Everything about Julian Schwinger totally explained
Julian Seymour Schwinger (
February 12,
1918 --
July 16,
1994) was an
American theoretical physicist. He formulated the
theory of
renormalization and posited a
phenomenon of
electron-
positron pairs known as the
Schwinger effect. He was jointly awarded the
Nobel Prize in Physics in
1965 for his work on
quantum electrodynamics (QED), along with
Richard Feynman and
Shinichiro Tomonaga.
Life and career
Schwinger was born in New York City where he attended
Townsend Harris High School and then the
City College of New York as an undergraduate before transferring to
Columbia University, where he received his B.A. in 1936 and his Ph.D. (overseen by
I.I. Rabi) in
1939. He worked at the
University of California, Berkeley (under
J. Robert Oppenheimer) and was later appointed to a position at
Purdue University.
During
World War II Schwinger worked at the
Radiation Laboratory at
MIT, providing theoretical support for the development of
radar. He tried applying his knowledge as a Nuclear Physicist to electromagnetic engineering problems, and arrived at results on nuclear scattering. Consequently, Schwinger began to apply his understanding of radiation to
quantum physics.
After the war, Schwinger left Purdue for
Harvard University, where he taught from 1945 to 1974. During this time, he developed the concept of
renormalization, which explained the
Lamb shift in an electron's magnetic field. He also realized, in his study of particle physics, that
neutrinos would come in multiple varieties, associated with
leptons like the
electron and
muon, which was experimentally verified in recent years.
Having supervised more than seventy 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).
In his later career, displeased with the complexity of other explanations of particle physics experiments, Schwinger developed
source theory, which treats gravitons, photons, and other particles uniformly. Schwinger left Harvard in 1972 for a position at the
University of California, Los Angeles where he continued his work on source theory, until his death.
After 1989 Schwinger took a keen interest in the research of low-energy nuclear fusion reactions (AKA
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've 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."
Schwinger is buried at
Mount Auburn Cemetery;
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.
As a famous physicist, Schwinger was often compared to another legendary physicist of his generation,
Richard Feynman. Schwinger was more mathematically inclined and heavily favoured mathematical rigour in his way of doing physics, especially in the field of
Quantum Field Theory. By contrast, Feynman was more intuitive and this showed in his
Feynman diagram approach to QFT. Schwinger commented on Feynman digrams in the following way,
Schwinger disliked Feynman diagrams to the point of banning them altogether in his class, although he understood them
perfectly and was observed to use them in private. Despite sharing the Nobel Prize, Schwinger and Feynman had a different approach to quantum electrodynamics,although they respected each other's work. On Feynman's death, Schwinger described him as
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