In 1948, Callen joined the faculty of the Department of Physics at the University of Pennsylvania and became a professor in 1956. Specialists consider his most lasting contribution to physics to be the paper co-written with Theodore A. Welton presenting a proof of the fluctuation-dissipation theorem, an extremely general result describing how a system's response to perturbations relates to its behavior at equilibrium. This crucial result became the basis for the statistical theory of irreversible processes and explains how fluctuations dissipate energy into heat in general and the phenomenon of Nyquist noise in particular. Callen then pioneered the thermodynamic Green's functions for magnetism. With his students, he studied many-body problems involving spin operators. This led to the discovery of some useful methods of approximations.
