Douglas Osheroff
American physicist
Who was Douglas Osheroff?
Douglas Dean Osheroff (born August 1, 1945) is an American physicist known for his work in experimental condensed matter physics, in particular for his co-discovery of superfluidity in Helium-3. Osheroff is currently the J. G. Jackson and C. J. Wood Professor of Physics, emeritus, at Stanford University. Osheroff was born in Aberdeen, Washington. His father, William Osheroff, was the son of Jewish immigrants who left Russia. His mother, Bessie Anne (Ondov), a nurse, was the daughter of Slovak immigrants (her own father was a Lutheran minister) from the Felvidék, Upper Hungary, Kingdom of Hungary. Osheroff was confirmed in the Lutheran Church but he was given the chance to choose and decided not to attend any longer. He has stated "In some sense it seemed that lying in church is the worst place to lie.
I guess at some emotional level I accept the idea of God, but I don't know how God would manifest itself.
Historical significance
For his contributions he shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics along with David Lee and Robert C. Richardson.