George branch

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George branch

George Zweig (born May 30, 1937 in Moscow ) is an American physicist and neurobiologist , who is one of the discoverers of quarks .

Zweig graduated from the University of Michigan in 1959 and then went to Caltech in Pasadena , where he was a student of Murray Gell-Mann , but when he was a visiting professor, Richard Feynman was supervising his dissertation. He worked for several years at MIT and Los Alamos National Laboratory and later (2004) at Renaissance Technologies on Long Island , New York , a financial services company (owned by mathematician James Simons ).

Independently of Murray Gell-Mann , he assumed the existence of quarks in 1964 , but referred to them as "aces" (aces, after the playing cards ). He spoke about it at one of the first Erice conferences in 1963, but never achieved the same recognition as Gell-Mann. Zweig also came into conflict with his boss Leon van Hove at CERN . He did not want to publish about his theory of quarks in a European journal like van Hove wanted, but in an American one because he was a visiting scientist from the USA at CERN and was financed by American agencies. But van Hove forbade him and when he persisted, van Hove reacted by forbidding the institute's secretary to work together and canceling Zweig's seminar lecture. Zweig also discussed his quark idea with Feynman in 1963, but Feynman was skeptical. With Zweig it can be proven that he actually considered the quarks to be physically real, with Gell-Mann this is controversial. Gell-Mann received the Nobel Prize in 1969 for his numerous contributions to strong interactions, when the quark model, which was not explicitly mentioned by the Nobel Committee, was still in the test stage - quarks were then just being seen in high-energy scattering experiments, but at that time still according to Feynman referred to as partons .

Zweig later turned to neurobiology and studied the transduction of sound into nerve impulses in the cochlea of the human ear . In 1975 he developed the continuous wavelet transformation .

In 1981 he was awarded a MacArthur Prize Fellowship . In 1996 he was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences , and in 1999 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . For 2015 he was awarded the Sakurai Prize .

Web links

Remarks

  1. Van Hove was the research director at CERN and his interest was in profiling CERN as a European center against the overwhelming power of the American accelerator centers, at the same time he was editor of Physics Letters at North Holland , a European founded in 1962 in competition with the American Physical Review Letters Physics journal. When Gell-Mann's Quark essay was rejected by Physical Review Letters because he was too speculative in their opinion, he turned to Leon van Hove in 1964, who was also skeptical, but published it in Physics Letters. John Moffat, Cracking the quantum code of the universe, Oxford UP 2014, p. 7
  2. Interview with George Zweig , CERN (Alice Collaboration) 2014
  3. Branch CERN Preprint No. 8182 / TH401 (1964), 24 pages.
  4. John Gribbin ("Schrödinger's Kittens and the Search For Reality", 1995) speculates that another award for quarks would not be presented because Gell-Mann would then have to be honored again.