Two well-known enough physicists were born on August 1st: Walter
Gerlach in 1889 and Douglas Osheroff in 1945. Douglas Osheroff –
congratulations to Stanford – was born to an originally Jewish
Russian father and an originally Slovak mother in the Washington
state. As an undergrad, he would attend Feynman's lectures at
Caltech, among other things. In the late 1960s, he would already
investigate helium-3 at Cornell together with David Lee and
Robert Richardson. Note that helium-3 is a fermion, whether we
talk about the nucleus or the whole atom, so it has to pair with
another helium-3 to produce a boson which may exhibit phenomena
similar to superfluidity and/or related but inequivalent Bose-
Einstein condensation. The superfluidity of helium-4 had been
known from the 1937 experiments by Kapitsa, Allen, and Misener,
and it's debatable whether the superfluidity of yet another
substance is such a radical discovery (although the pairing is
needed, much like lower temperatures than for helium-4) – but
many advances