Mendel Sachs

Mendel Sachs (; April 13, 1927 – May 5, 2012) was an American theoretical physicist. His scientific work includes the proposal of a unified field theory that brings together the weak force, strong force, electromagnetism, and gravity.

Biography

Early life and education Sachs was born in Portland, Oregon, the third son of a rabbi. When just four months old, Sachs moved with his family to Toronto, Canada, where he grew up and attended school.

In March 1945, when Sachs was 17 years old, he enlisted to serve in the US Navy during World War II. The Sachs family moved back to the United States to Los Angeles where other family members had already moved from Portland. From middle of 1945 onward, Sachs considered Los Angeles to be his hometown. After the war, in August 1945 Sachs enrolled in the Navy Eddy program in Chicago learning about electronics and radar equipment. He was then assigned to an aircraft carrier based in San Francisco that had been badly damaged in the war by a kamikaze airplane. In July 1946, Sachs spoke with the executive officer of the ship, explaining that he wanted to go to college and study physics and received an early honorable discharge from the Navy in August 1946. Sachs earned his bachelor's degree at the University of California, Los Angeles, he then moved to Columbia University, New York for postgraduate study. Sachs had heard of the research at Columbia University while at UCLA. During that time Columbia's physics department was chaired by Isidor Isaac Rabi and was home to two Nobel laureates (Rabi and Enrico Fermi) and seven future laureates (Polykarp Kusch, Willis Lamb, Maria Goeppert-Mayer, James Rainwater, Norman Ramsey, Charles Townes and Hideki Yukawa) While at Columbia Sachs was taught by Willis Lamb and Hideki Yukawa. Yukawa had agreed to be Sach's thesis advisor, but Sachs decided to complete his doctorate back at UCLA so that he could be reunited with Yetty Herman, whom he married in 1952.

Career Following the award of his PhD in 1954 Sachs first post-doctoral position was at the new University of California Radiation Laboratory at both Berkeley and Livermore, which was run by Edward Teller and Ernest Lawrence and was also home to Bryce DeWitt, who Sachs would later co-author articles with in Physics Today. The new laboratory was intended to spur innovation and provide competition to the nuclear weapon design laboratory at Los Alamos in New Mexico, home of the Manhattan Project that developed the first atomic weapons. In his new job Sachs intended to get in contact with Albert Einstein at his office at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton to arrange an appointment to discuss his research program. Sachs wanted to explore with him the features of nonlocality and nonlinearity that are absent in the quantum theory, but must be present in a field theory. Unfortunately Einstein died in April 1955 and Sachs never had the opportunity to talk to him about his ideas.

In 1956, Sachs became a senior scientist at Lockheed Missiles and Space Laboratory, Based in Sunnyvale and adjacent to the NASA-Marshall Space Flight Center, Moffett Field, Lockheed Martin Missiles and Space Systems was and continues to be one of the most important satellite development and manufacturing plants in the United States, covering 412 acres. While at Lockheed Sachs began developing with Solomon Schwebel a field theory of quantum electrodynamics that included broken symmetries that did not require recourse to renormalization or perturbation techniques – the "Schwebel-Sachs" model. During this time Sachs was also employed as assistant professor of physics at San Jose State College. In 1961, he became a research professor at McGill University; this was followed by a post as associate professor of physics at Boston University (1962–1966). In 1964, while at Boston University Sachs received an invitation from Paul Dirac to visit Cambridge University. Sachs, his wife and children first stayed for one month in Ireland, at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies where Sachs discuss various problems with Cornelius Lanczos, who had been one of Einstein's assistants in Berlin in the 1920s. Sachs also had discussions with Lanczos' colleagues John Lighton Synge, J. R. McConnell and Lochlainn O'Raifeartaigh. Following his trip to Ireland, Sachs stayed in England for three months, where his wife Yetty had family. Sachs worked with Paul Dirac at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, Cambridge University. While working with Dirac, Sachs also had the opportunity to discuss ideas with John G. Taylor, John Polkinghorne and graduate students at DAMTP.

In 1965, Sachs had had a breakthrough while at the Aspen Center for Physics, Colorado. Sachs was able to derive a result for a unified field theory if quantum mechanics was considered to be a linear approximation for a field theory of inertia expressed in general relativity. Sachs argued that the work of Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrödinger in general relativity did not yet take account of the inertia of matter, which required consideration of the Mach principle. In the summer of 1966 Abdus Salam invited Sachs to spend a few months at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics, in Trieste, Italy. During this time Sachs published the details of his formal structure of quantum mechanics from a generally covariant field theory of inertia in the Italian journal, Il Nuovo Cimento. In the fall of 1966, he was appointed professor of physics at State University of New York at Buffalo. Sachs was an editor for the International Journal of Theoretical Physics. On his retirement in 1997 he was given the title Professor of Physics Emeritus. A symposium was held in Sachs honour to mark his retirement, the event was attended by Nobel laureates Willis E. Lamb and Herbert A. Hauptman and a subsequent festschrift was published. Sachs published 13 books and over 200 journal articles during his life.

Research

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