Silvan S. Schweber

Silvan(Sam) Schweber was born in Strasbourg, France in 1928. He came to the United States in July 1942. He attended the City College of NY and graduated as a chemistry and physics major in 1947. He thereafter obtained an MS in Physics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1949 and a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1952, working with Professor Arthur Wightman. From 1952 to 1954, he was an NSF post-doctoral fellow at Cornell University. In 1955 he accepted a faculty appointment at Brandeis University.

He was the author of Hans Bethe and Fred de Hoffman of Volume I of Mesons and Fields (1955) and of an Introduction to Relativistic Quantum Field Theory (1961). In the mid-1970s, his research interests shifted to the history of science. He wrote extensively on Charles Darwin and 19th-century evolutionary theories and, since the mid-1980s, on the history of physics during the 20th century. He was the author of "QED and the Men Who Made It," "Bethe and Oppenheimer and the Moral Responsibility of Scientists," and "Einstein and Oppenheimer: The Meaning of Genius." 

He also wrote Volume 1 of "Faith in Reason, a biography of Hans Bethe." He helped establish the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology at MIT in 1988 and was its first director. In 2005 he retired from Brandeis University as the Koret Professor of the History of Ideas and Professor of Physics, emeritus. Since 1981 he has been a Faculty Associate in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard. He was a fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.