Eugene Feenberg Memorial Lecture Series

In 1946, Feenberg joined the faculty of Washington University, where he worked and taught for the rest of his life. For many years, he shared an office with Henry Primakoff. Their 1948 paper drew attention to the astrophysical importance of inverse Compton scattering. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, Feenberg won wide acclaim for pioneering works in several branches of theoretical physics. He was among the first to recognize the charge independence of nuclear forces and associate it with the internal symmetry called isospin. He played a major role in the formulation of the nuclear shell model, and he made innovative contributions to perturbation theory and other approximation methods in quantum mechanics. He was the founder of the theory of correlated basis functions, one of the most fruitful approaches to first-principles, microscopic description of quantum fluids and other strongly-interacting many-particle systems. Through his remarkable dignity and integrity, his incisive intellect, and his path-breaking achievements, Eugene Feenberg has had a profound influence on the development of computational quantum many-body theory. As a continuing memorial, his colleagues and former students established the Feenberg Medal for Many-Body Physics, which has been awarded since 1985 at the International Conferences on Recent Progress in Many-Body Theories.
Past Feenberg Lectures
John Bardeen (1979)
Quantum Fluids and the Structure of Matter
Eugene P. Wigner (1980)
The Meaningful Nature of the Principle of Causality
David Pines (1982)
Elementary Excitations in Liquid Helium
John A. Wheeler
Almost Everything from Almost Nothing?
Walter E. Massey (1988)
If I were President: Science and Technology Issues for the New Administration
Herman Feshbach (1989)
Evolution of a Nuclear Reaction
George E. Pake (1990)
Basic Science Foundations for Applied Research
Malvin H. Kalos
Crowds at the Casino, or Quantum Monte Carlo and the Many-Fermion Problem
N. David Mermin (1993)
Some New and Simpler No-Hidden-Variable Theorems
Eric G. Adelberger (1994)
Modern Tests of the Universality of Free Fall
S. Chandrasekhar (1995)
Newton's Formulation of His Universal Law of Gravitation
Richard L. Garwin (1996)
The End of Nuclear Explosion Tests? And What About the Nuclear Weapons?
Leon Lederman (1997)
A Physicist Mired in Science Education
Leon N. Cooper (1998)
Confessions of an Unrepentant Reductionist: What the Laws of Physics Don't Tell Us
Daniel Kleppner (1999)
The Bose-Einstein Condensation of Hydrogen
Michael V. Berry (2000)
Quantum Indistinguishability
Albert W. Overhauser (2001)
Dynamic Nuclear Polarization
Walter Kohn (2003)
A New Perspective on van der Waals Interactions
Frank Wilczek
The Origin of Mass and the Feebleness of Gravity
Anthony J. Leggett (2004)
What Can We Do With a Quantum Liquid?
Norman F. Ramsey (2005)
Contributions of Magnetic Resonance to Other Sciences
Horst L. Störmer (2006)
Small Wonders: the World of Nanoscience
Gordon Baym (2007)
New States of Quantum Matter
William D. Phillips (2011)
Almost Absolute Zero: The Story of Laser Cooling and Trapping
Elliott Lieb (2012)
Applications of Reflection and Positivity: Graphene & Other Examples
Douglas J. Scalapino (2014)
A Common Thread: the Pairing Interaction in the Unconventional Superconductors
Hans A. Weidenmüller (2015)
Random Hamiltonians in Quantum Physics
David Wineland (2017)
Quantum Computers and Raising Schrödinger's Cat
Steven Louie (2022)
The Fascinating Quantum World of One- and Two-dimensional Materials
Paul Steinhardt (2023)
The Second Kind of Impossible
Subir Sachdev (2024)
Quantum entanglement in nature: High temperature superconductors and black holes