Julian Schwinger

Julian Schwinger married Clarice Carrol in 1947 while he was teaching at the Harvard University. The couple did not have any children.

Towards the end of his life, Schwinger was afflicted with pancreatic cancer. In spite of that, he worked intensely almost till the last. His last paper (on sonoluminescence) was published in the very year of his death.

He died from pancreatic cancer on July 16, 1994 at his home in Los Angeles. He was survived by his wife Clarice.

Julian Seymour Schwinger was born on February 12, 1918, in New York City in a well to do Jewish family. His father, Benjamin Schwinger, was a successful clothing manufacturer. His mother’s name was Belle (née Rosenfeld) Schwinger.

Julian had an elder brother named Harold. Both the children were enrolled at Townsend Harris High School for their secondary education. Born a child progeny, Julian became interested in physics at an early age.

He later said that he had been reading Encyclopedia Britannica at home and got stuck when he reached ‘Physics’. Soon he began to visit public libraries to gain additional knowledge in that subject. In fact, most of his knowledge of physics at that time was gathered outside the formal educational system.

After passing out from school in 1933, Julian first entered the City College of New York with physics as his major. By this time he had formed the habit of studying at night. More than his text books, he kept reading outside publications and thus gained in depth knowledge on the subject.

Julian published his first paper in physics in 1934 at the age of sixteen and by the age of seventeen he was doing advanced calculations. Yet, because he did not attend classes and were more interested in solving higher problems, he began to have difficulties with his instructors and started failing in examinations.

After receiving his PhD in 1939, Julian Schwinger joined University of California, Berkeley as National Research Council Fellow. Next year in 1940, he began to work as the research associate of J Robert Oppenheimer.

He received his regular academic appointment in the summer of 1941 as an instructor of physics at the Purdue University, Indiana. The following year he was promoted to the post of Assistant Professor at the same University.

At that time, an active program in semiconductor research was being carried out at Purdue for the Radiation Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Schwinger joined the program in 1942 and worked on the propagation of microwave radiation in microwave cavities.

In the beginning of 1943, Oppenheimer asked Schwinger to join him at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where an atomic bomb was being built. Schwinger refused; instead he joined the Radiation Laboratory at MIT later in the same year.

Being a night bird and a loner, Schwinger chose to become a night research staff. This allowed him to work in solitude. By applying his knowledge of nuclear physics on electromagnetic engineering, he arrived at the theory of nuclear scattering, which ultimately provided important inputs in the design of radars.

Julian Schwinger is best known for his work on quantum electrodynamics (QED). He not only developed the formalism of the new QED in several fundamental papers, but had also made them more useful for practical calculations. His findings helped to bring about new dimension to the quantum field theory.