He also won the town's one mile swimming race on the River Witham on more than one occasion After completing his studies at Manchester he spent two years as a research associate at Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge.
The 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics was won by David Lee, Douglas D. Osheroff and Robert Richardson of Cornell University for their 1972 discovery that the isotope helium-3 can become superfluid at a temperature of 0.002 kelvin, very close to absolute zero.
In 1997 Emery gave the 326th Brookhaven lecture, entitled 'High Temperature Superconductors – The First Ten Years' illustrating his points with simple, non-technical terms.
He explained how key experiments at BNL had led to deeper insights into the atomic structure and forces of electricity and magnetism, that underlie the mechanisms of high-temperature superconductivity.
To give an example of the Meissner effect, one part of his basic research, he showed how a 200-kilogram Japanese Sumo wrestler could float inches off the ground on a thin magnet.
In 2001 Emery (with Alan H. Luther) won the Oliver E. Buckley Prize in Condensed Matter Physics for his "fundamental contribution to the theory of interacting electrons in a one-dimension".
Those new fellows included Richard Avedon, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Riley Bechtel, Woody Allen, Madeleine Albright, King Juan Carlos I of Spain, and Victor Emery.