Richard Feynman said, about his
experience at the 1948 Pocono conference: "... My way of looking
at things was completely new
..."(1).
In fact, that was not true. Feynman's way of looking at things had
been done earlier, by
Ernst Carl Gerlach Stueckelberg,
who "... acquired his Ph.D. in Munich ... under .... Sommerfeld
... he taught ... at Princeton University ... until the Depression
forced the school to let him go ...."(2)
and
who made 3 advances in theoretical physics, for which 3 Nobel
Prizes were given, but not to him, since the
physics establishment ignored his work. Stueckelberg ...
- "... [ with ] his student, Andre Petermann, invented
... 1951 ... the renormalization group, which is now essential to
the construction of grand unified theories ... [ and for which
Kenneth Wilson later won a physics Nobel Prize
]..."(2).
- "... predicted the first of the hundreds of subatomic
particles discovered shortly before and after the war [ World
War II - the pion ] , but did not publish the idea after Pauli
told him it was ridiculous. ( Later, the Japanese physicist Hideki
Yukawa received a Nobel Prize for this idea. ).
..."(2)
- "... pointed out in 1941 that pair production could be
described classically by considering positrons as electrons
running backwards in time ...
- ... illustrated these concepts with graphs of space-time
trajectories similar to the diagrams Feynman began drawing in the
summer of 1947 ..."(3);
and
- "... apparently wrote up a lengthy paper - in English, for
once - that outlined a complete and correct description of the
renormalization procedure for quantum electrodynamics. Sometime in
1942 or 1943, he apparently mailed it to the Physical Review. It
was rejected. "They said it was not a paper, it was a program,
an outline, a proposal," Stueckelberg remembered.
- ... struggled to carry out the program rejected by the
Physical Review. By the end of the war, in 1945, he seems to have
done it. ... he wrote up bits and pieces of his ideas. Eventually
they were presented in a complete form in a chapter of the thesis
of one of his students, Dominique Rivier. But by then Schwinger
[ and Feynman ] had come out with ... [ their programs
] ... and Stueckelberg, who had the ideas first, published
afterward ..."(2).
" [ Richard Feynman won ] ... the Nobel Prize in phyiscs
for 1965, jointly with Julian Schwinger of Harvard and Sin-Itiro
Tomonoga of Japan ... After the Nobel award ceremonies ... Feynman
went to ... CERN ... to give a lecture. ... Feynman's lecture at CERN
was attended by Ernst C. G. Stueckelberg ... After the lecture,
Stueckelberg was making his way out alone ... from the CERN
ampitheatre, when Feynman - surrounded by admirers - made the
remark:
"He [ Stueckelberg ] did the work and walks alone
toward the sunset; and, here I [ Feynman ] am, covered in all
the glory, which rightfully should be his!" ...
"(4)
Feynman's remark raises two questions in my mind:
- 1 - When and how did Feynman find out about Stueckelberg's QED
work? Certainly it was before the CERN talk in 1965, and it could
have been any time after 1942 or 1943 when Stueckelberg sent his
paper to the Physical Review in New York.
- 2 - Why did Feynman not insist to the Nobel Prize committee
that Stueckelberg should share the Nobel Prize for QED, or at
least publicly acknowledge Stueckelberg's work in his Nobel
acceptance speech, or at the very least personally and publicly
acknowledge Stueckelberg's work in the CERN lecture with
Stueckelberg in the audience ( instead of only making an informal
remark after the lecture to some members of the audience, but not
to Stueckelberg personally )?
In 1984, nearly 20 years later, "... Stueckelberg ... said,
"I [ Stueckelberg ] look forward every day to my
eventual journey to Heaven ...
We live too long,"
... Seven months later, on September 4, 1984, Ernst Stueckelberg
was buried
..."(4).
The above quotations are from:
- 1 - The Beat of a Different Drum: The Life and
Sciece of Richard Feynman, by Jagdish Mehra (Oxford 1994) (pp.
245-248);
- 2 - The Second Creation, by Robert P. Crease
and Charles C. Mann (revised edition, Rutgers 1996) (pp. 141-144)
- However, historian Laurie Brown (Northwestern University
Emeritus Professor of Physics and Astronomy) told me in 2002 that
he had read Stueckelberg's original papers and did not see any
prior discovery of Yukawa's pion;
- 3 - QED and the Men who Made It, by Silvan S.
Schweber (Princeton 1994) (pp. 576-577);
- 4 - The Beat of a Different Drum: The Life and
Sciece of Richard Feynman, by Jagdish Mehra (Oxford 1994) (pp.
573-577).
Frank D. (Tony) Smith, Jr., 8 May 2001.
Tony Smith's Home Page
......