Silvan S. Schweber

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Silvan Samuel Schweber (born April 10, 1928 in Strasbourg , † May 14, 2017 in Lexington , Massachusetts ) was an American theoretical physicist and historian of science .

Life

Schweber began studying chemistry in 1944 at the City College of New York (bachelor's degree in 1947) and then switched to physics from 1947 at the University of Pennsylvania , where he studied with Walter Elsasser and Herbert Jehle , among others . After completing his master's degree in 1949, he went to Princeton University , where he studied with David Bohm and Eugene Wigner and received his doctorate in 1952 with Arthur Strong Wightman . He then did a postdoc with Hans Bethe at Cornell University and, from 1954, at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh . From 1955 he was a professor at the newly founded Brandeis University . From 1958 to the end of the 1960s, he and others organized a summer school for theoretical physics there. In addition to a professorship for physics, he was most recently Richard Koret Professor for the History of Ideas. Schweber dealt with quantum field theory , about which he wrote textbooks only in the 1950s with Bethe and then in 1961 a well-known textbook. From the 1980s he dealt with the history of physics, especially with that of quantum field theory, in the development of which he himself was actively involved from the 1940s, but also with the emergence of "Big Science" after the Second World War and questions of the philosophy of science. At Bethe's request, he wrote his scientific biography and conducted many interviews, and a first volume was published (until 1939).

He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 1997 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society . In 2011 he received the Abraham Pais Prize .

Schweber was married to Snait Gississ and had a son and two daughters.

Fonts

Books:

  • with Bethe, Frederic de Hoffmann: Mesons and Fields, 2 volumes, Row, Peterson and Co., Evanston / Illinois, 1955
  • Nuclear Forces. The making of the physicist Hans Bethe , Harvard University Press 2012
  • An introduction to relativistic Quantum Field Theory, Row 1961, Harper and Row 1964, Reprint bei Dover, 2005, ISBN 0486442284
  • QED and the men who made it: Dyson, Schwinger, Feynman and Tomonaga, Princeton University Press 1994, ISBN 0691033277
  • A historical perspective on the rise of the Standard Model, in Lillian Hoddeson , Laurie Brown , Michael Riordan (Eds.): The rise of the Standard Model, Cambridge University Press 1997
  • Feynman and the visualization of space-time-processes, Reviews of Modern Physics, Vol. 58, 1986, pp. 449-508
  • Darwin and Herschel - a study of parallel lives, Journal of the History of Biology, Vol. 22, 1989, pp. 1-71
  • In the Shadow of the Bomb: Bethe and Oppenheimer and the Moral Responsibility of the Scientist, Princeton University Press 2000, ISBN 0691049890
  • Einstein and Oppenheimer: The meaning of Genius, Harvard University Press 2008, ISBN 0674028287
  • Einstein for the 21st Century: His Legacy in Science, Art, and Modern Culture, Princeton University Press 2008, ISBN 0691135207

Some essays and book contributions:

  • August Comte and the Nebular Hypothesis in In the Presence of the Past , in: Bienvenue, M. Feingold (Ed.), Essays in Honor of Frank Manuel, Kluwer Academic 1991, pp. 280-365.
  • Big Science in Context: Cornell and MIT , in: P. Galison, B. Hevly (Eds.): Big Science: The Growth of Large-Scale Research, Stanford University Press 1992, pp. 149-189.
  • Scientists and the State: The Legacy of World War II in Social Studies of Science , SAGE, Volume 23, 1993, pp. 595-642.
  • Scientists and the State: The Legacy of World War II , in: Kostas Gavroglu (Ed.), Trends in the Historiography of Science, Kluwer 1994, pp. 327-354.
  • Changing Conceptualization of Renormalization in Renormalization Theory , in: L. Brown (Ed.), Renormalization, Springer 1993, pp. 135–155.
  • with Tian Yua Cao: The Conceptual Foundations and Philosophical Aspects of Renormalization Theory , Synthesis, Volume 97, 1993, pp. 33-108.
  • Physics, Community, and the Crisis in Physical Theory , Physics Today, November 1993, pp. 34-40.
  • A Historical Perspective on the Rise of the Standard Model , in: L. Brown, L. Hoddeson, M. Riordan (Eds.), The Use of the Standard Model, Cambridge University Press 1995.
  • Telling the Life of Hans Bethe , in: R. Yeo, Writing Scientific Biography, Cambridge University Press 1995.
  • Writing the history of Hans Bethe: contextual history and Paul Forman , in: Physics Perspective, Volume 16, 2014, pp. 179-217

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Silvan “Sam” slider obituary. In: brezniakrodman.com. Brezniak Rodman Funeral Directors, May 14, 2017, accessed May 27, 2017 .
personal data
SURNAME Schweber, Silvan S.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Schweber, Silvan Samuel (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist
DATE OF BIRTH April 10, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH Strasbourg , France
DATE OF DEATH May 14, 2017
Place of death Lexington , Massachusetts , United States