His father Irving Kupchik was from Belarus and moved to the United States after the Russian Revolution in 1917. His mother Anna (née Zola) Kupchik was from Poland; she died when Leon was seven.[4] His father later changed the family's surname from Kupchick to Cooper when he remarried.[4]
Cooper first married Martha Kennedy, with whom he had two daughters.[4] In 1969, he married for a second time, to Kay Allard.
[14] He died at his home in Providence, Rhode Island, on October 23, 2024, at the age of 94.[4]
While Cooper was a postdoc in Princeton, he was approached by John Bardeen, a professor at the University of Illinois, and Bardeen's graduate student John Robert Schrieffer. Bardeen and Schrieffer were working on superconductivity, a topic which was new to Cooper but he agreed to collaborate with them. Superconductivity had been experimentally discovered in 1911, but there was no theoretical explanation for the phenomenon. Cooper moved to Illinois as a postdoc to work with Bardeen.
After a year of theoretical investigation, Cooper developed the idea of a quasiparticle composed of two bound electrons, now known as a Cooper pair. Cooper published his concept of Cooper pairs in Physical Review in September 1956.[4][15] The movement of Cooper pairs through a low-temperature metal would be almost unimpeded, producing a very low electrical resistance. After further development, Bardeen, Cooper and Schrieffer showed how this could produce superconductivity, publishing their theory in Physical Reviews in two papers during 1957.[4][16][17] This theory became known as the BCS theory, after the authors' initials, and is widely accepted as the explanation for conventional superconductivity. Bardeen, Schrieffer and Cooper were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1972 for their theory.[4]
Neuroscience
After joining Brown University, Cooper became interested in neuroscience, particularly the process of learning. In 1982, Cooper and two doctoral students, Elie Bienenstock and Paul Munro, published their theory of synaptic plasticity in The Journal of Neuroscience.[4] They estimated the weakening and strengthening of synapses that could occur without saturation of the connections. As synapses saturate, electrical connections become less effective, thereby reducing the saturation. Connections therefore oscillate between saturation and unsaturation without reaching their limits. Their theory explained how the visual cortex works and how people learn to see. It became known as the BCM theory, after the authors' initials.[4]
Cooper was the author of Science and Human Experience – a collection of essays, including previously unpublished material, on issues such as consciousness and the structure of space.
(Cambridge University Press, 2014).
Cooper also wrote an unconventional liberal-arts physics textbook, originally An Introduction to the Meaning and Structure of Physics (Harper and Row, 1968)[19] and still in print in a somewhat condensed form as Physics: Structure and Meaning (Lebanon: New Hampshire, University Press of New England, 1992).
^Cushing, James T. (1978). "Review of An Introduction to the Meaning and Structure of Physics by Leon N. Cooper". American Journal of Physics. 46 (1): 114–115. Bibcode:1978AmJPh..46..114C. doi:10.1119/1.11116.
External links
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Leon Cooper.
Leon Cooper on Nobelprize.org including the Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1972 Microscopic Quantum Interference Effects in the Theory of Superconductivity
