Theodore Welton

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Theodore "Ted" Allen Welton (born July 4, 1918 in Saratoga Springs , New York , † November 14, 2010 in Pleasant Hill , Tennessee ) was an American theoretical physicist.

Welton studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , where he exchanged ideas with Richard Feynman and in 1939 did his diploma (Senior Thesis, Bachelor) with Philip Morse . He then went to the University of Illinois , where he heard from Robert Serber and received his doctorate in 1944. During World War II he worked in the Manhattan Project , where he worked in Feynman's theory group (T-4) at its request. After the war he was first with Victor Weisskopf at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at the University of Pennsylvania . In 1950 he went to Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), where he became a Senior Theoretical Physicist. He also ensured a close connection between the University of Tennessee and the ORNL. In retirement he lived in Crossville, Tennessee, and in Pleasant Hill, Tennessee, where he died in 2010.

In 1948 he gave a simple qualitative description of the quantum electrodynamic corrections in atomic physics such as the Lamb shift as the interaction of non-relativistically treated electrons with stochastic quantum mechanical fluctuations of the electrodynamic field in the vacuum state, the mean value of which disappears, but not the standard deviation. This was an early precursor to later adopted methods known as stochastic electrodynamics (by Timothy Boyer , L. de La Peña, and others). Welton developed the method at MIT, but initially waited before publication (he wanted to submit a relativistic calculation) and did not present it at the Shelter Island Conference in 1947, so that the explanation of the Lamb shift was then by Hans Bethe , Weisskopf himself and others followed, followed by the relativistic calculations by the pioneers of quantum electrodynamics around Feynman and Julian Schwinger .

In 1951 he and Herbert B. Callen proved the fluctuation-dissipation theorem . The theorem was published by Harry Nyquist in 1928.

In 1953 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society . He was also an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow.

He was married twice and had four children from his first marriage.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Obituary from November 22, 2010 ( Memento from August 7, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ↑ in a joint notebook, Schweber QED and the men who made it , p. 375, Welton Memories of Feynman , Physics Today February 2007. Among other things, he reports that the paradox is in Chapter 17-4 of Vol. 2 of the Feynman Lectures Originated in a challenge from Feynman through Welton in Los Alamos.
  3. ↑ Welton Some observable effects of the quantum-mechanical fluctuations of the electromagnetic field , Physical Review, Vol. 74, 1948, p. 1157
  4. ↑ and also more controversial contributions like by Harold E. Puthoff and others
  5. ↑ Welton in his memoirs of Feynman (from 1983), Physics Today, February 2007 ( PDF ( Memento from December 29, 2009 in the Internet Archive ))
  6. ↑ Callen HB, Welton TA: Irreversibility and Generalized Noise. Physical Review, Vol. 83, 1951, pp. 34–40 ( PDF  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. ).@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.ligo.caltech.edu  
personal data
SURNAME Welton, Theodore
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Welton, Ted
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist
DATE OF BIRTH 4th July 1918
PLACE OF BIRTH Saratoga Springs
DATE OF DEATH November 14, 2010
Place of death Pleasant Hill, Tennessee