We read the Search and Discovery piece “Physics Nobel Prize to Nambu, Kobayashi, and Maskawa for theories of symmetry breaking” (Physics Today, December 2008, page 16) with great interest. Since it addresses history, we feel compelled to point out that work at Harvard University anticipated the cited breakthroughs in both quantum electrodynamics and the electroweak synthesis.
Julian Schwinger was undoubtedly the first to solve the problems of renormalization in QED. 1 Richard Feynman’s second paper on QED directly precedes Schwinger’s second covariant reformulation of his own theory. It is seriously ahistorical to attribute perturbative QED to only Feynman and Sin-itiro Tomonaga. All three shared the Nobel Prize for QED. We think it was the physics community’s frequent failure to recognize Schwinger’s fundamental contribution to QED that led C. N. Yang to observe, “I believe Schwinger was justifiably unhappy that the younger generation, dazzled by the brilliant performer that Feynman was, have forgotten that it was Schwinger who had first scaled the mighty peak that is known as renormalization.” 2
In the 1950s Schwinger went on to lay the groundwork for what eventually became the electroweak synthesis. 3 Details were wrong because of the experimental confusion at the time, but his work led directly to that of Sheldon Glashow, 4 six years before that of Steven Weinberg. Glashow, Weinberg, and Abdus Salam shared the Nobel Prize for the unification of weak interactions with electromagnetism. But as Peter Higgs correctly noted, “That vacuum expectation values of scalar fields, or ‘vacuons,’ might play such a role in the breaking of symmetries was first noted by Schwinger.” 5
Fame is fleeting, and even Nobel Prizes do not confer lasting memory on their recipients. But let’s try to keep the record straight for a new generation of physicists, who may pick up their knowledge of history from Physics Today’s pages.
