Josef Maria Jauch (September 20, 1914 in Lucerne – August 30, 1974 in Geneva) was a Swiss/American theoretical physicist, known for his work on quantum electrodynamics and on the foundations of quantum theory, and leader of the "Geneva School" of mathematical physics.
Biography
Early life Jauch was born on 20 September 1914 in Lucerne, Switzerland, the son of Josef Alois Jauch (a telegraph operator) and Emma Laura Rosa Jauch (née Conti). He had two older siblings: Adelheid Jauch and Emil Josef Karl Jauch. After his mother died in 1916, his father remarried, and a half-sister was born: Margrit Jauch (Fuchs). At the age of twelve he became fascinated with a fact he found stated in a popular astronomy book, that a body in a circular orbit with period T {\displaystyle T} , if brought to a stop, would fall into the central mass in time T / 32 {\displaystyle T/{\sqrt {32}}} , which he showed could be derived from Kepler's law. Jauch was also interested in music, studying the violin from age twelve with his father, and then professionally after his father died when he was fifteen, performing chamber music from the age sixteen, and continuing throughout his student years in Zurich. In 1933 Jauch began studies at the ETH Zürich, paying his fees with loans from friends in Lucerne because he had no money, and taking courses on thermodynamics from Wolfgang Pauli, on probability and graph theory from George Pólya, and on Galois theory and topology from Heinz Hopf. His Diplom Thesis was written under Pauli in 1938 on higher-spin particles in Dirac theory, presenting his results to the Swiss Physical Society in 1938. Upon presenting his results, Pauli reportedly said after a few minutes simply, "Das habe ich mir auch so gedach" ("I thought so too").
The War Years With few academic jobs available in Switzerland at the outbreak of World War II, Jauch became a part-time teacher at Trogen in Appenzell, where he received an international exchange fellowship to study a Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota on Pólya's recommendation. There he studied higher symmetries of classical and quantum systems under Edward Lee Hill, for a dissertation entitled On Contact Transformations and Group Theory in Quantum Mechanical Problems, which in particular gave a prototype model for strong interactions using the representation theory of S U ( 3 ) {\displaystyle SU(3)} .
During his doctoral studies in Minneapolis, Jauch met Anna Tonette "Tonia" Hegland, a graduate student in the School of Social Work at the University of Minnesota, and the two were married on 1 January 1940. After receiving his doctorate in 1940, Jauch returned to Zurich to take up a research assistantship offered to him by Pauli at the ETH. However, it was extremely difficult to carry out research in Switzerland during the war: as Heinrich Behnke wrote to Erich Hecke in a letter of 8 March 1940, "The Paulis would be very happy if you paid them a visit again [in Zurich]. However, it is probably immensely difficult to obtain permission for this. I had an official invitation, and nevertheless had fabulously many difficulties. ... on the day of departure, my nerves had had it." Soon after Jauch's arrival, the Paulis left Zurich for Princeton, where they stayed for the remainder of the war. Meanwhile, Jauch continued working alongside Pauli's students under Gregor Wentzel, working on pair theory until 1942. During these years, Jauch and his wife Tonia became acquainted with Carl Jung, and met regularly with him for dream analyses. As the war became increasingly dangerous and unpredictable, the Jauchs returned to the United States on the last civilian ship to leave Europe during the war, the SS Drottningholm. After arriving in the U.S., Jauch looked for a job and received an offer to join Pauli in Princeton as an assistant professor in 1942. There Pauli and Jauch studied the magnetic moment of the neutron, as well as the infrared divergence problem using Dirac field theory, reporting their results to the American Physical Society in 1944. In 1943, Jauch also taught classes in advanced quantum mechanics every other week at Cornell University. During their time in Princeton, Jauch and his wife had three children: Karl (1943), Eldri (1944), and Aletha (1945) (Aletha Solter).
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