“Unlocking the Future: How a Simple Discovery Revolutionized Technology and Changed Our Lives Forever”
After losing his company, in 1963 Shockley accepted a position at Stanford University as a professor of Engineering and Applied Science. And it is here that his career took a dark turn. Despite holding no degree in genetics or related disciplines, Shockley began vocally promoting pseudoscientific theories about race, intelligence, and eugenics, declaring, for example, that:
“My research leads me inescapably to the opinion that the major cause of the American Negro’s intellectual and social deficits is hereditary and racially genetic in origin and, thus, not remediable to a major degree by practical improvements in the environment.”
Such was Shockley’s conviction that miscegenation – AKA race mixing – posed an existential threat to the United States that he ran as a Republican candidate in the 1982 Senate Election on the single-issue platform of opposing the, to quote, “dysgenic threat” posed by African-Americans and other minority groups. He came in eighth place in the primary, receiving a paltry 0.37% of the vote. By the time Shockley died in 1989 at the age of 79, he had become a pariah, with his obituary in the Los Angeles Times stating:
“He went from being a physicist with impeccable academic credentials to amateur geneticist, becoming a lightning rod whose views sparked campus demonstrations and a cascade of calumny.”
Meanwhile, the co-discoverers of the transistor fared somewhat better. In 1951, John Bardeen left Bell Labs for the University of Illinois, where he began investigating the phenomenon of superconductivity – the ability of certain materials to attain zero electrical resistance when cooled to extremely low temperatures. This pioneering work earned him the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physics, making him the only person in history to win this award twice. He died in 1991 at the age of 82.
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