authorDiscover the Best Books Written by Robert B. Laughlin
Robert Betts Laughlin is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Stanford University. Along with Horst L. Störmer of Columbia University and Daniel C. Tsui of Princeton University, he was awarded a share of the 1998 Nobel Prize in physics for their explanation of the fractional quantum Hall effect.
In 1983, Laughlin was the first to provide a many-body wave function, now known as the Laughlin wavefunction, for the fractional quantum hall effect, which was able to explain the fractionalized charge observed in experiments correctly. This state has since been interpreted as the integer quantum Hall effect of the composite fermion.
His 2017 paper, "Pumped thermal grid storage with heat exchange," inspired Project Malta at Google X and, subsequently, Malta inc. Laughlin was born in Visalia, California. He earned a B.A. in mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1972 and his Ph.D. in physics in 1979 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Between 2004 and 2006, he served as the president of KAIST in Daejeon, South Korea.
Laughlin published a book entitled A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down in 2005. The book argues for emergence as a replacement for reductionism and general commentary on hot-topic issues.
