I started my graduate study in physics at Harvard University in 1956. Julian Schwinger had just completed his reformulation of Quantum Field Theory and was beginning to teach a three-year series of courses. I sat mesmerized, as did others. Attending one of [Schwinger’s] formal lectures was...
In the September “Einstein” issue of Scientific American, readers are given the impression that gravity is caused by curvature of space-time. For example, on the first page of that section, we read “gravity… is the by-product of a curving universe”, on p. 43 we find...
Despite the many successes of Quantum Field Theory, there are five unexplained mysteries or “gaps” that may someday be filled: Renormalization is necessary because Quantum Field Theory does not describe how an electron (or other charged quantum) is affected by its self-generated EM field. Field collapse is...
Quantum Field Theory is an axiomatic theory that rests on a few basic assumptions. Everything you have learned so far, from the force of gravity to the spectrum of hydrogen, follows almost inevitably from these three basic principles. (To my knowledge, Julian Schwinger is the...
Wolfgang Pauli was born in Vienna in the same year that Max Planck introduced quantization. He was five when Einstein published his theory of relativity. At the age of 19, while a student at the University of Munich, he was asked to write an encyclopedia article on...
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