Volume 38, Number 7 · April 11, 1991
The Charms of a Physicist
By Jeremy Bernstein
The Joy of Insight: Passions of a Physicist
by Victor Weisskopf
Basic Books, 328 pp., $24.95
In the fall of 1950, when I was a senior at Harvard, I decided that I wanted to study the quantum theory. This was only moderately unreasonable. I was a mathematics major and had taken a solid course in freshman physics given by the theoretical physicist Wendell Furry. I had also read some popular books and had a great many philosophical talks about the quantum theory with my teacher Philipp Frank. While I knew some higher mathematics, when it came to physics I knew next to nothing. Nonetheless, I decided to enroll in the first-year graduate course in quantum theory taught by the then reigning genius in theoretical physics at Harvard, Julian Schwinger.
Review, 5859 words
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