Silvan S. Schweber

Silvan Samuel Schweber (10 April 1928 – 14 May 2017) was a French-born American theoretical physicist and historian of science. He was known for his work on relativistic quantum field theory and its history, and he was the recipient of the 2011 Abraham Pais Prize for History of Physics.

Early life and education Schweber was born 10 April 1928, in Strasbourg, France, to an orthodox Jewish family. During the Second World War the family fled first within France and then via Spain, Portugal and Cuba to the United States where they settled in New York in 1942. In 1952 he received his doctorate under Arthur Wightman. After that, he was a postdoctoral fellow with Hans Bethe at Cornell University and in 1954 at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh.

Career From 1955 he was a professor at the newly founded Brandeis University. available in reprint by Dover Publications.

From 1981 Schweber was a Faculty Associate in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University. He was also a fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2011 he was awarded the Abraham Pais Prize for History of Physics.

Selected publications QED and the Men Who Made It: Dyson, Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga (Princeton University Press, 1994) In the Shadow of the Bomb: Oppenheimer, Bethe, and the Moral Responsibility of the Scientist (Princeton University Press, 2007) Einstein and Oppenheimer: The Meaning of Genius (2009) Nuclear Forces: The Making of the Physicist Hans Bethe (2012)