Julian Schwinger

About Julian Schwinger

Who is it?: Physicist
Birth Day: February 12, 1918
Birth Place: New York City, United States
Died On: July 16, 1994(1994-07-16) (aged 76)\nLos Angeles, California, U.S.
Birth Sign: Pisces
Alma mater: City College of New York Columbia University
Known for: Quantum electrodynamics Spin–statistics theorem Sigma model MacMahon Master theorem List of things named after Julian Schwinger
Spouse(s): Clarice Carrol (m. 1947)
Awards: Albert Einstein Award (1951) National Medal of Science (1964) Nobel Prize in Physics (1965)
Fields: Physics
Institutions: University of California, Berkeley Purdue University Massachusetts Institute of Technology Harvard University University of California, Los Angeles
Doctoral advisor: Isidor Isaac Rabi
Doctoral students: Roy Glauber Ben R. Mottelson Sheldon Lee Glashow Walter Kohn Bryce DeWitt Daniel Kleitman Sam Edwards Gordon Baym Lowell S. Brown Stanley Deser Lawrence Paul Horwitz Margaret G. Kivelson

Julian Schwinger Net Worth

Julian Schwinger was born on February 12, 1918 in New York City, United States, is Physicist. Julian Seymour Schwinger was an American theoretical physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 for his fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics. His fascination for physics grew while going through Encyclopedia Britannica at a very young age. Very soon he began to visit public libraries and read outside books on that subject. By the age of sixteen he had published his first paper on physics. However, his penchant for higher knowledge almost ruined his college education. It was Professor Isidor Isaac Rabi of Columbia University, who first recognized his talent and took him under his wings. Under his guidance, Schwinger not only earned his B.S. degree, but also his PhD. Very soon, he established himself as a brilliant theorist. However, he was fiercely independent and did not accept interference in his work. That is why he mostly worked at night. Although he dealt in diverse branches of physics, his works on quantum electrodynamics is specially noted. However, many believe that his students were his most enduring achievements. He left more than seventy students, through whom he continued to influence modern physics long after his death.
Julian Schwinger is a member of Scientists

💰 Net worth: Under Review

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Biography/Timeline

1929

Julian Seymour Schwinger was born in New York City, to Jewish parents originally from Poland, Belle (née Rosenfeld) and Benjamin Schwinger, a garment manufacturer, who had migrated to America. 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. 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 Isidor Isaac Rabi) in 1939 at the age of 21. He worked at the University of California, Berkeley (under J. Robert Oppenheimer), and was later appointed to a position at Purdue University.

1941

After having worked with Oppenheimer, Schwinger's first regular academic appointment was at Purdue University in 1941. While on leave from Purdue, he worked at the Radiation Laboratory at MIT instead of at the Los Alamos National Laboratory during World War II. He provided theoretical support for the development of radar. After the war, Schwinger left Purdue for Harvard University, where he taught from 1945 to 1974. In 1966 he became the Eugene Higgins professor of physics at Harvard.

1960

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 SU(2) gauge group spontaneously broken to electromagnetic U(1) 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.

1965

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).

1972

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?". At UCLA, and for the rest of his career, Schwinger continued to develop the source theory and its various applications.

1989

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."

1998

Schwinger died of pancreatic cancer. He 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.