and measuring them carefully makes it possible to change their state. His work on parity violation went on for more than 15 years, continuously improving on what others had done. Wieman describes his strength as a scientist as being good at figuring out how to put the big ideas of others into experiments that will measure and test them.

At the University of Colorado, his work on Bose-Einstein condensation was something of a spinoff from parity violation. Looking for alternatives to large, expensive lasers, he found that a simple diode laser, like those found in CD players, worked well for the last generation of the parity violation experiments. It was also excellent for cooling atoms for laser trapping, a field in which much important work was going on. Wieman studied the behavior of these dense, cooled atoms, and when he was confident that he knew enough about them, decided to tackle Bose-Einstein condensation. (10 minutes)

 Track 5: From Fuzzy Round Blob to Shark’s Fin
Einstein proposed Bose-Einstein condensation in 1924. If one could cool a gas enough and control several factors (e.g., its wanting to turn into ice), in theory the atoms would collapse into a single quantum state. In the 1970s and 1980s, people were inspired to try this, and Wieman benefited from their struggles and failures as he took a completely different approach, using laser-cooled atoms.  Until it actually happened, there was no way to know if creating a Bose-Einstein condensate was possible. After five years of work on the cooling process, the condensate showed up very dramatically on a June day in 1995. It was an exciting moment for Wieman and his lab colleagues to witness this new form of matter. (7 minutes)

 Track 6: Making an Impact on How People Learn
Following his success with creating the Bose-Einstein condensate, Wieman continues to explore its properties and what it will do under new conditions. Areas of practical application, which are years away, may include supersensitive measuring instruments and quantum computing.

Another great interest has taken much of his energy—improving science education. The experimental approach that has served him in the world of physics can be applied to understanding how people learn and developing ways to measure what they are learning. Despite the difficulties of measuring uncontrollable elements, in this context as well, being a good scientist involves designing experiments that elicit measurements that give clear conclusions. In Wieman’s view, changing the entire education system may be harder than creating the Bose-Einstein condensate, but making progress in this way is certainly possible and very important. (9 minutes)

Last Updated: 04-07-2006