Sidney Coleman
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| Sidney Coleman | |
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| Born | March 7, 1937 Chicago |
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| Died | November 18, 2007 |
| Residence | United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | Physicist |
| Institutions | Harvard University |
| Alma mater | Illinois Institute of Technology Caltech |
| Doctoral advisor | Murray Gell-Mann  |
| Doctoral students | Ian Affleck Mark Alford Carl Bender Katherine Benson Jacques Distler David Griffiths John LoSecco Jeffrey Mandula John March-Russell Robert Mawhinney Gergory Moore Philip Nelson Leonard Parker David Politzer Lee Smolin Paul Steinhardt Erick Weinberg Richard Woodard Anthony Zee |
| Known for | Quantum field theory |
| Notable awards | Dirac Medal Dannie Heineman Prize |
Sidney Richard Coleman (7 March 1937 – 18 November 2007) was an eminent theoretical physicist who studied under Murray Gell-Mann.
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[edit] Life and work
Sidney Coleman grew up on the Far North Side of Chicago. In 1957, he got his undergraduate degree from the Illinois Institute of Technology.
He received his PhD from Caltech in 1962, and moved to Harvard University that year, where he spent his entire career, meeting his wife Diana there in the late 1970s. They were married in 1982.
"He was a giant in a peculiar sense, because he's not known to the general populace," Nobel laureate Sheldon Glashow told the Boston Globe. "He's not a Stephen Hawking; he has virtually no visibility outside. But within the community of theoretical physicists, he's kind of a major god. He is the physicist's physicist."[1]
In 1966, Antonino Zichichi recruited Coleman as a lecturer at the then-new summer school at International School for Subnuclear Physics in Erice, Sicily. A legendary figure at the school throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, Coleman was awarded the title "Best Lecturer" on the occasion of the school's fifteenth anniversary (1979). His explanation of spontaneous symmetry breaking in terms of a little man living inside a ferromagnet has often been cited by later popularizers. [2] [3] The classic particle physics text Aspects of Symmetry (1985) is a collection of Coleman's lectures at Erice.
His lectures at Harvard were also legendary. Students in one quantum field theory course created Tshirts bearing his image and a collection of his more noted quotations, among them: "Not only God knows, I know, and by the end of the semester, you will know."
In 1989, he won the US National Academy of Sciences Award for Excellence in Scientific Reviewing. That award praised his "lucid, insightful, and influential reviews on partially conserved currents, gauge theories, instantons, and magnetic monopoles--subjects fundamental to theoretical physics." [4]
[edit] Contributions to physics
Some of his best known works are
- Coleman-Mandula theorem [1]
- Tadpoles
- Coleman theorem[2]
- Equivalence of the Thirring model and the quantum Sine-Gordon equation[3]
- Semiclassical analysis of the fate of a false vacuum
- Coleman-Weinberg potential
- Q-balls in the thin-wall limit
[edit] References
- ^ Sidney Coleman and Jeffrey Mandula (1967). "All Possible Symmetries of the S Matrix". Phys. Rev. 159: 1251–1256.
- ^ Sidney Coleman: "There are no Goldstone bosons in two dimensions", Commun. Math. Phys. 31, 259 (1973)
- ^ http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PRD/v11/i8/p2088_1
- Aspects of Symmetry, Sidney Coleman, Cambridge University Press, 1985, ISBN 0-521-31827-0
[edit] External links
- Sidneyfest 2005 - physicists' celebration of Sidney Coleman's life
- Chicago Tribune obituary, November 20, 2007.
- Harvard Gazette obituary, November 29, 2007.
- Boston Globe obituary, January 20, 2008.
- Physics Today obituary, May 2008, written by Sheldon Glashow.
- "Quantum Mechanics In Your Face", A lecture by Prof. Coleman at the New England sectional meeting of the American Physical Society April 9, 1994.
- Physics 253: Quantum Field Theory. Video of lectures by Sidney Coleman at Harvard in 1975-1976.
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