- Paperback: 690 pages
- Publisher: OUP Oxford (14 Aug 2003)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0198527454
- ISBN-13: 978-0198527459
- Product Dimensions: 22.9 x 15.5 x 4.1 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 3,577,157 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
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"Mehra and Milton provide a great deal of material from interviews and archival files and thus help give us a fuller picture of Schwinger. Perhaps their most important contribution is their account of the evolution of many of Schwinger's thoughts. [...] It does shed light on a many-faceted genius."
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Julian Schwinger was one of the leading theoretical physicists of the twentieth century. His contributions are as important, and as pervasive, as those of Richard Feynman, with whom (and with Sin-itiro Tomonaga) he shared the 1965 Nobel Prize for Physics. Yet, while Feynman is universally recognized as a cultural icon, Schwinger is little known even to many within the physics community. In his youth, Julian Schwinger was a nuclear physicist, turning to classical electrodynamics after World War II. In the years after the war, he was the first to renormalize quantum electrodynamics. Subsequently, he presented the most complete formulation of quantum field theory and laid the foundations for the electroweak synthesis of Glashow, Weinberg, and Salam, and he made fundamental contributions to the theory of nuclear magnetic resonance, to many-body theory, and to quantum optics. He developed a unique approach to quantum mechanics, measurement algebra, and a general quantum action principle. His discoveries include 'Feynman's' parameters and 'Glauber's' coherent states; in later years he also developed an alternative to operator field theory which he called Source Theory, reflecting his profound phenomenological bent. His late work on the Thomas-Fermi model of atoms and on the Casimir effect continues to be an inspiration to a new generation of physicists. This biography describes the many strands of his research life, while tracing the personal life of this private and gentle genius.
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Julian Seymour Schwinger was born on 12 February 1918 ('just five score and nine years after the birthday of Abraham Lincoln') in New York City into a middle class family. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
Julian Seymour Schwinger was born on 12 February 1918 ('just five score and nine years after the birthday of Abraham Lincoln') in New York City into a middle class family. Read the first page
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Julian Schwinger was one of the founders of modern theoretical physics, both a master formalist and a phenomenologist. He was a seeming conservative who sought understanding within the context of existing knowledge and yet, when the occasion demanded it, could be an iconoclastic radical. He nurtured over seventy doctoral students, three of who went on to win Nobel Prizes; his lectures were renowned for their depth and clarity. Some ten years after his death, the value of much of his work is only now being appreciated. And yet he is almost forgotten, even within the physics community. Richard Feynman (with whom Schwinger shared a Nobel prize for their work on Quantum Electrodynamics) is an cultural icon, a darling of the newly science aware chattering classes, while Schwinger merits less than an aside at the dinner party table. Jagdish Mehra has already written a biography of Feynman; in ‘Climbing the Mountain’ he seeks to redress the balance in Schwinger’s favour, aided by Kimball Milton.
Superficially, ‘Climbing the Mountain’ is very like ‘The Beat of a Different Drum’. The scientist’s life is charted from his childhood, through his formative years, on to his early successes. His defining moments of triumph are detailed and his subsequent adventures are recounted. Relatively ‘hardcore’ technical accounts of his work are given; it helps if the reader has studied physics at a post-graduate level. A leavening of anecdotes and asides is sprinkled through the sums; nonetheless the book is not an easy read. Much is quoted from the subject’s work and from earlier accounts of his life, and is scrupulously referenced. In ‘The Beat of a Different Drum’ this approach works; in ‘Climbing the Mountain’ it does not. There is too much evidence of ‘cut and paste’ and inadequate editing; episodes are re-related unnecessarily. Great chunks of the book are duplicated in ‘A Quantum Legacy – Seminal Papers of Julian Schwinger’ (K.A. Milton Ed.) published by World Scientific. Other than that Schwinger was a nice quiet chap, that his wife Clarice was a great support who nonetheless had a lot of fun herself and that Pauli was a rather unpleasant person, any reader familiar with JS’s published work will not learn much new from this book. For the non-physicist it does present a problem: what made this man great? Feynman was fun, with a gift for self mythology. JS was just a genius and somehow this book does not do him justice.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
The forgotten genius
7 May 2012
Format:Paperback
This book should be required reading for every physicist and every physics student. While the technical material can be tough going, it can be skipped over, and there is much personal history to interest the lay reader. Schwinger's accomplishments were not just comparable to Feynman's; they were much greater. Only by reading this book can one appreciate all that he did, including anticipating electroweak unification, introducing the Higgs mechanism, and proving the spin-statistics theorem. Most importantly, he perfected Quantum Field Theory (his third trip "up the mountain"). The tragedy is that, like most of Schwinger's work, QFT has been abandoned and forgotten - at least in its true meaning of a world made of fields - leaving the world to drown in a sea of chaos caused by the particle picture. As I show in my book for the lay reader [ASIN:0473179768 Fields of Color: The theory that escaped Einstein], which is dedicated in part to the memory of Julian Schwinger, only QFT can resolve the paradoxes of relativity and quantum mechanics that arise from the particle view.
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