| RefNo | EC/1965/30 |
| Previous numbers | Cert XVII, 149 |
| Level | Item |
| Title | Ward, John Clive: certificate of election to the Royal Society |
| Description | Citation typed |
| Citation | Distinguished for contributions to theory of Quantised Fields, theory of Elementary Particles, and theories of Quantum Statistics. In a basic paper he proved an important identity (known as "Ward's identity" in the literature) proving that renormalization of electric charge arises solely from the vacuum fluctuations of the photon field. He was one of the first to demonstrate the possibility of renormalization of scalar-meson nucleon interactions, his work leading to the discovery of the renormalization group studied extensively by Boguliubov and co-workers in U.S.S.R. In a classic work (with E.J. Montroll) he has recently developed Feynman diagram techniques for use in Quantum Statistics, achieving a marriage of modern field theory and Statistical Mechanics. One of the remarkable results of this work is proof of identity of the quantum version of Debye-Huckel theory (in the zero temperature case) with recent theories of Gell-Mann and Breuckner.
The solution by Ward and Kac of the two-dimensional Ising Problem by a combinational method represents a triumph. The partition function for this problem was first evaluated by Onsager and Kaufman, using powerful group theoretical and analytics methods, and for long it was believed that further progress was impossible. The combinational proof of Ward and Kac is elementary (in the "deep" sense) and short.
Ward's description of second sound in liquid helium in terms of a phonon gas (Ward and Wilks) is an important contribution to the theory of the subject. His recent work (Ward and Salam) is concerned with an attempt to understand all elementary particle interactions using a single, unified guage principle. |
| Proposers | From Personal Knowledge: Abdus Salam; M H L Pryce; Freeman J Dyson; Richard H Dalitz; R E Peierls; N Kemmer
From General Knowledge: B Bleaney |
| AccessStatus | Open |
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Fellows associated with this archive
| Code | PersonName | Dates |
| NA4836 | Ward; John Clive (1924 - 2000) | 1924 - 2000 |