Sam Edwards (physicist)
Sir Samuel Frederick Edwards ( born 1 February 1928 in Swansea, Wales ) is a British physicist.
Life and work
Samuel Edwards was born the son of Richard and Mary Jane Edwards. He attended the Grammar School in Swansea and then studied at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge. After the Master, he moved to Harvard University, where Julian Seymour Schwinger supervised his doctoral thesis. As a postdoctoral fellow, he worked from 1952 at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, before he returned to the United Kingdom. He did research at the University of Birmingham ( 1953-58 ) with Rudolf Peierls, then at the University of Manchester ( 1958-72 ), where he became in 1963 Professor of Theoretical Physics. In 1972 he moved as John Humphrey Plummer Professor at his home to Cambridge University and taught from 1984 until his retirement in 1995 as Cavendish Professor Physics. He was also from 1992 to 1995 Pro- Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge.
Edwards works in the field of condensed matter, particularly interest him polymer physics, spin glass and granular matter. He led 1958 quantum field theoretical methods in statistical physics. He examined systems with frozen disorder (English quenched disorder). Together with Philip W. Anderson in 1975 he suggested the replica trick before and worked on spin- glasses, then with RT Deam on the rubber elasticity, with DR Wilkinson on granular matter and RBS Oakeshott on powder. With Masao Doi he put on the tube model for the mobility of polymers. Among other things, the extension of this model was Pierre -Gilles de Gennes the 1991 Nobel Prize in Physics.
In 1953 he married Merriell EM Bland, with whom he has a son and three daughters.
Publications
- More than 250 papers in scientific journals
- Meinolf Dierkes and Coppock with Rob: Technological Risk. Oelgeschlager, Gunn and Hain, Cambridge / Mass. 1980, ISBN 0-89946-059-3 ( = Publication of the Science Center Berlin, Vol 23)
- With Masao Doi: The Theory of Polymer Dynamics. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1986, ISBN 0-19-851976-1, 6th Edition 2001, ISBN 0-19-852033-6 ( = International series of monographs on physics, Volume 73)
- Shaul M. Aharoni with: Rigid polymer networks. Springer, Berlin [ ua] 1994, ISBN 3-540-58340-8, ( = Advances in polymer science, Volume 118)