Geoffrey Chew

Geoffrey Chew Foucar ( born June 5, 1924 in Washington, DC) is an American theoretical physicist.

Chew graduated from the George Washington University (Bachelor 1944) and in 1944 with Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago, where he received his doctorate at Fermi 1948 ( The elastic scattering of high energy nucleons by deuteron ). From 1948 he was at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Radiation Laboratory and from 1949 as assistant professor of physics. 1950 to 1956 he was at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign ( since 1955 as a professor ). In 1956 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study. From 1957 he was professor of physics at Berkeley. From 1993 he was a professor emeritus. 1986 to 1993 he was dean of the Faculty of Physics and 1974-1978 chairman of the physics faculty. It was 1962/63 Visiting Professor at the University of Cambridge as a Fellow of Churchill College, 1970/71 Visiting Professor at Princeton University, and in 1983/84 at the University of Paris.

At Berkeley, he built up an influential in the 1960s school of theoretical particle physicists who were on the theory of S- matrix to understand the strong interaction. After Steven Frautschi he discovered in 1960 that one can divide the mesons in families in which the spin is proportional to the square of the mass, he interpreted this to mean that none of the known particles of the strong interaction was fundamental. Instead, he sought a description of analytical properties of the scattering matrix without resorting to a quantum field theory in the local space-time formulation recourse ( bootstrap theory). His approach was also known as " nuclear democracy ", since none of the " bound states" was regarded as elementary. In the 1970s, the S- matrix theory has been replaced by a "conservative" ordinary point particle quantum field theory in the description of the strong interaction, quantum chromodynamics with the corresponding quark model. At the same time, however, the string theory, which today is regarded as a fundamental description of all the interactions of elementary particles developed from the S- matrix theory from about 1970.

He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (since 1962 ) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1962 he was awarded the Hughes Prize of the American Physical Society and the 1969 Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award.

His doctoral include the string theorist David Gross ( 1966) and John Black ( 1966).

Writings

• The analytic S- matrix, Benjamin 1965
• Particles as S- Matrix Poles: Hadron democracy, in Hoddeson, Dresden, Brown ( ed.) Pions to quarks: particle physics in the 1950s, Cambridge University Press 1997