Geoffrey Chew

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For the British musicologist, see Geoffrey Chew (musicologist).

Geoffrey F. Chew
John H. Schwarz
John R. Taylor
Geoffrey F. Chew Los Alamos ID

Geoffrey Foucar Chew (

theoretical physicist. He is known for his bootstrap theory of strong interactions.[3]

Life

Chew worked as a professor of physics at the

University of Illinois. In addition, Chew was a member of the National Academy of Sciences as well as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.[4]
He was also a founding member of the International Center for Transdisciplinary Research (CIRET).

Chew was a student of

John H. Schwarz, one of the pioneers of string theory
.

Work

Chew was known as a leader of the

scattering matrix to calculate the interactions of bound-states without assuming that there is a point-particle field theory underneath. The S-matrix approach did not provide a local space-time description. Although it was not immediately appreciated by the practitioners, it was a natural framework in which to produce a quantum theory of gravity
.

Chew's central contribution to the program came in 1961:

Regge trajectories) where the square of the mass of a meson is linearly proportional to the spin (in their scheme, spin is plotted against mass squared on a so-called Chew–Frautschi plot), with the same constant of proportionality for each of the families. Since bound states
in quantum mechanics naturally fall into families of this sort, their conclusion, quickly accepted, was that none of the strongly interacting particles were elementary. The conservative point of view was that the bound states were made up of elementary particles, but Chew's more far-reaching vision was that there would be a new type of theory which describes the interactions of bound-states which have no point-like constituents at all. This approach was sometimes called nuclear democracy, since it avoided singling out certain particles as elementary.

Legacy

Although the S-matrix approach to the strong interactions was largely abandoned by the particle physics community in the 1970s in favor of quantum chromodynamics, a consistent theory for the scattering of bound-states on straight-line trajectories was eventually constructed and is nowadays known as string theory. Within string theory, Edward Witten reinterpreted S-matrix theory as a flat-space statement of the holographic principle.

Professor Chew participated in

religion and science discussions. He stated that an "appeal to God may be needed to answer the 'origin' question, 'Why should a quantum universe evolving toward a semiclassical limit be consistent?'" [6]

Chew investigated into models in which the concept of happenings or (pre-)events play a fundamental role, not only particles.[clarification needed] He saw similarities among his approach and the notion of occasion of Alfred North Whitehead.[7]

Awards

Chew received the Hughes Prize of the American Physics Society for his

Majorana Prize
in 2008.

References

  1. ^ U.S. Public Records Index Vol 1 (Provo, UT: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc.), 2010.
  2. ^ "Remembering Geoffrey Chew". UC Berkeley Physics. Archived from the original on April 28, 2019. Retrieved April 18, 2019.
  3. ^ Basarab Nicolescu, "The Bootstrap Principle and the Uniqueness of our World", in From Modernity to Cosmodernity - Science, Culture, and Spirituality, SUNY Press, 2018
  4. ^ a b Faculty: Geoffrey F. Chew, Physics at Berkeley, Department of Physics University of California (accessed April 2, 2012)
  5. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.7.394
    .
  6. Roy Abraham Varghese. This book is mentioned in a December 28, 1992, Time magazine article: Galileo And Other Faithful Scientists
  7. ^ Physics and Whitehead Workshop Archived April 29, 2012, at the Wayback Machine, August 5–6, 1998

External links

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