Benjamin Whisoh Lee
This article is about the physicist. For other uses, see Benjamin Lee (disambiguation).
Benjamin Whisoh Lee Born (1935-01-01)January 1, 1935
Keijō, Korea, Empire of Japan Died June 16, 1977(1977-06-16) (aged 42)
Kewanee, Illinois, U.S. Alma mater
• Seoul National University • Miami University • University of Pittsburgh • University of Pennsylvania
Known for •
• Weak interaction • Gauge theory • Lee-Weinberg bound
Spouse Marianne Mun Ching Sim Awards •
• Order of Camellia • (Order of Civil Merit of South Korea)
Scientific career Fields •
• Quantum field theory • Particle physics • Theoretical physics
Institutions •
• University of Pennsylvania • Institute for Advanced Study • Stony Brook University • Fermilab • University of Chicago
Doctoral advisor Abraham Klein Notable students Burt Ovrut
Korean name Hangul 이휘소 Hanja 李輝昭 RR I Hwiso MR I Hwiso Signature
Notes Biography of Benjamin W. Lee by JooSang Kang
Benjamin Whisoh Lee, or Ben Lee as he was more commonly known, was a Korean-American theoretical physicist whose work fundamentally shaped our understanding of particle physics in the latter half of the 20th century. Born on January 1, 1935, in Keijō, Korea, under Japanese rule, Lee's life, though tragically cut short, was marked by profound intellectual contributions, particularly in the realms of weak interaction, gauge theory, and the very fabric of the Standard Model. His research was instrumental in areas like the renormalization of the electro-weak model, a crucial step in unifying the fundamental forces. He even ventured into predicting the mass of the elusive charm quark, a prediction that spurred significant experimental efforts. His legacy extends beyond his groundbreaking papers; he mentored a generation of physicists, including Kang Joo-sang, who later became a distinguished professor. The resonance of his life and work even inspired fictional narratives, most notably the character Lee Yong-hu in Kim Jin-myung's novel, The Rose of Sharon Blooms Again.
Biography
Lee's early life was set against a backdrop of considerable upheaval, beginning in Yongsan, Seoul. His parents, both medically trained, instilled in him a strong academic foundation. His mother, in particular, was a formidable presence, managing the household as the primary breadwinner, first as a doctor in a hospital and later establishing her own successful practice in pediatrics and obstetrics/gynaecology. From a young age, Benjamin displayed an exceptional intellect, which earned him a place at Kyunggi Middle School. However, his education was dramatically interrupted by the outbreak of the Korean War during his fourth year. This conflict forced his family to flee, seeking refuge in the relative safety of the Busan Perimeter, where he managed to continue his studies amidst the chaos.
After the war, Lee enrolled in Kyunggi High School. Remarkably, a year before graduation, he achieved the extraordinary feat of being admitted as the top-ranked student to Seoul National University, choosing to major in chemical engineering. It was during his university years that a pivotal opportunity arose. He was awarded a scholarship, generously provided by an association of military wives whose husbands were serving in the Korean War. This scholarship was not merely financial aid; it was a passport, enabling him to emigrate to the United States to pursue his undergraduate studies.
His academic journey in the U.S. was nothing short of stellar. He earned his B.S. summa cum laude from Miami University in 1956, followed by an M.S. from the University of Pittsburgh in 1958. His doctoral studies culminated in a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1961, under the guidance of Abraham Klein. Following his Ph.D., Lee engaged in postdoctoral research at the prestigious Institute for Advanced Study. His academic career then blossomed as he took on professorial roles at the University of Pennsylvania, Stony Brook University, and the University of Chicago, solidifying his reputation as a leading theoretical physicist.
Later in his career, Lee was appointed to a leadership position as head of the department of theoretical physics at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, a hub of cutting-edge research. His contributions were recognized by his peers, leading to his election as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1976.
Tragically, Benjamin Lee's life was extinguished on June 16, 1977, in a devastating car accident near Kewanee, Illinois, on Interstate 80. He was only 42 years old. At the time of his untimely death, he was universally acknowledged by the scientific community as a world-class elementary particle physicist, whose expertise lay in the intricate domains of gauge theory and weak interactions.
Research
Gauge Theory
Lee's engagement with gauge theory was profound and transformative. In 1964, in collaboration with his doctoral advisor Abraham Klein, he published a seminal paper on spontaneous symmetry breaking. This work was a critical precursor to the development of the Higgs mechanism, a concept that would later become central to the Standard Model. In fact, Lee is often credited with not only contributing to the theoretical underpinnings but also for coining the terms "Higgs boson" and "Higgs mechanism," a testament to his foresight and influence.
His relentless pursuit of understanding led him, in 1969, to achieve a significant breakthrough: the successful renormalization of spontaneously broken gauge symmetries. This was a monumental achievement, as it provided a mathematically rigorous framework for dealing with theories that exhibited such symmetry breaking. Concurrently, a Dutch graduate student named Gerardus 't Hooft was independently working on the renormalization of local gauge symmetry breaking within the Yang–Mills theory, also employing the Higgs mechanism. 't Hooft's path crossed with Lee's at the Cargèse Summer School, where he consulted Lee and Kurt Symanzik on his research. These interactions, coupled with Lee's insights, proved invaluable. 't Hooft ultimately succeeded in the renormalization of non-abelian gauge theory, a feat for which he, along with Martinus Veltman, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1999. David Politzer, in his 2004 Nobel lecture, acknowledged the immense debt owed to Lee, stating that the particle physics community learned profoundly from him. Lee, it was said, masterfully synthesized his own work with that of Russian physicists and provided crucial encouragement for 't Hooft's groundbreaking paper.
Charm Quark
The prediction and subsequent search for the charm quark was another area where Lee made significant contributions. While Sheldon Glashow, Luciano Maiani, and John Iliopoulos had theoretically predicted the existence of charm quarks to reconcile experimental observations, Lee, in collaboration with Mary K. Gaillard and Jonathan L. Rosner, further refined these predictions. Their work involved a detailed calculation of quantities related to the mixing and decay of K meson particles, which allowed them to estimate the mass of the charm quark. This theoretical work was crucial in guiding experimentalists in their hunt for this then-undiscovered particle.
Cosmology
In the final year of his life, 1977, Lee, alongside the esteemed Steven Weinberg, published an influential paper that established a lower bound on the mass of heavy neutrinos. Their calculation, based on the premise that such particles, if present in the early universe and unable to interact strongly, would persist as relics after cosmic expansion, revealed a crucial relationship. They demonstrated that the interaction strength of these hypothetical particles must be greater than 2 GeV for them to remain as observable relics. This theoretical bound has significant implications for cosmology, particularly in the search for dark matter, and is now known as the Lee-Weinberg bound.
Lee's Role in Promoting Gauge Theories
While Steven Weinberg's 1967 paper, "A Model of Leptons," which has garnered over 15,000 citations and was central to his 1979 Nobel Prize, was groundbreaking, it initially remained somewhat obscure. It was Benjamin Lee's pivotal talk, "Perspectives on Theory of Weak Interactions," delivered at a conference at Fermilab in 1972, that is widely credited with bringing Weinberg's seminal work to the forefront of the physics community. Lee's clear and insightful explanation of gauge theories illuminated their potential and significance for a much wider audience, effectively pulling the concept out of relative obscurity and propelling it into the mainstream of theoretical physics research. This act alone highlights Lee's role not just as a researcher but as a crucial communicator and promoter of new, paradigm-shifting ideas.
Controversy Over Death
Following Lee's death, a South Korean fictional novel, The Rose of Sharon Blooms Again, published in 1993, ignited a controversy. The novel, purportedly based on Lee's life, suggested he was involved in assisting South Korea's authoritarian regime in developing nuclear weapons and hinted at the involvement of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in his demise. These allegations stood in stark contrast to Lee's known political convictions. In reality, Lee was a vocal opponent of the autocratic system prevalent in South Korea at that time. He had actively canceled all his planned graduate educational programs for South Korean students in particle physics as a form of protest against the government. The official account, corroborated by a Fermilab memoriam, firmly states that Lee died in a tragic car accident on Illinois highway I-80 in 1977, at the age of 42. The report indicated that a semi-trailer truck crossed the highway median and collided head-on with his vehicle.
Bibliography
Book
• Lee, Benjamin W. (1972). Chiral Dynamics. Documents on modern physics. New York: Gordon and Breach Science Publishers. ISBN 0-677-01380-9. OL 4915148M.
Selected papers
• Klein, Abraham; Lee, Benjamin.W. (March 1964). "Does Spontaneous Breakdown of Symmetry Imply Zero-Mass Particles?". Physical Review Letters . 12 (10): 266–268. Bibcode:1964PhRvL..12..266K. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.12.266. S2CID 15349102.
• Lee, Benjamin.W. (March 1969). "Renormalization of the σ₧-model". Nuclear Physics B . 9 (5): 649–672. Bibcode:1969NuPhB...9..649L. doi:10.1016/0550-3213(69)90065-0.
• Lee, Benjamin W.; Zinn-Justin, Jean (June 1972). "Spontaneously Broken Gauge Symmetries. I. Preliminaries". Physical Review D . 5 (12): 3121–3137. Bibcode:1972PhRvD...5.3121L. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.5.3121.
• Abers, Ernest S.; Lee, Benjamin W. (September 1973). "Gauge theories". Physics Reports . 9 (1): 1–2. Bibcode:1973PhR.....9....1A. doi:10.1016/0370-1573(73)90027-6.
• Gaillard, Mary; Lee, Benjamin W.; Rosner, Jonathan (April 1975). "Search for charm". Reviews of Modern Physics . 47 (2): 277–310. Bibcode:1975RvMP...47..277G. doi:10.1103/RevModPhys.47.277.
• Lee, Benjamin W.; Shrock, Robert E. (September 1977). "Natural suppression of symmetry violation in gauge theories: Muon- and electron-lepton-number nonconservation". Physical Review D . 16 (5): 1444–1473. Bibcode:1977PhRvD..16.1444L. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.16.1444.
• Lee, Benjamin W.; Weinberg, Steven (July 1977). "Cosmological Lower Bound on Heavy-Neutrino Masses". Physical Review Letters . 39 (4): 165–168. Bibcode:1977PhRvL..39..165L. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.39.165. S2CID 11368663.
References
• ^ a b c JooSang Kang (2007). 이휘소평전(양장본 Hard Cover ) [Lee Whiso : a critical biography] (in Korean). LUX Media. ISBN 978-89-89822-70-7.
• ^ "Book of Members, 1780–2010: Chapter L" (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved June 8, 2011.
• ^ "Dr. Benjamin Lee, 42, of Fermilab; Noted Physicist Was Crash Victim". The New York Times. 18 June 1977.
• ^ Chris Quigg & Steven Weinberg (Sep 1977). "Benjamin W. Lee". Physics Today. 30 (9): 76. Bibcode:1977PhT....30i..76Q. doi:10.1063/1.3037723.
• ^ "In Memoriam Benjamin W. Lee". Fermilab. 1977. Archived from the original on 2007-03-12. Retrieved 2005-09-27.
• ^ "Ben Lee Memorial International Conference at Fermi Lab". 1977. Archived from the original on 2007-10-16. Retrieved 2005-09-27.
• ^ James Riordon. "PRL Top Ten: #1 A Model of Leptons (an APS News interview with Steven Weinberg)". American Physical Society.
• ^ A. Klein & B.W. Lee (1964). "Does Spontaneous Breakdown of Symmetry Imply Zero-Mass Particles?". Physical Review Letters. 12 (10): 266. Bibcode:1964PhRvL..12..266K. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.12.266. S2CID 15349102.
• ^ "Rochester's Hagen Sakurai Prize Announcement" (Press release). University of Rochester. 2010. Archived from the original on 2008-04-16.
• ^ C.R. Hagen Sakurai Prize Talk (YouTube). 2010.
• ^ Ian Sample (29 May 2009), "Anything but the God particle", The Guardian
• ^ Benjamin W. Lee (1969). "Renormalization of the σ-model". Nuclear Physics B. 9 (5): 649–672. Bibcode:1969NuPhB...9..649L. doi:10.1016/0550-3213(69)90065-0.
• ^ Gerardus 't Hooft (1999). "Autobiography".
• ^ Soo-Jong Rey (December 1999). 1999년 노벨 물리학상에 즈음하여: 토프트, 벨트만, 이휘소, 그리고 입자 물리학의 미래 [At the time of the Nobel Prize in Physics 1999: 't Hooft, Veltman, Ben Lee and the future of particle physics] (in Korean). 물리학과 첨단기술. Archived from the original on 2011-07-22.
• ^ G. 't Hooft (1971). "Renormalizable Lagrangians for massive Yang-Mills fields". Nuclear Physics B. 35 (1): 167–188. Bibcode:1971NuPhB..35..167T. doi:10.1016/0550-3213(71)90139-8. hdl:1874/4733.
• ^ "Nobel '99 A Strong Vote for Electroweak Theory". Fermi News. 1999-12-17. Archived from the original on 2011-10-18. Retrieved 2010-11-18.
• ^ David Politzer (2004). "The Dilemma of Attribution".
• ^ Gaillard, M. K.; Lee, B. W. & Rosner, J. L. (1975). "Search for charm". Rev. Mod. Phys. 47 (2): 277–310. Bibcode:1975RvMP...47..277G. doi:10.1103/RevModPhys.47.277.
• ^ Lee B.W.; Weinberg S. (1977). "Cosmological Lower Bound on Heavy-Neutrino Masses". Physical Review Letters. 39 (4): 165. Bibcode:1977PhRvL..39..165L. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.39.165. S2CID 11368663.
• ^ Weinberg, S. (1967). "A Model of Leptons" (PDF). Phys. Rev. Lett. 19 (21): 1264–1266. Bibcode:1967PhRvL..19.1264W. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.19.1264. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2012-01-12.
• ^ Lee, B. W. (1972). "Perspectives on Theory of Weak Interactions" (PDF). EConf 720906. C720906V4: 249–305.
• ^ Veltman, Martinus (2003). Facts and mysteries in elementary particle physics. World Scientific. p. 274. ISBN 981238149X.
External links
• Wikiquote has quotations related to Benjamin W. Lee. • Wikimedia Commons has media related to Benjamin W. Lee. • "The Ben Lee Fellowship". Fermilab. • "In Memoriam Benjamin W. Lee". Fermilab. 1977. Archived from the original on 2007-03-12. Retrieved 2005-09-27. • "Ben Lee Memorial International Conference at Fermi Lab". 1977. Archived from the original on 2007-10-16. Retrieved 2005-09-27. • Chris Quigg & Steven Weinberg (Sep 1977). "Benjamin W. Lee". Physics Today. • "Benjamin Lee comments on HEP discoveries". May 13, 1976. Archived from the original on October 16, 2007. Retrieved September 27, 2005. • Moo-Young Han. "Benjamin Whiso Lee: Korea's Oppenheimer?". Archived from the original on 2012-02-10.
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