George Zweig

George Zweig (born 1937 in Moscow, Russia into a Jewish family) was originally trained as a particle physicist under Richard Feynman and later turned his attention to neurobiology. He spent a number of years as a Research Scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and MIT, but as of 2004, has gone on to work in the financial services industry.

Additional recommended knowledge

Daily Visual Balance Check

Don't let static charges disrupt your weighing accuracy

Weighing the right way

A 1959 graduate of the University of Michigan, Zweig proposed the existence of quarks while a graduate student in Physics at the California Institute of Technology in 1964 (independently of Murray Gell-Mann). Zweig referred to them as "aces" after the four playing cards, because he speculated there were four of them. Like Gell-Mann, he realized that the properties of particles such as protons and neutrons could be explained by treating them as triplets of other particles (which he called aces and Gell-Mann called quarks), but, unlike Gell-Mann, he was inclined to accept these entities as physically real particles^[1]. As pointed out by astrophysicist John Gribbin, Gell-Mann deservedly received the Nobel 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, and was not specifically mentioned. In later years, when quark theory became established as the standard model of particle physics, the Nobel Committee presumably felt they couldn't recognize Zweig as the scientist who first spelled out the theory's implications in detail and suggested that they might be real, without including Gell-Mann again. Whatever the reason, despite Zweig's seminal contributions to a theory central to modern physics, he has not been awarded a Nobel Prize^[2].

Zweig later turned to neurobiology, and studied the transduction of sound into nerve impulses in the cochlea of the human ear. In 1975, while studying the ear, he discovered the continuous wavelet transform.

In 1981, Zweig received a MacArthur Prize Fellowship.

In 1996, Zweig was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

Zweig now works for Renaissance Technologies on Long Island, NY.

References