Murray Gell-Mann - Criticism of Julian Schwinger (106/200)

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New York-born physicist Murray Gell-Mann (1929-2019) was a theoretical physicist. His considerable contributions to physics include the theory of quantum chromodynamics. He was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles. [Listener: Geoffrey West; date recorded: 1997]

TRANSCRIPT: I was at Columbia once, visiting, when Julian Schwinger gave the colloquium, and he talked about quantum electrodynamics at short distances—his work on it. And it was all wrong. He told about his calculations and his efforts to look at the behavior of the propagators at small distances, large momenta, and finally he concluded that the most likely form was a power. Well, Francis Low and I had shown that you get... definitely get a power if you leave out photon self-energy parts, and that if you include photon self-energy parts you don’t… absolutely do not get a power: you get a renormalization group result but not a power. And I got up and I said, 'But this… this just isn't true. What you're saying just isn't right.' And then he said, 'Oh, but this agrees with what you and Francis Low have done.' So he... in other words he hadn't mentioned our work, now he showed that he actually was familiar with it, wasn't that he had never heard of it, he was familiar with it, but he deliberately didn't mention it and also got it wrong. I didn't find that kind of behavior very... very… I didn't find it acceptable.

[GW] But you must have admired his elegance as a physicist?

No. I despised it!

[GW] Oh. I just was thinking about your earlier statements as a graduate student and so on.

No, I thought elegance in the service of things that are correct and original is nice, but elegance in the service of stuff that's either wrong or stolen or both, I didn't consider it to be so... so very impressive.

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