Ronald Shaw

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Ronald "Ron" Shaw (born September 5, 1929 in Tunstall (Stoke-on-Trent) , † 2016 ) was a British physicist and mathematician, known for his independent introduction of the Yang Mills theory in 1954.

Life

Ronald Shaw went to school in Stoke-on-Trent and after his military service (as a dental technician) went to Cambridge University from 1947 to 1949 , where he heard from Hermann Bondi , Fred Hoyle , Paul Dirac , Besikowitsch and John Todd , among others . From 1952 he researched under Nicholas Kemmer (as well as John Polkinghorne and John C. Taylor at the same time ) and from 1954 under Abdus Salam at Trinity College. In 1955 he received his doctorate from Salam. From 1955 he was at the University of Hull, where he rose from Assistant Lecturer to Senior Lecturer and in 1989 got a chair in mathematical physics. In 1995 he retired. In 1963 he was a visiting scientist at the Technical University of Ankara.

His daughter Elizabeth emerged from his first marriage to Marion Shaw. His marriage to Peak Yuen in 1988 and divorced in 2012.

Shaw later dealt mainly with applications of group theory in elementary particle physics, but also with octonions , Clifford algebras and finite geometry. In his dissertation in 1954 with Salam ( The Problem of Particle Types and Other Contributions to the Theory of Elementary Particles , in Part 3) he introduced Yang Mills fields, inspired by an essay by Julian Schwinger , who dealt with an Abelian Eich group (the two-dimensional rotating group). Despite being urged by Salam, he refrained from publishing it independently after Chen Ning Yang and Robert L. Mills foretold him in 1954. One reason was that the theory required massless vector gauge bosons that were not observed in nature. His work was published later. Salam in particular repeatedly referred to the independent discovery by Shaw.

Fonts

  • Linear Algebra and Group Representations , 2 volumes, Academic Press 1982/1983

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Marion Shaw: Ronald Shaw obituary . In: The Guardian . September 5, 2016. Archived from the original on September 17, 2016. Retrieved on September 17, 2016.
  2. ↑ It was not least this fact that hindered the application of the Yang-Mills theories at the time, and a way out was only found with the Higgs mechanism in the mid-1960s
  3. ↑ In Lochlainn O'Raifeartaigh The dawning of gauge theory , Princeton University Press in 1997 and John C. Taylor (Editor) Gauge Theories in the Twentieth Century , Imperial College Press 2001
  4. ^ For example, in his 1979 Nobel Speech
personal data
SURNAME Shaw, Ronald
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Shaw, Ron
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British physicist and mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH September 5, 1929
PLACE OF BIRTH Tunstall (Stoke-on-Trent)
DATE OF DEATH 2016