Princeton Diary

Sam Treiman with Steve Weinberg. Weinberg is so famaus these days that not many people know Treiman was his thesis advisor. This photo is from one of the issues of the Princeton Alumni Weekly.

• My thesis advisor was Sam Treiman. He was a good teacher and wrote good letters for me throughout my career. However, did he have enough scientific competence to support my research results after my PhD degree? My answer is No. I used to feel very bad about this, but not now. These days, I am known as a self-made man among my colleagues in physics.

  Since I published a number of papers with Eugene Wigner (Nobel 1963) during the years from 1986 to 1990, I am also known as Wigner's youngest student at Princeton. Click here for an interesting story.

  Steven Weinberg (Nobel 1979) was very famous. Did you know his advisor at Princeton was also Sam Treiman? Weinberg got his degree in 1957, and I got mine in 1961. You may check the list of Treiman's student from Treiman's Wikipage.

• In 1962, I was appointed as an assistant professor at the University of Maryland near the city of Washington, DC, and I started my professional career.

  While I was struggling to find out my own way of doing physics, the physics world produced a genius of the century in 1965. His name was Roger Dashen, and he became a full professor at the Princeton's Institute of Advanced Study (Einstein's Institute) in 1965. I became very unhappy because of my Herod Complex. Someone other than myself is a genius? Totally unacceptable to me.

• I looked at Dashen's papers carefully and found a gross mistake in his reasoning. I then published my result in the Physical Review. Click here for a detailed story.

  However, was the American physics community going to accept my result? The answer was No. The average physicists were not smart enough to understand Dashen's papers or my papers. Thus, the reaction from the Amrican physics community was

  Dashen is a genius, but you are only a Korean.
  Go back to Korea!

  This was a very valid argument in the United States at that time (1960-70). Korea was regarded as a hopelessly underdeveloped country. Not knowing the history of that area earlier than the Pearl Harbor Day of 1941, my American friends used to say the best solution of the Korean problem is to give the country to Japan.

  Sam Treiman and his wife, with my family in 1987. My son was in his quantum mechanics clas at Princeton during his seior year. This photo was taking during the reception for graduating seniors and their families.

• Thus, my position at the University was in danger. The only person who could help me in this difficult situation was Sam Treiman, who was my thesis advisor at Princeton. I went to Princeton to explain to him the technical details of Dashen's mistake, but he did not have enough brain to understand my explanations. He became very angry, and his attitude toward me was "Never come to Princeton again!"

  In the meantime, the University of Maryland went through a very careful examination of my case by contacting all possible experts in the field, and determined that I was right. This is the reason why I still maintain my office on the University campus, and publish books and articles with the University address.

  The United States has been very nice to me.

• This means that I became alive and well again, but I could not use my Princeton background through my thesis advisor. Dashen was still a genius there. However, I could still use my Princeton connection if I change the the name of my advisor. How was it possible after the graduation?

  When I was a student there (1958-61), I noticed that Eugene Paul Wigner (Nobel 1963) was totally isolated from the rest of the physics department. The best way was to contact him, but how? The only way to contact was to tell him the story he wanted to hear. I got this idea from my piece of Korean wisdom.

What story did I tell Wigner?

• Wigner published many papers, but his 1939 paper on his little groups was dearest to his heart. The paper deals with the internal space-time symmetries of particles in Einstein's Lorentz-covariant world.

  He was of course happy with his Nobel prize of 1963, but was not 100-percent happy because the prize was not for this paper of 1939. He wanted to hear that this paper alone deserves one full Nobel prize. This is precisely what I told him in 1986, and I had to give the reason why.

  Earlier, after my disappointment with my thesis advisor in 1966, I studied Wigner's 1939 paper on the internal space-time symmetries of particles in Einstein's world. What does the word internal mean? Click here.

• With my younger colleagues I published my papers in from 1983 to 1986 leading to this table:

  Einstein's World Massive/Slow between Massless/Fast

  Energy Momentum E=p2/2m Einstein's E=(m2 + p2)1/2 E = cp

  Helicity Spin, Gauge S3 S1 S2 Wigner's 1939 paper S3 Gauge Trans.

  This portrait was constructed by a Turkish physicst named Bullent Atalay in 1979.

• Earlier in 1979, a Turkish physicist named Bulent Atalay constructed this portrait of Wigner with Einstein. Wigner was so happy with this portrait that he prominently displayed it in his office.

  With the table given above, I was able to tell Wigner that his 1939 paper is as important as Einstein's special theory of relativity which leads to the formula E = mc².

  Wigner was so happy that he invited me to publish papers with him, and I wrote seven papers to make him happy. Since I published those papers with him, I became known as Wigner's youngest student at Princeton.

• Since I became Wigner's student particulary on the Einstein issue, I am able to insist on the following genealogy to the world.
  

Paul A. M. Dirac was Wigner's brother-in-law.

Physics faculty photo of the Univ. of Maryland (Spring 1963). I came to this University in July of 1962, and I am the youngest person in this photo.

• When I came to the University of Maryland in 1962, I was the youngest faculty member of the physics department.

  John S. Toll was the ambitious chairman of the department. He invited Paul A. M. Dirac (Nobel 1933) to the University for one week, and assigned me as personal assistant to him. My friends in the department called me the "baby sitter" for him.

• For me, this was the golden opportunity to learn physics directly from him. Since I was not happy with what Princeton people were doing at that time, I was like Nicodemus listening to Jesus (story from the Gospel of John). Click here for the detailed story.

• Even though Wigner's sister was Dirac's wife, and Dirac and Wigner met often, it is not clear whether they ever discussed physics when they were together. Wigner became very happy when I explained to him what Dirac did in the language he used in his 1939 paper.

• Neither Dirac nor Wigner was familiar with the experimental results from high-energy accelerators during the second half of the 20th Century. It was indeed a rewarding experience for me to offer my explanation of what we see in the real world in terms of the theoretical devices developed by these two "famous brothers-in-law."

• Dirac wrote beautifuful sentences and formulas. Indeed, his papers are like poems. On the other hand, his papers do not have figures. It was fun to translate his poems into cartoons. I was able to summarize Dirac's lifetime efforts and synthesize them as

  One hundred years ago, Niels Bohr was worrying about the electron orbit of the hydrogen atom, while Albert Einstein was interested in how things appear to moving observers. They met occasionally to discuss physics. Did they talk about moving hydrogen atoms? If they did, there are no written records to indicate their discussions on this issue. If they did not, it was because there are no observable hydrogen atoms moving with relativistic speed.

• If I raise this question, I am not doing any injustice to them.

  I am proud to say that I did this mathematical exercise during my war-time high-school years (1951-53) in Korea. Click here for a story.

• The question then is whether this figure has anything to with what we see in the real world.

  The moving hyrogen atom is translated into the moving bound state. After Gell-Mann's formulation of the quark model in 1964, the proton became a quantum bound state of more fudamental parrticles called the "quarks," just like the hydrogen atom. The proton can be accelerated, and its speed can become very close to that of light. How does this fast-moving bound state appear in the laboratory? In 1969, Feynman summuarized how it appears. It is called Feynmna's parton picture.

  The issue then becomes whether Gell-Mann's quark model and Feynman's parton picture are two different ways to observe the same thing. This question becomes the same as how Einstein's energy-momentum relation appears for slow and fast particles. Thus, we are allowed to add an additional row to the above table. This in the bluse row in the following table.

  Einstein's World Massive/Slow between Massless/Fast

  Energy Momentum E = p2/2m Einstein's E=(m2 + p2)1/2 E = cp

  Helicity Spin & Gauge S3 S1 S2 Wigner's Little Group Helicity Gauge Trans.

  Hadrons, Bound States Gell-Mann's Quark Model One Lorentz- Covariant Entity Feynman's Parton Picture

  This table was contained in my paper published in Physical Review Letters (1989). Click here for the paper.

• Click here detailed explanations.

• Princeton is talking about me:

  May 2023.