H. David Politzer

Origins and early life

Hugh David Politzer was born in New York City on 31 August 1949, into a Jewish family; his parents had escaped from Czechoslovakia to England in 1939 and came to the United States after the war. He went to the Bronx High School of Science, graduating in 1966, read physics at the University of Michigan and took a doctorate at Harvard in 1974 under Sidney Coleman.

Work and career

The paper that made his name was his first, published in 1973 while he was still a graduate student. The strong force holds quarks inside a proton so tightly that no experiment has ever knocked one loose, and yet when a proton is struck hard enough the quarks inside behave as though nothing were holding them at all. Politzer calculated that in this kind of theory the coupling actually shrinks at short distance: the closer two quarks are, the weaker the force between them, and the further apart, the stronger — asymptotic freedom, which explains both the freedom inside and the imprisonment outside.

David Gross and Frank Wilczek at Princeton found the same thing at the same time, and the result made quantum chromodynamics possible. With Thomas Appelquist he then predicted charmonium, the bound state of a charm quark and its antiquark, found the following year.

Recognition

He has been at Caltech since 1977, took the Sakurai Prize in 1986, played a small part as the physicist Robert Serber in the film Fat Man and Little Boy, and shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics with Gross and Wilczek.