Silvan Samuel Schweber (Strasbourg, 10 April 1928 –Cambridge, 14 May 2017)[1] was a French-born American theoretical physicist and historian of science.
Schweber was born in France to an orthodox Jewish family. During the Second World War the family fled first within France and then via Spain, Portugal and Cuba to the United States where they settled in New York in 1942.[2] In 1944 Schweber began to study chemistry at theCity College of New York and in 1947 moved to theUniversity of Pennsylvania as a physics major, where he studied withWalter Elsasser andHerbert Jehle. After obtaining his master's degree in 1949, he went toPrinceton University, where he studied withDavid Bohm andEugene Wigner.[3] In 1952 he received his doctorate underArthur Wightman.[4]
After that, he was a postdoctoral fellow withHans Bethe atCornell University and in 1954 at theCarnegie Institute of Technology inPittsburgh. From 1955 he was a professor at the newly foundedBrandeis University.[3]
He wrote a book onrelativistic quantum field theory published in 1961,[5] available in reprint byDover Publications.[6]
From 1981 Schweber was a Faculty Associate in the Department of the History of Science atHarvard University.[2] He was also a fellow of theAmerican Physical Society, theAmerican Association for the Advancement of Science and of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences.[7]
In 2011 he was awarded theAbraham Pais Prize for History of Physics.
Schweber died on 14 May 2017 inCambridge, Massachusetts.[8][9]
