George Zweig

George Zweig (/zwaɪɡ/; born May 30, 1937) is an American physicist of Jewish origin. He was trained as a particle physicist under Richard Feynman.[1] He introduced, independently of Murray Gell-Mann, the quark model (although he named it "aces"). He later turned his attention to neurobiology. He has worked as a research scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and in the financial services industry.

George Zweig
George Zweig giving a speech at Department of Physics, National Taiwan University
Born (1937-05-20) May 20, 1937
Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union (now Russia)
CitizenshipAmerican
Alma mater
Known forQuark model
Awards
Scientific career
FieldsPhysics; neurobiology
InstitutionsLos Alamos National Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Doctoral advisorRichard Feynman

Early life

Zweig was born on May 30, 1937 in Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union,[2] into a Jewish family.[2] His father was a structural engineer. He graduated from the University of Michigan in 1959, with a bachelor's degree in mathematics, having taken numerous physics courses as electives. He earned a PhD degree in theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology in 1964.

Career

Zweig proposed the existence of quarks at CERN, independently of Murray Gell-Mann, shortly after defending his PhD dissertation. Zweig dubbed them "aces", after the four playing cards, because he speculated there were four of them (on the basis of the four extant leptons known at the time).[3][4] The introduction of the concept of quarks provided a cornerstone for particle physics.

Like Gell-Mann, he realized that several important properties of particles such as baryons (e.g., protons and neutrons) could be explained by treating them as triplets of other constituent particles, with fractional baryon number and electric charge. Unlike Gell-Mann, Zweig was partly led to his picture of the quark model by the peculiarly attenuated decays of the φ meson to ρ π,[5][6] a feature codified by what is now known as the OZI Rule, the "Z" in which stands for "Zweig". In subsequent technical terminology, ultimately Gell-Mann's quarks were closer to "current quarks", while Zweig's to "constituent quarks".[7]

Gell-Mann received the Nobel Prize for physics in 1969, for his overall contributions and discoveries concerning the classification of elementary particles and their interactions; at that time, quark theory had not become fully accepted,[8] and was not specifically mentioned in the official citation of the prize. In 1977 Richard Feynman nominated both Zweig, and Gell-Mann again, for the Nobel prize,[9] but the nomination failed.[10]

Zweig later turned to research on hearing and neurobiology, and studied the transduction of sound into nerve impulses in the cochlea of the human ear,[11] and how the brain maps sound onto the spatial dimensions of the cerebral cortex. In 1975, while studying the ear,[12] he introduced a version of the continuous wavelet transform, the cochlear transform.

In 2003, Zweig joined the quantitative hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, founded by the former Cold War code breaker James Simons. He left the firm in 2010. Once his four-year confidentiality agreement with Renaissance Technologies expired, the 78-year-old Zweig returned to Wall Street and co-founded a quantitative hedge fund, called Signition, with two younger partners. They began trading in 2015.[13]

Awards and honors

References
  1. "George Zweig". Mathematics Genealogy Project (North Dakota State University). Retrieved March 18, 2010.
  2. Charitos, Panos (December 13, 2013). "Interview with George Zweig" (Interview). CERN. Retrieved June 22, 2023.
  3. G. Zweig (1964), "An SU(3) model for strong interaction symmetry and its breaking", In *Lichtenberg, D. B. ( Ed.), Rosen, S. P. ( Ed.): Developments In The Quark Theory Of Hadrons, Vol. 1*, 22-101 and CERN Geneva - TH. 401 (17 Jan. 1964) 24p.
  4. G. Zweig (1964), "An SU(3) model for strong interaction symmetry and its breaking II", Published in 'Developments in the Quark Theory of Hadrons'. Volume 1. Edited by D. Lichtenberg and S. Rosen. Nonantum, Mass., Hadronic Press, 1980. pp. 22-101 and CERN Geneva - TH. 412 (21 Feb. 1964) 76p.
  5. G. Zweig (1980), "Origins of the Quark Model", CALT-68-805
  6. G. Zweig (2013), "Concrete Quarks: The Beginning of the End" (PDF), CERN colloquium
  7. Concrete quarks: CERN 2013 colloquium, video
  8. Missing hadronic resonance states predicted by the quark model were only established in the early 1970s. Appreciation that flavor SU(3) reflects nothing beyond the symmetries of the three lightest quarks had to wait until the late 1970s. Understanding of the reason free quark searches were turning up negative was lacking until 1974.
  9. G. Zweig Memories of Murray and the Quark Model,' International Journal of Modern Physics A 25(20) January 2012 p.15.
  10. J. Gribbin (1995), Schrödinger's Kittens and the Search For Reality, Phoenix, p. ix, 261 p. : ill. ; 29 cm, ISBN 978-1-85799-402-5
  11. Zweig, G.; Shera, C. A. (1995). "The origin of periodicity in the spectrum of evoked otoacoustic emissions". The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 98 (4): 2018–47. Bibcode:1995ASAJ...98.2018Z. doi:10.1121/1.413320. PMID 7593924. S2CID 18188510.
  12. Zweig, G. (1976). "Basilar Membrane Motion". Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology. 40: 619–33. doi:10.1101/SQB.1976.040.01.058. PMID 820509., Zweig, G.; Lipes, R.; Pierce, J. R. (1976). "The cochlear compromise". The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 59 (4): 975–82. Bibcode:1976ASAJ...59..975Z. doi:10.1121/1.380956. PMID 1262596.
  13. Chung, Juliet (July 23, 2015). "At 78, Scientist Is Starting a Hedge Fund". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved December 21, 2019.
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