Physicist Rudolph Peierls was born #OTD in 1907. He contributed across the breadth of 20th century physics, from quantum field theory to nuclear physics to statistical mechanics.
Image: Atomic Heritage Foundation
Physicist Rudolph Peierls was born #OTD in 1907. He contributed across the breadth of 20th century physics, from quantum field theory to nuclear physics to statistical mechanics.
Image: Atomic Heritage Foundation
In 1940, Peierls co-authored a famous memorandum with Otto Frisch, discussing the feasibility of developing an atomic bomb with a small amount of uranium-235.
He eventually led the British Mission of scientists who joined the Manhattan Project, working in New York and Los Alamos.
Here is an (audio!) interview with Sir Rudolph, from the "Voices of the Manhattan Project" oral history project, where he discusses his time at Los Alamos.
https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/voices/oral-histories/sir-rudolf-peierlss-interview/
One of Peierls's important contributions came in a 1952 paper titled "The commutation laws of relativistic field theory." In it, he develops a covariant generalization of the Poisson bracket.
Ref: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1098/rspa.1952.0158
The Poisson bracket is a mathematical structure at the heart of the Hamiltonian description of the dynamics of classical physical systems. It is the starting point for "canonical quantization" — the most common method of quantizing a classical theory.
But, by construction, this approach to quantization will always single out a preferred notion of time.
The Peierls Bracket, on the other hand, is “covariant.” Unlike the structures underlying canonical quantization, its definition doesn't depend on a specific frame of reference. So it is well-suited to relativistic applications where such distinctions are not supposed to be important.
Physicist Bryce DeWitt made extensive use of the Peierls Bracket in his work on field theory and quantum gravity. Here's the first paragraph to the preface of his book "The Global Approach to Quantum Field Theory."
It comes up again and again in DeWitt's work; he never fails to add a comment about how "beautiful" it is. In recent years the Peierls Bracket has popped up in the context of holographic dualities like the AdS/CFT correspondence.
But you don't have to wade into relativistic field theory or quantum gravity to appreciate Peierls's work! If you're a physicist, or have some technical background, have a look at his books "Suprises in Theoretical Physics" and "More Surprises in Theoretical Physics."
The books collect examples where a naive or unrefined physical intuition leads one astray: simple problems that lead to counterintuitive results, or complex problems that yield surprisingly simple solutions.
Both are classics and highly recommended.
If you have JSTOR access, you can find them there!
Surprises: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1416425
More Surprises: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv10crg2s
And just to be a completist, I should point out that Peierls’s memoir "Bird of Passage: Recollections of a Physicist" is also available on JSTOR.
I have not read it, but have had it recommended to me many times.
Uh, what is this weird image showing up as the preview of the link for the oral history interview at the Atomic Heritage Foundation?
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