Enrico Fermi by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Died of cancer at age 53. Ciro Santilli just can't help but speculate that it is linked to radioactivity exposure.
Julian Schwinger by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
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.
Pascual Jordan by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
One of the leading figures of the early development of quantum electrodynamics.
Sylvain Poirier by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli feels a bit like this guy:
singlesunion.org/ so cute, he's looking for true love!!! This is something Ciro often thinks about: why it is so difficult to find love without looking people in the eye. The same applies to jobs to some extent. He has an Incel wiki page: incels.wiki/w/Sylvain_Poirier :-)
Figure 1.
Sylvain's photo from his homepage.
Source. He's not ugly at all! Just a regular good looking French dude.
Video 1.
Why learn Physics by yourself by Sylvain Poirier (2013)
Source.
Electromagnetism by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
As of the 20th century, this can be described well as "the phenomena described by Maxwell's equations".
Back through its history however, that was not at all clear. This highlights how big of an achievement Maxwell's equations are.

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