Talk:Julian Schwinger/Archive 1

Schwinger's picture
I've seen that picture a hundred times--- I am pretty sure that there aren't copyright issues with it. It's the photograph he puts in books and whatnot, it's supposed to be used for stuff like this. Unfortunately, this is all from vague memory, so I can't verify it. I think that for photographs of academics, taken from university archives, the copyright issues are probably nonexistent. I can see how for photos of Brittany Spears there could be issues, but does that mean that we have to find out what anonymous photographer took a picture of a dead scientist forty years ago?Likebox (talk) 19:17, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

Minor Edits
Corrected for neutral perspective. Comments about quality of UCLA physics department have no place in a biographical article.

I dunno how to add a comment to the talk page, but the article is erroneous in saying Schwinger didn't use an explicit regulator. He used an infrared cutoff to regulate the integral of cos(w)/w from 0 (he set it to w0) to infinity, which appeared in his calculation of both the vacuum polarization and the electron matter field's self-energy. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 137.158.152.207 (talk) 20:18, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

Renormalization due to Schwinger?
The article contains an imprecise statement when it attributes the renormalization concept to Schwinger. The renormalization is usually credited to Victor Weisskopof. Anyways, Victor and Bethe already employed renormalization even before Schwinger had a Ph.D.

References on the work of Victor and Bethe can be found in standard textbooks on quantum field theory, such as Weinberg's.

I'm sure that Schwinger did contribute to the development of the renormalization theory but he was certainly not the one who invented it.

I believe that the idea was originally conceived by Kramers. Ty8inf (talk) 03:51, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

War Work
It is possible that Schwinger chose not to work at Los Alamos during WWII because of his personal dislike of the unpleasant J.R. Oppenheimer.64.12.116.131 16:48, 25 March 2006 (UTC)Lestrade


 * According to R. Rhodes, in "The Making of the Atomic Bomb," I.I. Rabi refused to work at Los Alamos, saying (more or less) "I'm serious about this war. We could lose it without adequate radar."  Schwinger may simply have chosen to work with his old mentor. MWS 22:11, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

In Climbing the Mountain, by Mehra and Milton, Schwinger did not go to Los Alamos because he felt that the bomb was essentually an engineering problem. The book also indicates that Schwinger did not dislike Oppenheimer, but felt uncomfortable around him. Ty8inf (talk) 03:51, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

Statistical Atom and the Thomas-Fermi Model
There is no mention of Schwinger's work on the Thomas-Fermi model that he carried out in the early 1980s. Here I quote from Schwinger's biography, Climbing the Mountain by Mehra and Milton:

"It is interesting that this work not only is regarded as important in its own right by atomic physicists, but has led to some significant results in mathematics. A long series of substantial papers by C. Fefferman and L. Seco has been devoted to proving his conjecture about the Z dependence of the ground state energy of large atoms.  As Seth Putterman has remarked, it is likely that, of all the work that Schwinger accomplished at UCLA, his work on the statistical atom will prove the most important."

Ty8inf (talk) 18:09, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

Schwinger effect
The Schwinger effect redirects here, and this page links to the Schwinger effect. Would be nice to have a separate stub. I believe it has to do with dielectric breakdown of the vacuum. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Lionelbrits (talk • contribs) 18:19, 22 March 2008 (UTC)
 * It would also be nice to have an article on his source theory and more on why it was not acceptable to his colleagues. Xxanthippe (talk) 02:44, 10 December 2009 (UTC).

Schwinger and Infinite Energy Magazine
interesting how Schwinger worked with Eugene Mallove of Infinite Energy Magazine. Schwinger spoke at Mallove's conferences. 66.194.104.5 (talk) 14:59, 9 June 2011 (UTC)

Schwinger's Quote Regarding Feynman
About this quote: "Like the silicon chips of more recent years, the Feynman diagram was bringing computation to the masses." I am reminded of a quote attributed to Newton about how he (Newton) stood tall merely because he stood on the shoulders of giants. Most of the time, that quote is used to imply a humility on Newton's part; that implication, however, is incorrect. Newton was actually referring to a rival of his (a German, I believe) who was known for his physically short stature. I mention this because James Gleick in Genius states explicitly that Schwinger was being anything but respectful with that line; that in fact that he (Schwinger) considered it pedagogical tool, not a scientific tool. I believe that another line should be added to emphasize this point. --NBahn (talk) 03:55, 25 July 2010 (UTC)


 * 1) You are of course referring to Leibniz who was involved in a bitter dispute about which had invented differential calculus.
 * 2) The article Standing on the shoulders of giants says the phrase has been documented in use before Newton.
 * 3) The article Standing on the shoulders of giants says Newton clearly used the phrase referring to his own work and not to Leibniz.
 * --BjKa (talk) 15:01, 10 November 2014 (UTC)

Opening Paragraph
developing a relativistically invariant perturbation theory, and for renormalizing QED to one loop order This portion is in desperate need of some wikilinks! I find it most unfortunate, that the opening words of any article should be so uncomprehensible to the general public. --BjKa (talk) 15:01, 10 November 2014 (UTC)