Harry J. Lipkin
Harry Jeannot Lipkin ( born June 16, 1921 in New York City ) is an Israeli theoretical physicist who deals primarily with nuclear physics and elementary particle physics.
Lipkin attended high school in Rochester, New York and studied electrical engineering at Cornell University, where he also attended some physics courses by Hans Bethe and Bruno Rossi. In 1942 he graduated ( bachelor's degree ). During the Second World War he developed as an engineer a radar receiver for anti-submarine defense at the MIT Radiation Laboratory. In 1948, he received his master's degree and in 1950 he received his doctorate at Princeton, where he among other things, David Bohm physics studied, with an experimental thesis on the relativistic correction of the scattering formulas for electrons and positrons ( has the correction for both different signs ). According to Lipkin's own words, it was the first time that an experiment showed that positrons are described by the Dirac equation. In 1950 he moved with his wife Malka to Israel to be part of the Kibbutz Movement. Instead of working in agriculture, however, he was 1953/4 sent by the Israeli government to the French Saclay in order to retrain in nuclear technology and help with early plans for the first Israeli nuclear reactor at Dimona (1956 to 1958 he was an advisor to the IAEC ). From 1954 he was in Rehovot, where he built the first degree program in Israel for Nuclear Physics at the Weizmann Institute of Science. Lipkin remained until his retirement Professor of Physics at the Weizmann Institute. He was last seen regularly in the Argonne National Laboratory in the USA. 1991/92 he was a Sackler Scholar. Even today ( 2007), he is at the Weizmann Institute and the Sackler Institute of the University of Tel Aviv.
Lipkin is mainly for applications of group theory in physics, especially in quark models in the 1960s, is known. His book " Lie groups for pedestrians " was then widespread. According to his own words, particle physicists were the use of unitary symmetries that time not familiar, but well trained to Racah and Wigner methods nuclear physicists, which allowed them to get started in this area. In 1961 she confirmed Gell- Mann's Eightfold Way SU (3) model against Sakatas model ( also SU (3 ), but with proton, neutron and lambda in a triplet ) in the calculation of Mesonenerzeugung from proton-antiproton annihilation. Lipkin also dealt with later predictions from the quark model ( pentaquarks, etc.) and eg with neutrino physics and the foundations of quantum mechanics.
In 1959 he developed with S. Goshen Spectrum Generating Algebras ( algebras harmonic oscillators ), which they used in the solid state and nuclear physics. Simplified models for the study of dynamic symmetries and collective excitations, partly motivated by the shell model of atomic nuclei, bear names Lipkin ( Lipkin model or Lipkin - Meshkov - Glick model).
1958/59 he used at the University of Illinois at Urbana ( in the group of Hans Frauenfelder ) an extension of the scattering experiment from his dissertation ( "Double Scattering " method ) to the just discovered parity violation to investigate during beta decay. There, his work also began on also just discovered Mössbauer effect, which got its name from Lipkin.
Lipkin is also actively teach reading in the dissemination of a method, children ( LITAF that developed the teacher Nira Altalef in Israel in the 1980s ). The problem is particularly acute in Israel as a prototypical immigration country with many languages of immigrants.
In 1957 he founded with the virus researcher Alexander Kohn ( Cohen ), Journal of Irreproducible Results, which also had a role in the founding of the Ig Nobel Prize. The idea of the journal was created when Lipkin 1957 organized the first international conference on nuclear physics in Israel.
In 1973 he received the Kaplun Prize and in 1980 the Rothschild Prize. In 2002 he received the Wigner Medal.
He was married since 1949 and has two children.