Schweber, Sylvan

Sylvan Samuel Schweber was born in French Strasbourg in a family of Orthodox Jews. After the outbreak of World War II, Sylvanas, with his mother and sister, fled first to the Vichy part of France , and in 1942 he arrived in New York through Spain, Portugal and Cuba, where his father was already waiting for them. In 1944, Schweber entered the City College of New York , where he studied chemical technology . Soon his interests shifted towards physics. He moved to the University of Pennsylvania , where he studied under the leadership of and . In 1949, Schweber received a master’s degree and entered graduate school at Princeton University , where in 1952 he defended his doctoral dissertation under the supervision of on “Analysis of Relativistic Field Theories in Configuration Space” . ) ^{[1] [2]} .

For the next two years, Schweber held a postdoc at Cornell University , where he worked with Hans Bethe ; in 1955, together with , they wrote the book Mesons and Fields , one of the first monographs to present quantum field theory in a modern way. Schweber later published the famous textbook An Introduction to Relativistic Quantum Field Theory . From 1955 until the end of his life, the scientist worked at the Physics Department of Brandeis University , including being elected three times as Dean of the Faculty ^[1] .

Since the 1970s, Schweber began to pay more attention to the history of science. The change of interests was directly embodied during a vacation that the scientist spent at Harvard University and who spent on working on an article about the origins of Charles Darwin 's Origin of Species , published in 1977. It was the history of the theory of biological evolution and the analysis of the work of Darwin Schweber who was engaged in the initial period of his activity as a historian of science. His approach, which combined an interest in the history of ideas (particularly Darwinism ) and social history (in this case, the history of Victorian culture), was shaped by the work of psychologist . In subsequent years, Schweber published an article on Darwin and political economists, as well as several works on Darwinism in the broader context of British intellectual history ^[2] .

In the 1980s, Schweber turned to the history of the development of quantum field theory , in particular the renormalization method . The culmination of this activity was the famous book “Quantum electrodynamics and the people who created it: Dyson, Schwinger, Feynman and Tomonaga” ( English QED and the men who made it: Dyson, Schwinger, Feynman and Tomonaga , 1994). Since the early 1990s, Schweber’s efforts have been directed primarily to the study of Bethe’s biography, but the task turned out to be so complex and the amount of information is so great that the work took many years and was carried out in parts. One way the historian applied to such a big task was to draw parallels between Bethe and his fellow contemporaries. In subsequent years, this approach was embodied in several monographs in which, using examples of biographies of Bethe, Oppenheimer, and Einstein , the subtle issues of intellectual history were studied, including those related to the moral responsibility of scientists. Finally, in 2012, a book was published on the development of Bethe as a scientist ^[2] .

Since 1981, Schweber spent part of his time at the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University. In 1988, he participated in the organization of the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and became its first director. In 2005, he retired at Brandeis University, remaining an honorary professor of physics and a professor of the history of ideas ^[1] .

Schweber was married three times. His first wife, Mirna, died of multiple sclerosis. Then followed an unsuccessful marriage with Miriam. The third wife, Sneit Gissis, is also a historian of science ^[2] .

• Abraham Pais Prize in the History of Physics (2011) "for his complex, technically skilled historical research on the emergence of quantum field theory and quantum electrodynamics, as well as deeply penetrating biographical works on several of the most influential physicists of the 20th century - Einstein, Oppenheimer and Bethe" ^[3] .
• Member of the American Physical Society , American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Books

• Bethe H., de Hoffmann F., Schweber S. Mesons and Fields. Vol. 1: Fields. - Evanston: Row, Peterson and Co., 1955. Russian translation: Bethe G., Hoffmann F., Schweber S. Mesons and Fields. T. 1: Fields. - M .: Foreign literature, 1957.
• Schweber S. An introduction to relativistic Quantum Field Theory. - Evanston: Row, Peterson and Co., 1961. Russian translation: Schweber S. Introduction to relativistic quantum field theory. - M .: Publishing house of foreign literature, 1963.
• Schweber SS QED and the men who made it: Dyson, Schwinger, Feynman and Tomonaga. - Princeton University Press, 1994.
• Schweber SS In the Shadow of the Bomb: Oppenheimer, Bethe, and the Moral Responsibility of the Scientist. - Princeton University Press, 2000.
• Schweber SS Einstein and Oppenheimer: The Meaning of Genius. - Harvard University Press, 2008.
• Schweber SS Nuclear Forces: The making of the physicist Hans Bethe. - Harvard University Press, 2012.

Featured Articles

• Wightman AS, Schweber SS Configuration Space Methods in Relativistic Quantum Field Theory. I // Physical Review . - 1955. - Vol. 98, No. 3 . - P. 812-837. - DOI : 10.1103 / PhysRev . 98.812 .
• Schweber SS On Feynman Quantization // Journal of Mathematical Physics . - 1962. - Vol. 3, No. 5 . - P. 831-842. - DOI : 10.1063 / 1.1724296 .
• Schweber SS The origin of the Origin revisited // Journal of the History of Biology. - 1977. - Vol. 10, No. 2 . - P. 229-316. - DOI : 10.1007 / BF00572644 .
• Schweber SS Darwin and the political economists: Divergence of character // Journal of the History of Biology. - 1980. - Vol. 13, No. 2 . - P. 195–289. - DOI : 10.1007 / BF00125744 .
• Schweber SS Feynman and the visualization of space-time processes // Reviews of Modern Physics . - 1986. - Vol. 58, No. 2 . - P. 449-508. - DOI : 10.1103 / RevModPhys . 58.449 .
• Cao TY, Schweber SS The conceptual foundations and the philosophical aspects of renormalization theory // Synthese. - 1993. - Vol. 97, No. 1 . - P. 33–108. - DOI : 10.1007 / BF01255832 .
• Schweber SS Physics, Community and the Crisis in Physical Theory // Physics Today . - 1993. - Vol. 46, No. 11 . - P. 34–40. - DOI : 10.1063 / 1.881368 .

• Galison P., Kaiser D. Silvan Samuel Schweber // Physics Today . - 2018 .-- Vol. 71, No. 1 . - P. 63. - DOI : 10.1063 / PT.3.3827 .
• Sigurdsson S. Silvan Samuel Schweber (1928–2017) // Isis. - 2019 .-- Vol. 110, No. 2 . - P. 370-373. - DOI : 10.1086 / 703789 .
• Positioning the History of Science [Volume in honor of SS Schweber ] / ed. K. Gavroglu, J. Renn. - Springer, 2007.

• Hessenbruch A. Silvan Sam Schweber interview . The Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology (August 27, 2001). Date of treatment July 1, 2019.
• 2011 Abraham Pais Prize for History of Physics Recipient . American Physical Society (2011). Date of treatment July 1, 2019.