Jeremy Bernstein - The difference between Schwinger's and Weisskopf's lectures (18/86)

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To listen to more of Jeremy Bernstein’s stories, go to the playlist: • Jeremy Bernstein - My ...
Born in 1929, Jeremy Bernstein is an American physicist, educator and writer known for the clarity of his writing for the lay reader on the major issues of modern physics. [Listener: Christopher Sykes]
TRANSCRIPT: So I continued in mathematics in graduate school but I was drifting toward physics at that time and I hadn't taken any physics but I was drifting in that direction.
So I took my first course in quantum mechanics from Schwinger. And it was an extraordinary course, though I didn't appreciate it really at the time, because I just didn't know anything but I certainly appreciate it now. I mean it was fine, the first part, where he talked about the reasons for there being a quantum theory, but then he had his own development. He was in rivalry with Feynman. Feynman had a quantum theory, Schwinger had a quantum theory and so Schwinger's personal quantum theory was abstract and, I think powerful and abstract, and completely the wrong thing to teach to students.
So we used to go down to MIT and listen to [Victor] Weisskopf lecture on quantum theory. Weisskopf was completely different. I remember the first lecture I heard of Weisskopf. He came in and there was a big class, all men, and he said, 'Boys, I had a wonderful night last night.' And everybody said, 'Yay, Vicky, bravo, bravo.' He said, 'No, no, it's not what you think. I finally understood the Born approximation.' Then he explained the Born approximation

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28 сен 2024

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Комментарии : 8

@schmetterling4477 2 года назад

I can believe that. Schwinger's approach would have been completely inaccessible to all but maybe the most gifted students.

@capthawkeye8010 9 месяцев назад

Schwinger had to come up with his own language in order to explain his solutions to himself. It made sense if you were Schwinger. Dyson and others eventually found it possible to translate Schwinger into conventional mathematical language and symbols but it took a lot of effort. Schwinger's story is very similar to that of Funes, The Memorious. The man with a supreme memory and cognizance but who's simple inability to communicate his brilliance with others stemmed from an inability to empathize with others through shared language and ideas. Funes came up with a better system for numbers than our own-but it was incomprehensible to all but himself alone, making it functionally useless. Schwinger was lucky, ultimately that his peers were willing to work with him and put the effort into translating his work or his life's efforts might well have vanished into nothing.

@schmetterling4477 9 месяцев назад

@@capthawkeye8010 That is entirely possible. I remember reading Schwinger's papers and my mind was virtually blank. I had no idea how he had come up with them. Feynman is extremely "reader-friendly" in my opinion and Tomonaga is somewhere in the middle. Schwinger's approach is something else. Having said that, I am an experimentalist, so the "fault" might be with me.