Bøger af M. Flato

Very few people have contributed as much to twentieth-century physics as Julian Schwinger. It is therefore appropriate to offer a retrospective of his work on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday (February 12, 1978). We hope, in offering this selection of his papers, to bring to light ideas and results that may have been partly overlooked at the time of the original publication. Schwinger has published prodigiously on a great variety of subjects, as is evident from the comprehensive list of publications arranged in chronological order which appears on p. xiii. Needless to say, only a small subset could be included in the present modest volume. In the selection, great weight was assigned to papers that seem to be less widely known or appreciated than they deserve. Many important papers are therefore omitted. (Examples: Paper [64] 'On Gauge Invariance and Vacuum Polarization' and Paper [69] 'On Angular Momentum', both of which have been reprinted elsewhere. ) The collection is a personal one, having been chosen by Schwinger himself, and is therefore of particular interest. It would probably not be interesting to offer an analysis, by the editors, of Schwinger's contributions to physics. However, we are very pleased to be able to include Schwinger's own informal and very personal comments about each article that appears in this volume. These comments indicate his reasons for choosing these particular articles and, in many cases, provide a capsule synopsis of what he considers most valuable.

to our own also needs to be understood. Such unification may also require that the supersymmetry group possess irreducible representations with infinite reductiori on the Poincare subgroup, to accommodate an infinite set of particles. Such possibilities were 5 envisaged long ago and have recently reappeared in Kaluza-Klein . 6 d' . th 7 S . l' th supergraVlty an m superstnng eory. upersymmetry Imp Ies at forces that are mediated by bose exchange must be complemented by forces that are due to the exchange of fermions. The masslessness of neutrinos is suggestive-we continue to favor the idea that neutrinos are fundamental to weak interactions, that they will finally play a more central role than the bit part assigned to them in Weinberg-Salam theory. There seems to be little room for doubting that supersymmetry is badly broken-so where should one be looking for the first tangible manifestations of it? It is remarkable that the successes that can be legitimately claimed for supersymmetry are all in the domain of massless particles and fields. Supergravity is not renormalizable, but it is an improvement (in this respect) over ordinary quantum gravity. Finite super Yang-Mills theories are not yet established, but there is now a strong concensus that they soon will be. In both cases massless fields are involved in an essential way.

Two important events in the history of physical sciences occurred re­ cently: the fiftieth anniversary of Quantum Mechanics and the Jubilee of Louis de Broglie's celebrated Thesis. These events occurred in the same period of time when the world honored de Broglie on the occa­ sion of his eightieth birthday. Some of de Broglie's friends, former students, and some people who used to know him and appreciate his personality decided to prepare an international volume for this cele­ brated occasion. Such a task was not very easy. It is always simpler to contribute in honor of famous people whose works and impact were great on a tech­ nical and pragmatic level than to contribute in honor of a person whose achievements were not only dominant in physical sciences themselves, but also had many important implications for the development of the whole branch of philosophy of sciences. Louis de Broglie, the man to whom we owe among other things the most fundamental notion of duality between waves and particles, be­ longs in a way to the Einsteinian school of thought. He never accepted literally the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. To him it was clear that this interpretation makes quantum mechanics incomplete and highly non-deterministic. He always believed that since the duality between waves and particles was an experimental fact, there should be some manifestation of the Schrodinger wave itself in the realistic world. De Broglie had to struggle much for this idea, which he never gave up.

On the occasion of the sixtieth birthday of Andre Lichnerowicz a number of his friends, many of whom have been his students or coworkers, decided to celebrate this event by preparing a jubilee volume of contributed articles in the two main fields of research marked by Lichnerowicz's work, namely differential geometry and mathematical physics. Limitations of space and time did not enable us to include papers from all Lichnerowicz's friends nor from all his former students. It was equally impossible to reflect in a single book the great variety of subjects tackled by Lichnerowicz. In spite of these limitations, we hope that this book reflects some of the present trends of fields in which he worked, and some of the subjects to which he contributed in his long - and not yet finished - career. This career was very much marked by the influence of his masters, Elie Cartan who introduced him to research in mathematics, mainly in geometry and its relations with mathematical physics, and Georges Darmois who developed his interest for mechanics and physics, especially the theory of relativity and electromagnetism. This par- ticular combination, and his personal talent, made of him a natural scientific heir and continuator of the French mathematical physics school in the tradition of Henri Poincare. Some of his works would even be best qualified by a new field name, that of physical ma- thematics: branches of pure mathematics entirely motivated by physics.