Far From the Madding Crowd

Julian Seymour Schwinger, thirty-five-year-old Professor of physics, has kept his life pretty much to himself. Since his seventeenth birthday, this genial, soft-spoken man has been challenging the frontiers of physics, armed with only his intellect, a pencil, and paper. Far removed from most undergraduates, only dimly aware of the machinery of collegiate life, and vaguer even about his own past, Schwinger dwells in a world apart. His personality spills out only in odd stories--his reputation for writing with both hands on the blackboard, his night-owl habits, and his excellence at ping-pong.

To the handful of graduates who take his advanced physics course, he is a lucid, if somewhat rapid lecture. He generally arrives late for class, marching in to scribble bursts of equations on the blackboard with incredible speed. When his right hand gets tired writing he switches to his left. He seldom looks at the class, but addresses the balckboard, writing as be talks. "When I lecture," he says, "I'm talking out loud to myself. I only hope that those who are listening will understand." Apparently this hope is justified for his lucidity often makes extremely complicated lecture material somewhat easier to digest. Schwinger likes teaching for it enables him to try out on his class new ways of attacking traditional problems.

This habit of recasting physics in new ways, the emblem of an insatiable intellect, has led him into the depths of his science at almost breakneck speed. When he was just starting high school in his native New York, he read unceasingly in physics. "I began to read systematically through the branch libraries uptown, gradually working my way downtown to the Public Library on 42nd Street." By the time Schwinger had graduated from high school, he had read thoroughly in atomic physics and quantum mechanics. His training in mathematics had been to read all that the Encyclopedia Britannica offered on that subject, which, as he said, "pretty well covered the field up to that time."

Schwinger first went to City College in New York. After two years he switched to Columbia and received a Ph.D. in physics at the age of twenty-one. After receiving his degree, he went to Stanford for two years to work as Oppenheimer's research assistant. He taught at Purdue for a year, and then worked on radar at M.I.T. during the war. He came to Harvard in 1946 as an associate professor. A year later, at the age of twenty-nine, Harvard advanced him to the rank of full professor. He is married and drives his cadillac to class from a house on Fairweather Street in Cambridge.

It was at M.I.T. that Schwinger developed his owlish habits. The noise and bustle of the Radiation Laboratory was so intense during the day, that he preferred to work at night. He often worked from midnight to dawn--"there were fewer people around then, just the scrub women."

But if Schwinger worked late, he began early. At the age of seventeen he published his first paper in the Physical Review. Since then, he has been contributing constantly, delving into topics of higher physics. In his own highly specialized, creative field, Schwinger is almost alone; there are only a handful of theoretical physicists of his prolificy in the world.

Although he has won several prizes for his past work, the National Academy Prize, in 1949, the first Einstein prize in 1951, a medal from Columbia in 1951 ("They were supposed to give me an honorary degree, but I was too young"), Schwinger believes that his present work will be the most significant. To a layman he can explain it only in generalities. The gist of his effort is to force modern physics to a showdown. The present physical theories are so complicated that they need an enormous amount of experimental work to check their validity. Schwinger aims to recast quantum mechanics so that these physical theories, if false, would reduce to self-contradictions.

One of Schwinger's main problems with his work has been to keep up with his thought. Although he says he can already visualize the whole framework of his theory, he is only beginning to realize it on paper. Thus his ideas always run far ahead of his ability to write them down. He says his writing is already three years behind his thought.

Working in a complex field, and living in a gadget-ridden society, Schwinger stands out in bold relief. His office, almost bare of books and papers, with only a few mementos, reminds one that no physical paraphernalia stands between him and his work. He is, perhpas, driven by the excitement of discovery. For although living in a defined, pedantic way, he pursues, in physics, and ephemeral certainty remote from the certitudes of everyday experience. "We're in a provisional state of things now," he says, glancing at a blackboard covered with symbols. "We don't know where we stand."