Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli  40

Ciro Santilli's admiration for Dyson goes beyond his "unify all the things approach", which Ciro loves, but also extends to the way he talks and the things he says. Dyson is one of Ciro's favorite physicist.

Besides this, he was also very idealistic compassionate, and supported a peaceful resolution until World War II with United Kingdom was basically inevitable. Note that this was a strategic mistake.

Dyson is "hawk nosed" as mentioned in Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics by James Gleick (1994) chapter "Dyson". But he wasn't when he was young, see e.g. i2.wp.com/www.brainpickings.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/freemandyson_child-1.jpg?resize=768%2C1064&ssl=1 It seems that his nose just never stopped growing after puberty.

He also has some fun stories, like him practicing night climbing while at Cambridge University, and having walked from Cambridge to London (~86km!) in a day with his wheelchair bound friend.

Ciro Santilli feels that the label child prodigy applies even more so to him than to Feynman and Julian Schwinger.

Bibliography:

Head of the theoretical division at the Los Alamos Laboratory during the Manhattan Project.

Richard Feynman was working under him there, and was promoted to team lead by him because Richard impressed Hans.

He was also the person under which Freeman Dyson was originally under when he moved from the United Kingdom to the United States.

And Hans also impressed Feynman, both were problem solvers, and liked solving mental arithmetic and numerical analysis.

This relationship is what brought Feynman to Cornell University after World War II, Hans' institution, which is where Feynman did the main part of his Nobel prize winning work on quantum electrodynamics.

Hans must have been the perfect PhD advisor. He's always smiling, and he seemed so approachable. And he was incredibly capable, notably in his calculation skills, which were much more important in those pre-computer days.

WTF is wrong with that family???

He was a leading figure at the MIT Radiation Laboratory, and later he was head at the Columbia University laboratory that carried out the crucial Lamb-Retherford experiment and the anomalous magnetic dipole moment of the electron published at The Magnetic Moment of the Electron by Kusch and Foley (1948) using related techniques.

Personal website: jakobschwichtenberg.com/

PhD at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in 2019: www-kseta.ttp.kit.edu/fellows/Jakob.Schwichtenberg/ on the strong CP problem.

Books:

This seems like a cool dude. Besides a hardcore scientist, he also made many important contributions to the French education and research system.

Richard Feynman's mentor at Princeton University, and notable contributor to his development of quantum electrodynamics.

Worked with Niels Bohr at one point.

Web of Stories interview (1996): www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFzVlqiUh95Q881umWUPjQbB. He's a bit slow, you wonder if he's going to continute or not! One wonders if it is because of age, or he's always been like that.

This is the one Ciro Santilli envies the most, because he has such a great overlap with Ciro's interests, e.g.:

Extremely precocious, borderline child prodigy, he was reading Dirac at 13-14 from the library.

He started working at night and sleeping during the moring/early afternoon while he was at university.

He was the type of guy that was so good that he didn't really have to follow the university rules very much. He would get into trouble for not following some stupid requirement, but he was so good that they would just let him get away with it.

Besides quantum electrodynamics, Julian worked on radar at the Rad Lab during World War II, unlike most other top physicists who went to Los Alamos Laboratory to work on the atomic bomb, and he made important contributions there on calculating the best shape of the parts and so on.

He was known for being very formal mathematically and sometimes hard to understand, in stark contrast to Feynman which was much more lose and understandable, especially after Freeman Dyson translated him to the masses.

However, QED and the men who made it: Dyson, Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga by Silvan Schweber (1994) does emphacise that he was actually also very practical in the sense that he always aimed to obtain definite numbers out of his calculations, and that was not only the case for the Lamb shift.

The bald confident chilled out particle physics guy from Stanford University!

One can't help but wonder if he smokes pot or not.

Also one can't stop thinking abot Leonard Hofstadter from The Big Bang Theory upoen hearing his name.