During the Second World War he was a staff member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Radiation Laboratory from 1942 to 1945.
Professor Fairbank specialized in low-temperature physics, including liquid helium and super conductivity at low temperatures.At Stanford, one of his most famous discoveries has been the flux quantization in superconducting tin.
At Stanford also he initiated experiments under gravity-free conditions, such as the specific heat of liquid helium near the lambda point, directed by John Lipa , and "gravity Probe B", an experiment, led by Francis Everitt, to test an Einstein prediction which produced results, reported first in 2007.
In 1990, International Center for Relativistic Astrophysics hosted the first of three meetings held in honor of William Fairbank.William Fairbank has been a dear friend and an enthusiastic colleague who has given us with his vitality and originality a marvelous example of how to broaden the frontier of science and knowledge.
Every encounter with him gave us an injection of enthusiasm and some new physical insight, every visit to his laboratory a sensation of exploring the fundamentals of gravitation through the most original use of basic physics, and every encounter with his research group an opportunity to discuss some of our most recent results in theoretical research with an outstanding group of experimentalists....These meetings have been conceived with the aim of keeping alive the "Bill Fairbank spirit and to extend it to a larger and larger number of scientists.