Kenneth C. Zirkel · CC BY-SA 3.0

Leon Cooper showed that electrons in a superconductor pair up against their own electrical repulsion, riding lattice vibrations in a bound state now called a Cooper pair — the insight that let him, John Bardeen, and John Robert Schrieffer complete BCS theory and share the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physics. He later turned to neuroscience, co-developing the BCM theory of how synapses strengthen and weaken during learning, work far removed from the physics that made his name.