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Mário Schenberg | |
|---|---|
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| Born | Mayer Schönberg (1914-07-02)July 2, 1914 |
| Died | November 10, 1990(1990-11-10) (aged 76) |
| Alma mater | University of São Paulo |
| Known for | Schönberg-Chandrasekhar limit Urca process |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Theoretical physics |
| Doctoral students | José Leite Lopes |
| Notes | |
Brazilian physicist of the 'heroic era' (1900–1945), together withJosé Leite Lopes,Cesar Lattes,Jayme Tiomno, andJoaquim da Costa Ribeiro. | |
Mário Schenberg (bornMayer Schönberg [var.Mário Schönberg,Mario Schonberg,Mário Schoenberg]; 2 July 1914 – 10 November 1990) was a Brazilianelectrical engineer,physicist,art critic and writer.
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Schenberg was born on 2 July 1914 inRecife, Brazil[1] as Mayer Schönberg. His parents wereRussian Jews of German origin.[clarification needed] From early on he showed remarkable ability for mathematics, enchanting himself with geometry, which had a strong influence on his works. He took the primary and secondary courses in Recife. Because of his family's financial limitations, he was not able to study in Europe. He then entered the Faculty of Engineering of Recife in 1931.
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Widely regarded as one of Brazil's most importanttheoretical physicists, Schenberg is best remembered for his contributions toastrophysics, particularly the theory of nuclear processes in the formation ofsupernova stars. He provided the inspiration for the name of the so-calledUrca process, a cycle of nuclear reactions in which a nucleus loses energy by absorbing anelectron and then re-emitting abeta particle plus aneutrino-antineutrino pair, leading to the loss of internal supporting pressure and consequent collapse and explosion in the form of a supernova.George Gamow (1904–1968) was inspired to name the process Urca after the name of theUrca Casino in Rio de Janeiro, when Schönberg remarked to him that "the energy disappears in the nucleus of the supernova as quickly as the money disappeared at that roulette table."
Together with Indian physicistSubrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (1910–1995), he discovered and published in 1942 the so-calledSchönberg–Chandrasekhar limit, which is the maximum mass of the core of a star that can support the overlying layers againstgravitational collapse once the corehydrogen is exhausted.
At theUniversity of São Paulo Schönberg interacted closely withDavid Bohm during the final years ofBohm's exile in Brazil,[2] and, in 1954, Schönberg demonstrated a link among the quantized motion of theMadelung fluid and the trajectories of thede Broglie–Bohm theory.[3]
He wrote a series of publications of 1957/1958 ongeometric algebras applicable toquantum physics andquantum field theory. He pointed out that those algebras can be described in terms of extensions of the commutative and the anti-commutativeGrassmann algebras which have the same structure as theboson algebra and thefermion algebra ofcreation and annihilation operators. These algebras, in turn, are related tosymplectic algebras and toClifford algebras, respectively.[4]
In a paper published in 1958, Schönberg suggested to add a newidempotent to theHeisenberg algebra,[5] and this suggestion was taken up and expanded upon in the 1980s byBasil Hiley and his co-workers in their work on algebraic formulations of quantum mechanics;[2][4][6] this work was performed atBirkbeck College where Bohm had become professor of physics in the meantime. Schönberg's ideas have also been cited in connection with algebraic approaches to describe relativistic phase space.[7]
His work has been cited, together with that ofMarcel Riesz, for its importance to Clifford algebras and mathematical physics in the proceedings of a workshop held in France in 1989 which had been dedicated to these two mathematicians.[8]
Schenberg was a member of theBrazilian Communist Party[9][10] and professor of theUniversity of São Paulo.[1]
He died on 10 November 1990 in São Paulo.[1]
His articles include:
| Preceded by | President of theBrazilian Society of Physics 1979–1981 | Succeeded by |
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