David Pines, 93, Insightful and Influential Physicist, Dies

David Pines, a physicist whose theoretical insights helped explain the electric flow of superconductors and the churning of matter inside collapsed stars, died May 3 at his home in Urbana, Illinois. He was 93.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, according to the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, which Pines had helped establish as a multidisciplinary effort to study complex systems.

“David was a leader of what one might call the ‘greatest generation’ of U.S. condensed matter physicists,” said Robert B. Laughlin, a professor of physics at Stanford. Condensed matter physics is the study of liquids and solids.

Although Pines never won a Nobel Prize, he contributed advances that directly led to others’ Nobels. In 1952, for example, after joining the physics department at the University of Illinois as a postdoctoral researcher for John Bardeen, he and Bardeen began tackling the problem of how certain materials could convey electricity with virtually no resistance. The problem had eluded explanation since superconductivity was discovered in 1911.

Electrons, which are negatively charged, usually repel one another.

But in late 1954, Bardeen and Pines showed that within a crystal of ions, it is possible that electrons can actually be attracted to one another — a step, they thought, that could be used to construct a superconductivity theory.

While particles of the same charge repel, those of opposite charge attract. Bardeen and Pines correctly calculated that as an electron passes by positively charged ions, it would pull the ions toward it and set off vibrations; other electrons would then be attracted to that clump of ions would create an attractive force between electrons.

A few months later, Pines left Illinois for a tenure-track professorship at Princeton. Leon Cooper, Pines’ successor, used the Bardeen-Pines result to show how electrons pair up, and John Robert Schrieffer, a graduate student, figured out how the paired electrons fall into a superconducting state.

Bardeen, Cooper and Schrieffer shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 1972 for what is known as BCS theory. (Bardeen also shared the 1956 prize, for the invention of the transistor.) By rule, no more than three people can share a Nobel.

“David was a bit unlucky in that regard,” David Campbell, a professor of physics at Boston University, said in a telephone interview. If history had unfolded a bit differently, perhaps it might have been the BPS theory of superconductivity instead.

A few years after his work with Bardeen, Pines collaborated with two other physicists, Aage Niels Bohr and Ben Roy Mottelson, on a paper describing excitations in nuclei. That work led to Bohr and Mottelson’s winning the 1975 Nobel in physics, shared with another physicist, Leo James Rainwater, who had independently come up with similar ideas.

A recurring theme in Pines’ nearly 70 years of research was the notion of “emergence.”

For many physicists, the aim is to discover the smallest basic building blocks of the universe and write down the simplest equations that describe the fundamental forces of nature.

In an article published in 2000, Pines and Laughlin argued that this pursuit was “the science of the past.” They maintained that many crucial phenomena in nature arise as the collective behavior of a large number particles, and that these phenomena could not be readily understood by extrapolating from the properties of a single particle.

“The central task of theoretical physics in our time,” they wrote, “is no longer to write down the ultimate equations but rather to catalog and understand emergent behavior in its many guises, including potentially life itself.”

David Pines was born on June 8, 1924, in Kansas City, Missouri, to Sidney and Edith Adelman Pines. In 1938, his family moved to Dallas, where his father started a company that installed heating and air-conditioning systems. He graduated from high school two weeks before his 16th birthday as class valedictorian. He attended Black Mountain College near Asheville, North Carolina, for one year before transferring to the University of California, Berkeley.

He graduated from Berkeley in 1944 with a bachelor’s degree in physics and started taking graduate classes. After being drafted into the Navy and serving for two years, he resumed his physics studies, first at Berkeley and then at Princeton, where he finished his doctoral degree in 1950. With his thesis adviser, renowned theoretical physicist David J. Bohm, Pines developed a technique, known as random phase approximation, to describe the behavior of electrons in a dense gas. That led to the notion of the plasmon, where vibrations in the gas could behave like particles.

Pines was an instructor at the University of Pennsylvania for a few years before moving to Illinois to join Bardeen’s group. He was an assistant professor at Princeton from 1955 to 1958, then a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, for a year before returning to Illinois as a professor of physics and electrical engineering.

Pines also worked on superfluids — materials that flow effortlessly — and applied those techniques to studying neutron stars, the ultradense remnants of stars that have blown up in supernovas. Occasionally, the neutron stars undergo “glitches,” when their spin suddenly speeds up.

“It’s basically doing superfluids but on a much bigger scale,” said Kevin Bedell, a Boston College physics professor who collaborated with Pines for many years.

After retiring from Illinois in 1995, Pines worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the University of California, Davis, in addition to the Santa Fe Institute.

Pines also created organizations like the Center for Advanced Study at the University of Illinois and the Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter at the University of California. He helped found the Santa Fe Institute in 1984.

“David was a great convener,” Bedell said.

In recent years, Pines put energy into a “Think Like a Scientist” initiative, which aimed to change how science was taught in elementary and middle schools.

Pines is survived by a daughter, Catherine Pines; a son, Jonathan; and three grandchildren. His wife, Suzy, whom he had met during graduate school at Princeton, died in 2015. Pines was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

While he brought scientists together, he could also alienate colleagues by aggressively pushing his ideas. “He had both characteristics,” Bedell said.

In 1986, a new type of superconductor was discovered, one that remained superconducting at relatively warm temperatures. Through the 1990s, as theorists tried to come up with an explanation, Pines and Philip W. Anderson, a Princeton physicist, offered competing theories and argued contentiously. (Neither idea worked out, and the understanding of high-temperature superconductivity is still incomplete.)

“I didn’t behave well, and he didn’t behave well,” Anderson said in a telephone interview. But, he said, “we maintained our friendship.”

Anderson was one of the scientists Pines had helped bring to the Santa Fe Institute, and even when they sparred, they cooperated there.

“I was always very fond of David,” Anderson said, “and I owe a great deal to him.”