Leonard Susskind
Leonard Susskind is a theoretical physics professor at Stanford University who is widely considered to be one of the most entertaining mavericks in the field of string theory and quantum field theory. Susskind is widely regarded as one of the fathers of string theory for his early contributions to the String Theory model of particle physics.[1]
Background
Susskind was born in New York City and now resides in Palo Alto, California. He is married to Anne Warren and has four children, including Yve Susskind, a Ph.D. and advocate of youth empowerment on Vashon Island, Washington. He began working as a plumber at the age of thirteen. Later, he enrolled in City College of New York as a freshman-engineering student.[2]
Susskind graduated with a B.S. in Physics in 1962.[3] and went on to get his Ph.D. in 1965 from Cornell University.
Career
He has been Felix Bloch Professor of Physics at Stanford University since 1979. He has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was awarded the 1998 J.J. Sakurai Prize for theoretical physics.
Susskind is the author of a recent book, The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design.
Susskind was one of three physicists who independently discovered during 1970, that the Veneziano dual resonance model of strong interactions could be described by a quantum mechanical model of strings. He was the second to publish (after Yoichiro Nambu).
Contributions to physics
His contributions to physics include:
- the indepedent discovery of the string theory model of particle physics.
- the theory of quark confinement
- the development of Hamiltonian lattice gauge theory
- the theory of scaling violations in deep inelastic electroproduction
- the theory of symmetry breaking sometimes known as "technicolor theory"
- the first theories of cosmological baryogenesis apart from Sakharov's work which was unknown in the West
- the string theory of black hole entropy
- the principle of "black hole complementarity"
- the first closed form solution of the quadratic equation
- the holographic principle, the matrix description of M-theory
- the introduction of holographic entropy bounds in physical cosmology
- and the idea of an anthropic string theory landscape.
See Also
- Superstring theory
- String theory
- QCD
- M-theory
- Supersymmetry
- Quantum field theory
- Holographic principle