I heard this morning the news that Steven Weinberg passed away yesterday at the age of 88. He was arguably the dominant figure in theoretical particle physics during its period of great success from the late sixties to the early eighties. In particular, his 1967 work on unification of the weak and electromagnetic interactions was a huge breakthrough, and remains to this day at the center of the Standard Model, our best understanding of fundamental physics.
During the years 1975-79 when I was a student at Harvard, I believe the hallway where Weinberg, Glashow and Coleman had offices close together was the greatest concentration of the world’s major figures driving the field of particle theory, with Weinberg seen as the most prominent of the three. From what I recall, in a meeting one of the graduate students (Eddie Farhi?) referred to “Shelly, Sidney and Weinberg”, indicating the way Weinberg was a special case even in that group. I had the great fortune to attend
Nominations of EPFL professors 16 July
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talks cam : Quantum Field Theory and Beyond
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Virtual Particles: What are they?
The term “virtual particle” is an endlessly confusing and confused subject for the layperson, and even for the non-expert scientist. I have read many books for laypeople (yes, I was a layperson once myself, and I remember, at the age of 16, reading about this stuff) and all of them talk about virtual particles and not one of them has ever made any sense to me. So I am going to try a different approach in explaining it to you.
The best way to approach this concept, I believe, is to forget you ever saw the word “particle” in the term. A virtual particle is not a particle at all. It refers precisely to a disturbance in a field that is