"So in 1958 when I went for my thesis exam... and Yang... was in my committee, he and Paul [C.] Martin and Julian Schwinger... I started explaining how the is different from the and Yang said, "Wait a minute... there's no way of distinguishing electron neutrinos from muon neutrinos. It makes no sense to say they are different from one another. It's a meaningless concept." ...I began to explain and Schwinger, seeing my distress and realizing that he was the cause... said, "Let me explain the situation to Mr. Yang" and he patiently explained how an experiment could be done, namely the experiment that would be done in a couple of years... to distinguish electron neutrinos from muon neutrinos, if... they were different... and Yang nodded and the exam continued and I passed the exam. ...[S]ix months later Lee and Yang published a paper explaining how electron neutrinos and muon neutrinos could be different from one another. They simply stole the idea from Julian. He was subject to many such acts of thievery. Years later I met Yang in China... and I described the incident to him... He said, "It is exactly as you said, Shelly.""
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Academics from the United StatesJews from the United StatesPeople from New York CityNobel laureates in PhysicsPhysicists from the United States
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Julian Schwinger
Julian Seymour Schwinger (February 12, 1918 – July 16, 1994) was an American theoretical physicist. He is best known for his work on quantum electrodynamics (QED), in particular for developing a relativistically invariant perturbation theory, and for renormalizing QED to one loop order.
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