Walter Thirring

Walter Thirring (born April 29, 1927 in Vienna ; † August 19, 2014 there ) was an Austrian physicist .

life and work

Walter Thirring, son of the physicist Hans Thirring , laid down due to the turmoil of the Second World War (from 1943 he was drafted as an anti-aircraft helper, but was only in the military for a short time, as he was seriously injured during his training and was in the hospital until the end of the war ), never graduated from high school . He studied physics at the Universities of Innsbruck and Vienna , where he received his doctorate under Felix Ehrenhaft in 1949 ( on force-free movement according to the Dirac equation ). He then worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Dublin with Erwin Schrödinger (1949), with Bruno Touschek at the University of Glasgow (1950) and in 1950 at the Max Planck Institute for Physics (then) in Göttingen with Werner Heisenberg , where he worked with Reinhard Oehme and Gerhart Lüders worked together (on non-renormalizable divergences in quantum field theories with mesons). In 1951/52 he was at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich with Wolfgang Pauli , where he met Gunnar Källén , worked on the divergence of perturbation theory in quantum electrodynamics and wrote a book on quantum field theory. He was in 1952 an assistant at the University of Bern in Fritz Houtermans , 1953-54 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton , where he also Albert Einstein met, and after two years a lecturer at the University of Bern, interrupted by stays at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge (Visiting Professor 1956/7) and at the University of Washington in Seattle . Since 1959 he was professor for theoretical physics at the University of Vienna , where he retired in 1997 and was one of the founders of the Erwin Schrödinger Institute in 1993 . From 1968 to 1971 he was director of the department for theoretical physics at CERN .

He worked in the field of theoretical physics , especially in quantum field theory , where he a. a. introduced an exactly solvable model named after him ("Thirring model"), which is often examined as a test model of a quantum field theory, and mathematical physics , where he u. a. investigated the “stability of matter” with Elliott H. Lieb (ie estimates of the lower limit for the energy of fermion systems). With Murray Gell-Mann and Marvin Leonard Goldberger , he wrote an early work in 1954 on dispersion relations in elementary particle physics.

He is the author of several physical textbooks. The “Textbook of Mathematical Physics I – IV” (1977–1980, an English edition was later published by Springer) is considered the standard textbook for mathematical physics.

Thirring also wrote popular science books, for example with Cornelia Faustmann the book Einstein Entformelt , in which the special theory of relativity is presented as clearly as possible with as few formulas as possible, only with diagrams and pictures. In his book Cosmic Impressions , for which Cardinal Franz König wrote a foreword, it is also about the relationship between science and religion . An indication of the existence of God, according to Thirring, is the fine tuning of the natural constants . He also published an autobiography.

Thirring was the first president of the International Association of Mathematical Physics (IAMP) from 1976 to 1978 . In 1993 he was instrumental in founding the Erwin Schrödinger Institute for Mathematical Physics (ESI) in Vienna. Belatedly he got in 2009 by his former high school, the Neulandschule in Vienna- Grinzing , a Maturazeugnis " honoris causa ".

His doctoral students include Peter Aichelburg , Heide Narnhofer , Fritjof Capra , Peter Freund , Harald Grosse , Franz Schwabl , Herbert Pietschmann . Close collaborations developed with Elliott Lieb, Heide Narnhofer, Harald Grosse, Peter Hertel , Alfred Wehrl .

Thirring had been married since 1952 and had two sons. He played the organ and the piano and composed - Thirring originally wanted to be a musician, but in his own words, after his brother's death in World War II, it was his duty to continue the family tradition of science.

Honors and awards (selection)

• Eötvös Medal (1967)
• Erwin Schrödinger Prize (1969)
• Max Planck Medal of the German Physical Society (1978)
• City of Vienna Prize (1978)
• Austrian Decoration of Honor for Science and Art (1992)
• Gold Medal of Honor of the Federal Capital Vienna (1993)
• Honorary doctorate from the Comenius University in Bratislava (1994)
• Great Cardinal Innitzer Prize (1995)
• Henri Poincaré Prize from IAMP (Int. Association of Mathematical Physics) 2000
• Paul Watzlawick Ring of Honor (2013)

Memberships

• Member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences
• 1975: Member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina
• Member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences , Rome
• Member of the National Academy of Sciences , USA
• Member of the Academia Europaea
• Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences

Works

• Selected papers of Walter E. Thirring with Commentaries. American Mathematical Society, 1998, ISBN 0-8218-0812-5 .
• Introduction to quantum electrodynamics. Deuticke, Vienna 1955, DNB 455049491 .
  • Principles of quantum electrodynamics. Academic Press, New York 1958; 2nd edition 1962.
• With Ernest M. Henley : Elementary Quantum Field Theory. BI Verlag, Mannheim 1975, ISBN 3-411-01486-5 .
• Successes and failures of theoretical physics. In: Physical sheets. Vol. 33 (1977), p. 542 ff. (Singularity theorems by Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose , KAM theory, stability of matter, speech on the occasion of the award of the Max Planck Medal), online.
  • See also his article Mathematical Physics - Successes and Failures. In: Lexicon of Physics. Spektrum Verlag 1999 (with the same subjects as examples).
• Mathematical Physics textbook. Jumper.
  • 1. Classical dynamic systems. 1988, ISBN 3-211-82089-2 .
  • 2. Classical field theory. 1990, ISBN 3-211-82169-4 .
  • 3. Quantum mechanics of atoms and molecules. 1994, ISBN 3-211-82535-5 .
  • 4. Quantum mechanics of large systems. 1998, ISBN 3-211-81604-6 .
• Stability of matter. In: Natural Sciences. Springer, Berlin vol. 73 (1986), p. 705 ff.
• Cosmic impressions. God's footsteps in the laws of nature. Molden, Vienna 2004, ISBN 3-85485-110-3 .
• With Cornelia Faustmann: Einstein dismantled. How a teenager found out about him. Seifert Verlag, Vienna 2007, ISBN 3-902406-42-9 .
• Desire to research. Life path and encounters. Seifert Verlag, Vienna 2008, ISBN 978-3-902406-58-3 .
• With Johannes Huber, Cornelia Faustmann: Building plans of creation. Does the world have an architect? Seifert 2011, ISBN 978-3-902406-73-6 .
• Flashbacks: A Barefoot Scholar Recalls. Seifert 2013, ISBN 978-3-902406-98-9 .

literature

• Jakob Yngvason : In Memoriam Walter Thirring (1927-2014). In: uni: view. 22nd August 2014.

Web links

• Literature by and about Walter Thirring in the catalog of the German National Library
• Walter Thirring's biography. (PDF; 14 kB).
• Website of Walter Thirring (Austrian Academy of Sciences). ( Memento from August 17, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
• Walter Thirring. "Direct line to the Big Bang." ( Memento from September 29, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) On: Weltwoche.ch. Interview.
• “Nazi bomb would have been a catastrophe.” ( Memento from October 12, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) On: CHiLLi.cc. Interview.
• Laudation on the occasion of the awarding of the Poincare Prize.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Viennese physicist Walter Thirring died. In: derStandard.at . August 19, 2014. Retrieved August 19, 2014.
2. ^ Karl von Meyenn (Ed.): Wolfgang Pauli. Scientific correspondence with Bohr, Einstein, Heisenberg and others a. Volume IV, Part 1 (Correspondence 1950–1952), Springer Verlag 1996, p. 627. A rifle grenade exploded in class, killing eight soldiers and seriously injuring 29.
3. ↑ Die Presse : Physicist Thirring still declared "ripe". December 5, 2009, p. 24.
4. ↑ Walter Thirring in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)
5. ^ Thirring, Walter E. Author profile . INSPIRE-HEP . Retrieved July 22, 2019.
6. ^ Thirring: A soluble model in relativistic field theory. In: Annals of Physics. Vol. 3, 1958, pp. 91-112. A Dirac spinor field self-interacting via coupled currents in a space and a time dimension.
7. ^ Lieb, Thirring: Bound for the kinetic energy of fermions which proves the stability of matter. In: Physical Review Letters. Vol. 35, 1975, p. 687.
8. ^ Gell-Mann, Goldberger, Thirring: Use of causality conditions in quantum theory. In: Physical Review. Vol. 95, 1954, p. 1612.
9. ↑ Star physicist Walter Thirring has passed away. At: orf.at. August 19, 2014, accessed August 20, 2014.
10. ↑ Walter Thirring in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)
11. ↑ Cardinal Schönborn pays tribute to the late physicist Thirring. At: Erzdioezese-Wien.at. 20th August 2014.
12. ↑ Paul Watzlawick Ring of Honor. ( Memento of the original from July 14, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The  archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved October 14, 2015.
13. ↑ Walter Thirring receives the Paul Watzlawick Ring of Honor. At: derStandard.at . 4th February 2013.
14. ↑ Member entry by Prof. Dr. Walter E. Thirring at the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina , accessed on February 19, 2016.
15. ^ Anton Zeilinger new member of the US National Academy of Sciences. ( Memento from August 8, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) At: medienportal.univie.ac.at/uniview. Online newspaper of the University of Vienna, May 13, 2013.