George Zweig | |
|---|---|
 George Zweig giving a speech at Department of Physics, National Taiwan University | |
| Born | (1937-05-20)May 20, 1937 (age 87) Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union (now Russia) |
| Citizenship | American |
| Alma mater | |
| Known for | Quark model |
| Awards |
|
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Physics;neurobiology |
| Institutions | Los Alamos National Laboratory,Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Doctoral advisor | Richard Feynman |
George Zweig (/zwaɪɡ/; born May 30, 1937) is an American physicist ofRussian-Jewish origin. He was trained as aparticle physicist underRichard Feynman.[1] He introduced, independently ofMurray Gell-Mann, thequark model (although he named it "aces"). He later turned his attention toneurobiology. He has worked as a research scientist atLos Alamos National Laboratory andMassachusetts Institute of Technology, and in the financial services industry.
Zweig was born on May 30, 1937 inMoscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union,[2] into a Jewish family.[2] His father was astructural engineer. He graduated from theUniversity of Michigan in 1959 with a bachelor's degree inmathematics, having taken numerous physics courses aselectives. He earned a PhD degree in theoretical physics at theCalifornia Institute of Technology in 1964.
Zweig proposed the existence ofquarks atCERN, independently ofMurray 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 extantleptons 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 asbaryons (e.g.,protons andneutrons) could be explained by treating them as triplets of other constituent particles, with fractionalbaryon number andelectric charge. Unlike Gell-Mann, Zweig was partly led to his picture of the quark model by the peculiarly attenuated decays of theφ meson toρ π,[5][6] a feature codified by what is now known as theOZI 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 theNobel 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 1977Richard 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 thetransduction ofsound intonerve impulses in thecochlea of thehumanear,[11] and how the brain maps sound onto the spatial dimensions of the cerebral cortex. In 1975, while studying the ear,[12] he introduced aversion of thecontinuous wavelet transform, the cochlear transform.
In 2003, Zweig joined the quantitative hedge fundRenaissance Technologies, founded by the former Cold War code breakerJames 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]
