Julian Seymour SchwingerBorn 12 Feb 1918; died 16 Jul 1994 at age 76. American physicist who shared (with Richard Feynman and Shin-Itiro Tomonaga) the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics for work in quantum electrodynamics which reconciled quantum mechanics with Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity. He published his first physics paper at age 16, and received a Ph.D. by age 21. During WW II, he developed important methods in electromagnetic field theory, which advanced the theory of wave guides. His variational techniques were applied in several fields of mathematical physics. In the 1940s he was one of the inventors of the “renormalization” technique. In 1957, he theorized that there were different neutrinos: one associated with the electron and one with the muon (verified experimentally 1962.) He invented and developed source theory.«A third family of neutrinos associated with the tau meson is now known (per email from David L. Wilson 17 Jul 2012). |