Attending one of [Schwinger's] formal lectures was comparable to hearing a new major concert by a very great composer, flawlessly performed by the composer himself ... The delivery was magisterial, even, carefully worded, irresistible like a mighty river ... Crowds of students and more senior people from both Harvard and MIT attended ... I felt privileged-- and not a little daunted-- to witness physics being made by one of its greatest masters. - Walter Kohn, Nobel laureate ("Climbing the Mountain" by J. Mehra and K.A. Milton).
As Schwinger stood at the blackboard, writing ambidextrously and speaking mellifluously in well-formed sentences, it was as if God Himself was presenting the Ten Commandments. The equations were so incredible that it seemed the world couldn't be created any other way. From the barest of first basic principles, he discovered all of QFT, even including gravity. Not only was the mathematics beautiful, but the philosophic concept of a world made of properties of space seemed to myself much more satisfying than unexplainable particles. I was amazed and thrilled to discover how all the paradoxes of relativity theory and quantum mechanics that I had previously found so complicated disappeared or were resolved.
However, Schwinger, once referred to as "the heir-apparent to Einstein's mantle" by J. Robert Oppenheimer, never had the effect he should have had on the world of physics or rather on the public at large. It is possible that Schwinger's very elegance was his downfall.
Julian Schwinger was one of the most important and influential scientists of the twentieth century ... Yet even among physicists, recognition of his funda ¬ mental contributions remains limited, in part because his dense formal style ultimately proved less accessible than Feynman's more intuitive approach. However, the structure of modern theoretical physics would be inconceiv ¬ able without Schwinger's manifold insights. His work underlies much of modern physics, the source of which is often unknown even to the practi ¬ tioners. His legacy lives on not only through his work, but also through his many students, who include leaders in physics and other fields.-- "Climbing the Mountain" by J. Mehra and K.A. Milton.
Schwinger is remembered mainly, if he is recalled at all, for figuring out a calculational problem with QFT referred to as renormalization, for which he shared the 1965 Nobel prize with Sin-Itiro Tomanaga and Richard Feynman. Feynman's manner, which had no theoretical basis, proved to be easier to work with than Schwinger's (and Tomanaga's) field-based approach, and Schwinger's method was relegated to the archives. It is Feynman's picture, not Schwinger's, that was enshrined on a postage stamp.
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