Julian Schwinger

thumb|Julian Schwinger, winner of the 1965 [[Nobel Prize in Physics. Original caption: "His laboratory is his ballpoint pen." ]]

Julian Seymour Schwinger (; February 12, 1918 – July 16, 1994) was an American theoretical physicist. He shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics with Richard Feynman and Shin'ichirō Tomonaga "for their fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics (QED), with deep-ploughing consequences for the physics of elementary particles". He developed a relativistically invariant perturbation theory, and renormalized QED to one loop order. Schwinger was a physics professor at several universities.

Schwinger is recognized as an important physicist, responsible for much of modern quantum field theory, including a variational approach, and the equations of motion for quantum fields. He developed the first electroweak model, and the first example of confinement in 1+1 dimensions. He is responsible for the theory of multiple neutrinos, Schwinger terms, and the theory of the spin-3/2 field. He shared the inaugural Albert Einstein Award with Kurt Gödel. who had emigrated from Poland to the United States. Both his father and his mother's parents were prosperous clothing manufacturers, although the family business declined after the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The family followed the Orthodox Jewish tradition. Julian's older brother Harold Schwinger was born in 1911, seven years before Julian who was born in 1918.

Schwinger was a precocious student. He attended the Townsend Harris High School from 1932 to 1934, a highly regarded high school for gifted students at the time. During high school, Julian had already started reading Physical Review papers by authors such as Paul Dirac in the library of the City College of New York, in whose campus Townsend Harris was then located. He published his first paper when he was seventeen. Nowadays there are known to be three light neutrinos; the third is the partner of the tau lepton.

In the 1960s, Schwinger formulated and analyzed what is now known as the Schwinger model, quantum electrodynamics in one space and one time dimension, the first example of a confining theory. He was also the first to suggest an electroweak gauge theory, an <math>SU(2)</math> gauge group spontaneously broken to electromagnetic <math>U(1)</math> at long distances. This was extended by his student Sheldon Glashow into the accepted pattern of electroweak unification. He attempted to formulate a theory of quantum electrodynamics with point magnetic monopoles, a program which met with limited success because monopoles are strongly interacting when the quantum of charge is small.

Having supervised 73 doctoral dissertations, Schwinger is known as one of the most prolific graduate advisors in physics. Four of his students won Nobel prizes: Roy Glauber, Benjamin Roy Mottelson, Sheldon Glashow and Walter Kohn (in chemistry).

Schwinger had a mixed relationship with his colleagues, because he always pursued independent research, different from mainstream fashion. In particular, Schwinger developed the source theory, a phenomenological theory for the physics of elementary particles, which is a predecessor of the modern effective field theory. It treats quantum fields as long-distance phenomena and uses auxiliary 'sources' that resemble currents in classical field theories. The source theory is a mathematically consistent field theory with clearly derived phenomenological results. The criticisms by his Harvard colleagues led Schwinger to leave the faculty in 1972 for UCLA. It is a story widely told that Steven Weinberg, who inherited Schwinger's paneled office in Lyman Laboratory, there found a pair of old shoes, with the implied message, "think you can fill these?" Based on Schwinger's source theory, Weinberg set the underpinnings of the effective field theory, that is more appreciated among physicists. In spite of the shoes incident, Weinberg gave the credit to Schwinger for the inspiration.

At UCLA, and for the rest of his career, Schwinger continued to develop the source theory and its various applications. After 1989 Schwinger took a keen interest in the non-mainstream research of cold fusion. He wrote eight theory papers about it. He resigned from the American Physical Society after their refusal to publish his papers. He felt that cold fusion research was being suppressed and academic freedom violated. He wrote, "The pressure for conformity is enormous. I have experienced it in editors' rejection of submitted papers, based on venomous criticism of anonymous referees. The replacement of impartial reviewing by censorship will be the death of science."

In his last publications, Schwinger proposed a theory of sonoluminescence as a long-distance quantum radiative phenomenon associated not with atoms, but with fast-moving surfaces in the collapsing bubble, where there are discontinuities in the dielectric constant. The mechanism of sonoluminescence now supported by experiments focuses on superheated gas inside the bubble as the source of the light.

Schwinger was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 for his work on quantum electrodynamics (QED), along with Richard Feynman and Shin'ichirō Tomonaga. Schwinger's awards and honors were numerous even before his Nobel win. They include the first Albert Einstein Award (1951), the U.S. National Medal of Science (1964), honorary D.Sc. degrees from Purdue University (1961) and Harvard University (1962), and the Nature of Light Award of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (1949). In 1987, Schwinger received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.

Schwinger and Feynman

As a famous physicist, Schwinger was often compared to another legendary physicist of his generation, Richard Feynman. Schwinger was more formally inclined and favored symbolic manipulations in quantum field theory. He worked with local field operators, and found relations between them, and he felt that physicists should understand the algebra of local fields, no matter how paradoxical it was. By contrast, Feynman was more intuitive, believing that the physics could be extracted entirely from the Feynman diagrams, which gave a particle picture. Schwinger commented on Feynman diagrams in the following way,

Schwinger disliked Feynman diagrams because he felt that they made the student focus on the particles and forget about local fields, which in his view inhibited understanding. He went so far as to ban them altogether from his class, although he understood them perfectly well. The true difference is however deeper, and it was expressed by Schwinger in the following passage,

Despite sharing the Nobel Prize, Schwinger and Feynman had a different approach to quantum electrodynamics and to quantum field theory in general. Feynman used a regulator, while Schwinger was able to formally renormalize to one loop without an explicit regulator. Schwinger believed in the formalism of local fields, while Feynman had faith in the particle paths. They followed each other's work closely, and each respected the other. On Feynman's death, Schwinger described him as

Death

thumb|right|The headstone of Julian Schwinger at Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, MA.

Schwinger died of pancreatic cancer. He is buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery; <math>\frac{\alpha}{2\pi}</math>, where <math>\alpha</math> is the fine structure constant, is engraved above his name on his tombstone. These symbols refer to his calculation of the correction ("anomalous") to the magnetic moment of the electron.

Selected publications

Books

Milton KA, A Quantum Legacy: Seminal Papers of Julian Schwinger, World Scientific, 2000.
Milton KA, Schwinger J, Classical Electrodynamics, 2nd ed, Taylor & Francis, 2024.
Milton KA, Schwinger J, Electromagnetic Radiation: Variational Methods, Waveguides and Accelerators, Springer, 2006.
Schwinger J, Einstein's Legacy: The Unity of Space and Time, Dover, 2002.
Schwinger J, Particles, Sources, and Fields, 3 vols, CRC, 2018.
Schwinger J, Quantum Kinematics and Dynamics, Westview, 2000.
Schwinger J, Quantum Mechanics: Symbolism of Atomic Measurements, Springer, 2001.
Schwinger J, Saxon DS, Discontinuities in Waveguides, Gordon and Breach, 1968.

Articles

Feshbach, H., Schwinger, J. and J. A. Harr. "Effect of Tensor Range in Nuclear Two-Body Problems", Computation Laboratory of Harvard University, United States Department of Energy (through predecessor agency the Atomic Energy Commission) (November 1949).
Schwinger, J. "On Angular Momentum", Harvard University, Nuclear Development Associates, Inc., United States Department of Energy (through predecessor agency the Atomic Energy Commission) (January 26, 1952).
Schwinger, J. "The Theory of Quantized Fields. II", Harvard University, United States Department of Energy (through predecessor agency the Atomic Energy Commission) (1951).
Schwinger, J. "The Theory of Quantizied Fields. Part 3", Harvard University, United States Department of Energy (through predecessor agency the Atomic Energy Commission) (May 1953).

References

External links

including the Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1965 Relativistic Quantum Field Theory