Silvan S. Schweber (1928–2017)

I’m re-reading this book published in 1994 in 2021 after the gminus2 results came out. I would have thought that after transporting the Brookhaven National Laboratory's large 600 ton magnet, at a cost of 3 million dollars, the first experiment would have been with the electron to confirm the equipment was working correctly, or have they done this? With the same high precision result from the electron, both experimental and theoretical, then I would have thought would be the time to do the Muon experiment.

Feynman's calculation, (albeit in the mid-1980s) and those that followed, with a few 'erroneous' steps on the theoretical way, used a coupling constant ~0.00729, around 0.7%, is this the same for the Muon? It is 200 times more massive. The coupling constant for the nucleon group called a proton, consisting of 3 quarks, Up, Up & down, around 2.4MeV/c2 for the Up and 4.8MeV/c2 of the Down, has a coupling more like ~1 and he warned theoreticians that the QED way of doing things would not work for such massive particles. The 'proton' mass is 938.272MeV/c2 and so most of the mass of the nucleon 99% is the binding energy to keep the whole thing together; the rest mass of the Quarks amounting to only 9.6MeV/c2. So they are only 20 times heaving than the electron not including the binding energy. What he said about not using his technique for 'Fermions', meaning the nucleons in this instance, looks to be true and the coupling constant, of around 1, produces, according to his book, 'The Strange Theory of Light & Matter' 2.7+/-0.3 for the proton magnetic moment whereas experimentally it was 2.79275, an error of 10% and so 10,000 times less accurate then experiment (p.138 of his QED book)...

So is it a surprise the Muon results don't match well enough… the Muon 206.8 times more massive that the electron, is this anything to be of concern here? the next member of the Lepton family, there being 3 'generations', is the Tauon and is 17 times more massive then the Muon and therefore 3477 times more massive than the electron. I wonder what the magnetic moment of it will be, if it can ever be measured...

The Feynman Diagrams used to calculate the magnetic moment have to be seen to be believed, and what's more, the complex mathematics (with a 's' please) associated with the coupling points which enables this to be achieved, is not for the faint-hearted.

The material on the splitting of the electron when confined, into 3 separate parts, a Holn (charge) a Spinon (well, spin) and Orbiton, has to give us pause for thought. If this IS really what the electron is like and therefore presumably the Muon and Tauon, we are in deep-shit in our understanding of what's going on at this level. The electron splits into 3 wave-functions as I understand it.. HOW, can charge… hate that word, it explains nothing, be a wave-function but see. It’s remarkable. And they thought it would be easy but seems far and away, and we are still 20 orders of magnitude away from the Planck length. The parallel development of mathematics and physics in the 20th century is without any doubt the most noble and beautiful thing our species has ever done, or likely ever will do - the only thing that one could be unequivocally proud of, one that doesn't involve conquest or discrimination (although, yes, there were individuals who did it in the service of such things, but they have always been to its detriment), and that is accessible to anyone from any social or cultural background who wants to put in the work to find out about it. Dyson, Feynman, Schwinger, Tomonoga and thousand other minds working peaceably and collaboratively, across borders and cultures through some of the ugliest times in history to gift the species with an exacting view of the world that goes far beyond the lumpish native intuition of our ape brains and tells us stories at impossible scales of time and energy. There was no biological reason we should have been able to do even a fraction of it, but there we are.

This is the sort of book that that make be believe I am in a quantum state of belief and unbelief as a consequence of another quantum state, that of comprehension and (99.9999999% ) incomprehension. The older I get, the harder it is to believe that any of this exists: bosons, me, you, the universe, the restaurant at the end of that universe... And yet, what else is there?

Just some thoughts as I have pondered this over a number of years and, as Einstein once stated, to my utter surprise:

'...All these fifty years of conscious brooding have brought me no nearer to the answer to the question, 'What are light quanta?' Nowadays every Tom, Dick and Harry thinks he knows it, but he is mistaken (Albert Einstein, 1954).'… (mais)

The author starts by presenting an apology for writing biography, considered by him and his fellow academics as the lowest form of history. He then tries to make up for his choice by writing the dryest, dullest bio ever written. I gave it two stars because the subject, Bethe, was not dull: he calculated how to build the A-bomb, struggled with Teller, came to Oppenheimer's defence in the witchhunt, and opposed nuclear weapons, later in life. The recounting of Bethe's life, however, reads like a snooze-thru lecture. This story should be told, but maybe by someone else.

the book does get better about page 100 when it starts including equations and physics into the story--especially if you are a geekreader (like many of us). So hold on as you read part one or just jump past Hans' schooling, his german upbringing, etc. to the physics courses that he took.… (mais)

We all know Albert Einstein as the foremost scientist of the twentieth century for his articulation of the special and general theories of relativity, and as a co-founder of quantum theory. He also contributed to statistical physics and the theory of radiation, and argued famously with Niels Bohr about God and dice. Einstein's theory of general relativity appeared in 1916. It introduced the concept of four-dimensional space-time, and showed how gravity could be conceived as the 'curvature' of space-time created by the presence of matter. Einstein insisted that the curvature of space-time must be distinguished from everything else that exists, such as electromagnetic fields and atomic particles. This vital, but problematic, distinction plagues us today in the unsuccessful efforts to combine general relativity and quantum mechanics into a single theory. He is recognized as a giant in physics, right up there with Isaac Newton, whose theories he expanded and amended. We also know from Walter Isaacson's book, Einstein: His Life and Universe (Metapsychology review here) that he was born on 14 March 1879, in Ulm, Germany, to Jewish parents and was quite religious until the age of 12, when his readings in popular science convinced him the stories in the Bible were flawed. This was the beginning of Einstein's reputation as a stubbornly independent thinker, for whom schools were too rigid, and examinations too arbitrary. Several recent biographies have filled in the details of the life of this scientific genius. Hence we know that his left-leaning political views, fueled by his concern for social justice, led to a large FBI file filled with letters from his critics.

In 1939, Einstein and Leo Szilard sent a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt about work in nuclear physics which could lead to the creation of a powerful explosive device, and Roosevelt took the letter seriously. That letter led directly to American atomic research. Earlier Einstein had written, 'we are led to the more general conclusion that the mass of a body is a measure of its energy content.' This sentence is in effect the famous equation, E = MC2. The American effort to develop this powerful explosive device will be headed up by the second scientist discussed in this book: J. Robert Oppenhemier.

Julius Robert Oppenheimer was born in New York City on April 22, 1904. His parents, Julius S. Oppenheimer, a wealthy German textile merchant, and Ella Friedman, an artist, were of Jewish descent but did not observe the religious traditions. He studied at the Ethical Culture Society School, whose physics laboratory has since been named for him, and entered Harvard in 1922, intending to become a chemist, but soon switching to physics. He graduated summa cum laude in 1925 and went to England to conduct research at Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory, working under J.J. Thomson.

While Einstein was stubbornly independent, Oppenheimer was not. He exhibited a different trait: "the need for and deference to, authority" which is described in a letter from Wolfgang Pauli for whom Oppenheimer is working in Zurich to Paul Ohrenfest in Leyden as "a very Bad characteristic: he comes to me with a rather unconditional belief in authority..."(18)

Einstein, we are told, was convinced that the best minds' work was carried out in solitude while one of Oppenheimer's great strengths was his ability to bring together and build a team of experts and inspire them to work creatively and harmoniously together. Thus, he was perfectly equipped to establish a first-rate physics department at UC Berkeley ("Starting with a single graduate student in my first year in Berkeley, we gradually began to build up what was to become the largest school in the country of graduate and postdoctoral study in theoretical physics, so that as time went on, we came to have between a dozen and twenty people learning and adding to quantum theory, nuclear physics, relativity, and other modern physics. As the number of students increased, so in general did their quality. The men who worked with me during those years hold chairs in many of the great centers of physics in the United States; they have made important contributions to science.") [Source], to lead the project to develop the atomic bomb, and to administer the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton.

Schweber explores these differences between these two twentieth century giants of science in six chapters. The first chapter relates Einstein's position on nuclear weapons, world government, and individual versus collective stands on important issues. In the second chapter Schweber tells the interesting story of Einstein and the founding of Brandeis University. Anyone who has attended faculty meetings will find the politics and the conflicts among these founders delicious.

The next two chapters present an intellectual history of Oppenheimer from the early formative years of his education, to Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory to Los Alamos, to the postwar years, and to his articulation of his mature philosophy in the William James Lectures at Harvard.

The last two chapters bring the two together for a comparative analysis of the positions that they agreed on as well as the differences that so clearly delineate two unique human beings. We see here Einstein the European Romantic and Oppenheimer the American Pragmatist. The book is well documented with copious notes, an index and bibliography, preface, introduction and reprints the Russell-Einstein manifesto of 1955. In several photographs Schweber points out how Einstein is usually seen with thumb and forefinger joined "in what is called the vitarka gesture, the sign for compassionate teaching. (288) In fact Buddhism is one of the places where these two scientists come together.

If you have an interest in science, in 20th century culture and history, in genius and the community of scholars, then Schweber's book is for you. More than a biography of two towering physicists, more than a history of the building of the atomic bomb, more than a review of the formative forces in the lives of these two scientists, this book argues that the story of science can be understood properly by focusing not merely on outstanding individuals but also on the scientific communities to which they belonged.

© Bob Lane 2008 http://tinyurl.com/6frmdq

Bob Lane is an Honorary Research Associate in Philosophy and Literature at Vancouver Island University in British Columbia.… (mais)