Sidney Coleman
Sidney Richard Coleman ( born March 7, 1937 in Chicago, † November 18, 2007 in Cambridge ( Massachusetts)) was an American theoretical physicist.
Life and work
Coleman grew up in Chicago. He studied at the Illinois Institute of Technology ( bachelor's degree in 1957 ) and received his doctorate in 1962 at the California Institute of Technology Murray Gell-Mann. From 1961 he was Corning Lecturer and Fellow at Harvard University, where he was an assistant professor in 1963, associate professor in 1966 and professor in 1969. From 1980 he was there Donner Professor of Science. In 2003 he retired.
Coleman worked in the field of particle physics and quantum field theory ( QFT ). His lectures (eg in the summer schools in Italy Erice in Sicily from 1966, but also at the summer school in Cargese, Corsica and in Aspen, Colorado ) about this area of theoretical physics were famous for their clarity and intelligibility and found wide distribution. For 30 years he held a much-visited QFT lecture at Harvard.
1967 showed Coleman with Jeffrey Mandula that symmetries with internal symmetries are no non-trivial associations summarized in the Poincaré group space-time ( Coleman - Mandula theorem, a more particular theorem in this direction proved Lochlainn O'Raifeartaigh 1965). In the 1970s he examined, inter alia, Erick Weinberg spontaneous symmetry breakings by quantum fluctuations. In 1973 he proved the non-existence of Goldstone bosons in QFT with two dimensions (one space and one time dimension ), a variant of the Mermin -Wagner- Hohenberg theorem in statistical mechanics ( there forbids it in two or fewer dimensions the spontaneous breaking continuous symmetries ). Influential also were Coleman's studies of the decay of metastable ( "false " ) vacuum states with applications in cosmology. According to this theory, new universes as expanding bubbles in a false vacuum, ie from states of higher energy but are prevented from decay by a classical energy barrier quantum mechanically but can decay by tunneling of the barrier. In 1988 he came out with a theory to explain the disappearance of the cosmological constant. He explained this by the fact that the universe is on the Planck scale from grub holes, through which the universe is connected to other universes. A zero value of the cosmological constant is then obtained as a kind of interference effect between the different universes.
2000 he received the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics and 1990, the Dirac Medal ( ICTP ). Posthumously, he was awarded the Erice price. In 1964 he was Sloan Fellow. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the NAS Award for Scientific Reviewing he received in 1989, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In his last years he suffered from a form of Parkinson 's disease. 2005, a conference in his honor at Harvard University ( " Sidneyfest " ) was held, which was attended by many Nobel Prize winners.
Among his doctoral students include David Politzer ( Coleman in his work on asymptotic freedom, which earned him the Nobel Prize, supervised), Erick Weinberg, Ian Affleck, Carl M. Bender, Gregory W. Moore, Philip Nelson, Jeffrey Mandula, Anthony Zee, Paul Steinhardt, Lee Smolin, Leonard Parker, Jacques Distler, David J. Griffiths.
Coleman was married since 1982. He had from his youth a soft spot for science fiction and also advised some science- fiction writers.
Works (selection)
- Aspects of Symmetry: Selected Erice Lectures, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1985
- There are no Goldstone bosons in two dimensions, Communications in mathematical physics, Bd.31, 1973, p.259
- Fate of the false vacuum 1: semiclassical analysis, Physical Review D, Bd.15, 1977, S.2929, Part 2 with Curtis Callan " Quantum Corrections ," Physical Review D, vol 16, 1977, S.1762
- With De Luccia Gravitational effects on and off vacuum decay, Physical Review D, vol 21, 1980, S.3305
- Erick Weinberg: Radiative Corrections of spontaneous symmetry breaking, Physical Review D, vol 7, 1973, S.1888 -1911
- With Mandula All possible symmetries of the S matrix, Physical Review, Vol 159, 1967, S.1251 ( Coleman - Mandula theorem)
- Why there is nothing rather than something: Theory of the Cosmological Constant, Nuclear Physics B, Bd.310, 1988, S.643