GENERAL ARTICLE

The Life and Work of E. C. George Sudarshan∗1

N Mukunda

E. C. G. Sudarshan is widely regarded as the most gifted the-

oretical physicist of Indian origin in the latter half of the 20th
century. This article describes his early student years in In-
dia, and at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in
Bombay, before he left for USA in 1955 to work with R. E.
Marshak at the University of Rochester. It then recounts his
career as it evolved thereafter, and his decision to settle there.
His contributions in many areas of physics, in each of which N Mukunda is INSA
he made a distinct mark, are recalled. In particular, his work Distinguished Professor at
Indian Academy of Sciences,
on the V – A theory of the weak interactions, and on the Di-
Bengaluru.
agonal Representation in quantum optics, are described in
some depth and detail. Sudarshan maintained strong links
with the Indian physics and scientific communities all his life.
From the 1970s onwards, he was at the Indian Institute of Sci-
ence in Bangalore, and then at the Institute of Mathematical
Sciences in Madras, till 1990. The events of this period are
recounted. Some remarks on his personality, and his views
1
on life and philosophy, conclude the article. Reproduced with permis-
sion from Current Science,
Vol.116, No.2, pp.179–192,
1. Introduction January 2019.

Modern science came to India, through teaching at College and

University levels, only in the late 1800s. In those days, in a hand-
ful of institutions across the country, there were a few truly ded-
icated teachers, many from the Jesuit and other Christian mis-
sionary orders. The three earliest modern universities at Calcutta,
Bombay and Madras were all established in 1857; however, their
role was largely as examining bodies. Given this, it is remark- Keywords
able that the idea of promoting research in science was thought of V – A theory, Zeno effect, diago-
nal representation, open quantum
systems.
∗
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12045-019-0768-6

RESONANCE | February 2019 129

 GENERAL ARTICLE

quite soon, the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science

being set up in Calcutta (now Kolkata) by Mahendra Lal Sircar
already in 1876.
Despite this relatively late beginning, Indian contributions in the-
oretical physics (to which we limit ourselves) have been remark-
able, many of them achieving worldwide impact and acclaim.
The pioneers were Meghnad Saha (1893–1956) and Satyendra
Nath Bose (1894–1974), both of whom had their education and
did their outstanding work in the India of their times. Later came
Homi Jehangir Bhabha (1909–1966) and Subrahmanyam Chan-
drasekhar (1910–1995), who both went to Cambridge in England
for their doctoral work in the early 1930s. Of them, only the
former came back to India (in 1939), and after a few years of de-
voting himself to research in theoretical (and some experimental)
physics at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore, he
turned to institution-building on an impressive scale.
Two outstanding theoretical physicists in the next phase, Prahlad
Chunilal Vaidya (1918–2010) and Amal Kumar Raychaudhuri
(1923–2005), both worked in the area of general relativity. They
were trained entirely within the Indian university system, to which
they contributed throughout their lives. The mathematician Harish-
Chandra (1923–1983), originally a physicist, belonged to the same
generation.
The next important names from this region are Abdus Salam (1926–
1996) and E. C. G. Sudarshan (1931–2018). Both were born in
pre-independence times, and lived and studied in India up to Col-
lege and University levels. Thereafter, Salam (like Bhabha and
Chandrasekhar) went to Cambridge in 1946, completed his Ph D
in 1951, and after an unsuccessful attempt to return to Pakistan,
went back to the West. His life was spent in England and Italy.

He was a highly original This article is devoted to Sudarshan. An attempt is made to de-
and in some ways scribe his life and important influences on him up to the time he
unusual physicist, with a
went abroad in 1955; his career in USA, and his work and ma-
remarkably broad range
of interests and gifts. jor accomplishments in physics. He was a highly original and in
some ways unusual physicist, with a remarkably broad range of

130 RESONANCE | February 2019

 GENERAL ARTICLE

interests and gifts. His work had tremendous impact in several

areas, though unfortunately he did not receive proper credit for
all his achievements.
Sudarshan retained strong links with the Indian physics and larger
scientific community all his life, even though he was primarily a
full time academic based in USA.
This article will try to convey all this as objectively as possible,
bringing out also, to some extent, aspects of his personality.

Early Life and Education

Ennackal Chandy George (ECG) was born into a Syrian Chris-

tian family on 16 September 1931 in Pallam, Kerala. His mother
Achamma was a school teacher, and father E. I. Chandy a revenue
inspector in the old Travancore state. He was the second of three
boys, between Joseph and Thomas Alexander.
ECG’s aptitude for mathematics was apparently evident from his
school days. After high school, he completed the two-year In-
termediate at the Church Missionary Society (CMS) College in
Kottayam in 1948. This college, established in 1817, was the
oldest such institution in Kerala.
From CMS College, ECG went to the Madras Christian Col-
lege (MCC) in Madras (now Chennai) for his B Sc (Honours)
in Physics. This was from 1948 to 1951, after which he stayed
on for a year as a demonstrator in physics. He said later that the
course on classical optics taught by M. A. Thangaraj was a won-
derful experience. Among his contemporaries at MCC were P. M.
Mathews (born 1932) and R. Srinivasan (born 1931), long settled
in Chennai and Mysore respectively. In 1952, by lapse of time,
ECG received the MA degree of the University of Madras.

ECG then joined the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR)

in Bombay (now Mumbai) in the spring of 1952 as a research
student. TIFR had been set up by Bhabha in 1945, and soon be-
came a leading research institution in the country. One of ECG’s

RESONANCE | February 2019 131

 GENERAL ARTICLE

Figure 1. Paul Dirac

with ECG at Austin, Texas,
Spring 1973.

fellow students, to whom he remained close all his life, was Ra-
manuja Vijayaraghavan (born 1931) who worked at TIFR for his
entire career. Vijayaraghavan’s area of research was experimen-
tal condensed matter physics; after retirement he divides his time
The three years, 1952 to between Mumbai and Singapore. The three years, 1952 to 1955,
1955, spent by ECG at spent by ECG at TIFR turned out to be enormously important in
TIFR turned out to be
many ways. He was initially asked to do experimental work in
enormously important in
many ways. particle physics, using the photographic emulsion technique. In
this phase he worked closely with Sukumar Biswas (1924–2009)
and Ranjit Roy Daniel (1923–2005), as well as with Bernard Pe-
ters (1910–1993), all well-known cosmic-ray physicists. Later he
was able to turn to theoretical work, developing his true interests
and strengths. These years brought him close to two other senior
physicists at TIFR – the condensed matter theorist Kundan Singh
Singwi (1919–1990), and the experimental nuclear physicist Raja
Ramanna (1925–2004).

In late 1954, the Then in late 1954, the legendary Paul A. M. Dirac (1902–1984),
legendary Paul A. M. a teacher of Bhabha at Cambridge in the 1930s, visited TIFR
Dirac (1902–1984), a
and gave a course of lectures on quantum mechanics. The lec-
teacher of Bhabha at
Cambridge in the 1930s, ture notes were prepared by ECG and K. K. Gupta, a student of
visited TIFR and gave a Bhabha. This work brought ECG and Dirac into close contact
course of lectures on – a unique and unimaginably fortunate opportunity to learn the
quantum mechanics.
subject from the master himself. It is reasonable to imagine that
this experience must have shaped ECG’s attitude to quantum me-

132 RESONANCE | February 2019

 GENERAL ARTICLE

chanics all his life, giving him the daring and courage to push and
test the principles of the subject in many directions. ECG greatly
admired Dirac, and the two remained lifelong friends.
Another important earlier visitor to TIFR in this period, in Au- Another important
gust 1953, was Robert Eugene Marshak (1916–1992), who had earlier visitor to TIFR in
this period, in August
been a student of Hans Bethe at Cornell University, USA in the
1953, was Robert
late 1930s. Marshak was a leading theoretical elementary par- Eugene Marshak
ticle physicist, a contemporary of Julian Schwinger (1918–1994) (1916–1992), who had
and Richard Phillips Feynman (1918–1988) (all three from in and been a student of Hans
Bethe at Cornell
around New York city), and a good friend of Bhabha. He had cre-
University, USA in the
ated a vibrant group at the University of Rochester, USA, with late 1930s.
talented students brought in from many parts of the world. Dur-
ing his visit and lectures, Marshak was so impressed by ECG that
he persuaded him to come to Rochester and work with him for
his PhD. After some initial difficulties, ECG was able to go to
Rochester in September 1955.
Some time before this, in 1954, ECG and Lalitha (neé Rau), an-
other student at TIFR, were married. It was at this time that he
added the Hindu name ‘Sudarshan’; so ECG became ECGS. They
were to have three sons: Pradeep Alexander (born 1959); Arvind
Jewett (1962–2004); and Ashok John (born 1966). The marriage
lasted till 1989. Sometime soon after, Gopalakrishnan Bhamathi
(born 1938) and ECG were married.

The US years – Rochester, Harvard, Syracuse and Austin

At the time ECG reached Rochester, there was enormous excite-

ment in the field of elementary particle physics, largely on ac-
count of experimental results using the photographic emulsion
technique which he had learnt at TIFR. Many new particles had
been discovered in the cosmic radiation – the π mesons, ‘strange’ Marshak was so
particles like the K mesons, and the hyperons Λ, Σ,... (heavier impressed by ECG that
he persuaded him to
‘cousins’ of the proton and neutron). The production and study
come to Rochester and
of these particles at accelerators was yet to come. Their decay work with him for his
modes and characteristics had led to intriguing puzzles, one of PhD.
the best known being the so called ‘τ – θ puzzle’. (The τ meson

RESONANCE | February 2019 133

 GENERAL ARTICLE

had been discovered in 1953 by M. G. K. Menon (1928–2016)

and collaborators working at Bristol, UK, using the photographic
emulsion method to study cosmic rays.) In 1956, as a way out
of these problems, T. D. Lee (born 1926) and C. N. Yang (born
1922) suggested that spatial inversion may not be a valid symme-
try of nature in these processes [1]. Parity may not be conserved
in the weak interactions. Their careful analysis revealed that this
had never been experimentally tested, and they suggested that this
be done in β-decays. The definitive experiment was carried out
by Lee’s Columbia colleague Mme C. S. Wu (1912–1997) and
collaborators at the National Bureau of Standards in Maryland,
USA, and the results were announced in 1957 [2]. Indeed, parity
was not conserved in weak processes. Lee and Yang shared the
1957 Nobel Prize in Physics [3].
The original 1933 Fermi (1901–1954) theory of β-decay had of
course assumed that parity was conserved [4]. In 1936, a variation
of the Fermi theory had been made by G. Gamow (1904–1968)
and E. Teller (1908–2003), again conserving parity [5]. After the
events of 1956–1957, it became a major problem to determine the
correct form of a universal Fermi interaction to replace Fermi’s
originally formulated 1933–34 theory, capable of describing β-
decay as well as all strange particle decays, incorporating parity
violation. It was to this extremely active field that, most fortu-
nately, Marshak introduced ECG to work for his Ph D. By early
1957, after an extensive study of all existing experimental results
and allowed theoretical possibilities, ECG and Marshak had ar-
rived at the so-called ‘V – A’ structure for the universal Fermi
interaction as the only tenable hypothesis. We discuss this work
later, allowing for some repetitions.
ECG completed his Ph D in 1958. Some of his fellow students
were Sudhir Pandya (born 1928) from India graduating in 1957
in nuclear theory and later living and working in India; Prabhakar
Pandurang Kane (born 1929), Ph D 1958, who also worked later
in India; Susumu Okubo (1930–2015) from Japan graduating un-
der Marshak in 1958, and Tullio Regge (1931–2014) from Italy,
also graduating under Marshak in 1957. Senior to them was the

134 RESONANCE | February 2019

 GENERAL ARTICLE

Italian Eduardo Caianiello (1921–1993), who had completed his

Ph D under Marshak in 1950, and had set up a flourishing school
in theoretical physics in Naples during the years 1956–1972.
After submitting his Ph D thesis, ECG spent two years – 1957
to 1959 – as Research Fellow with Schwinger at Harvard Uni-
versity. During this period he made frequent visits to Rochester,
travelling overnight by Greyhound buses, to continue collabora-
tions with Marshak and Okubo – many papers by the trio date
from these years. At Harvard he did a well-known piece of work
with K. Johnson, a student of Schwinger, on inconsistencies in
higher spin field theories in external fields [6]. This was based
on Schwinger’s Action Principle, and it inspired a considerable
amount of work by G. Velo, A. S. Wightman and others, some
years later. Following a suggestion by Schwinger, ECG also col-
laborated with S. Deser (born 1931) and W. Gilbert (born 1932)
on problems in axiomatic quantum field theory – integral repre-
sentations for two-point and three-point functions. Gilbert had
been a student of Salam in physics at Cambridge, in 1980 he
shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with F. Sanger and P. Berg.
ECG had apparently planned to return to India after the two years
at Harvard. In a paper with Deser and Gilbert submitted to the
Physical Review on 15 July 1959, ECG’s name was accompanied
by a footnote ‘On leave of absence from the Tata Institute of Fun-
damental Research, Bombay, India’.
However, soon after, Marshak offered him a position; and though
ECG met Bhabha at Washington, the decision had been made to
stay on in the US. In a paper with P. M. Mathews and Jayaseetha
Rau submitted to the Physical Review on 15 August 1960, there
was no mention of TIFR [7].
In 1959, ECG returned to Rochester and joined the physics fac-
ulty as Assistant Professor; two years later he became Associate
Professor. His early students in these years – a large group with
an international flavour – were R. Acharya (1936–2018) from In-
dia; Thomas Jordan (1936–2018), Douglas Currie, Korkut Bar-
dakci from Turkey; M. Y. Han (1934–2016) from South Korea
and M. E. Arons, Gabriel Pinski and N. Mukunda (also from

RESONANCE | February 2019 135

 GENERAL ARTICLE

India). In 1962, ECG taught the graduate classical mechanics

course in an unusual way, stressing the importance of Lie groups
and Lie algebras both in the general formalism and in the actions
of space–time and other symmetry groups. In hindsight one can
In 1963, ECG discovered see the influence of Schwinger’s style in this treatment of a ven-
the Diagonal Coherent erable old subject. (Some years later, in 1974, this led to the book
State Representation for
Classical Dynamics – A Modern Perspective co-authored with N.
arbitrary states of
quantum optical fields. Mukunda [8].) It was in 1961 that his fundamental work with P.
M. Mathews and J. Rau titled ‘Stochastic dynamics of quantum
mechanical systems’ appeared. This was in a sense far ahead of
the times, heralding the quantum theory of open systems which is
today at the base of quantum information theory.
In 1963, ECG discovered the Diagonal Coherent State Repre-
sentation for arbitrary states of quantum optical fields. This is
discussed in more detail later, especially the vexed problem of
how to apportion the credit between him and R. J. Glauber (born
1925). The two outstanding faculty members at Rochester at that
time, in the field of optics, were Emil Wolf (1922–2018) and from
1964, Leonard Mandel (1927–2001); they were instrumental in
creating the conditions leading to ECG’s work, and later collab-
orated with him. On the mathematical side, this work involved
the use of ‘distributions’ of an extremely singular nature. We
are reminded of the Dirac ‘delta function’, introduced as early
as 1930 by Dirac in his formulation of quantum mechanics. For
many years, this ‘function’ was not accepted by the mathemat-
ics community. It was only in 1944–45 that the theory of dis-
tributions by Laurent Schwartz (1915–2002) provided a satisfac-
tory mathematical framework able to handle rigorously the Dirac
delta function (and finitely many derivatives of it). However, in
ECG’s work there appeared much more singular objects, distri-
butions whose Fourier transforms could be diverging Gaussian
expressions, which even Schwartz’s theory could not handle. The
courage, indeed daring, to use such mathematical objects, one
imagines, may have had its roots in his discussions with Dirac at
TIFR in 1954.
Another important work published in 1963 was with Currie and

136 RESONANCE | February 2019

 GENERAL ARTICLE

Jordan, leading up to the No Interaction Theorem for classical rel-

ativistic Hamiltonian theories of point particles [9]. Many years
later, 1980–1984, these problems were re-examined in the frame-
work of Dirac’s constrained Hamiltonian dynamics, as part of a
large collaborative effort that lasted from 1979 to 1984.
ECG took sabbatical leave in 1963–64, spending the first half at
the University of Bern, and the second at Brandeis University.
In between he also visited the Institute of Mathematical Sciences
(IMSc) in Madras in India. At Bern he gave a set of lectures on
quantum optics; the notes by F. Ghielmetti served as the basis
for the 1968 book Fundamentals of Quantum Optics with J. R.
Klauder (born 1932) [10]. This is one of the early books on the
subject, and it dealt with the 1963 diagonal coherent state repre-
sentation in all its mathematical detail. At IMSc ECG introduced
Lochlainn O’Raifeartaigh (1933–2000), who was also visiting, to
the problem of combining internal symmetry with relativistic in-
variance. (In fact, ECG had met O’Raifeartaigh in Europe a few
months earlier and suggested that he visit IMSc.) This was an
active area of research at that time, and a paper from Brandeis
in 1964 by Schnitzer, Mayer, Acharya, Sudarshan and Han (evi-
dently inspired by ECG) was referred to by O’Raifeartaigh as the
SMASH paper.
In 1964, ECG moved from Rochester to Syracuse University as
Professor, and created a group in elementary particle physics. Up
to that time the major emphasis at Syracuse had been on general
relativity led by Peter G. Bergman (1915–2002), once an assis-
tant to Albert Einstein in Princeton. ECG’s initial colleagues were
O’Raifeartaigh, A. P. Balachandran (born 1938) and A. J. Macfar-
lane. As a student, Jacob G. Kuriyan from India, who had come to
Rochester in 1963, moved with ECG to Syracuse and completed
his Ph D in 1967. In 1965, Sandip Pakvasa (born 1935; Ph D 1965
from Purdue University), a leader in weak interactions and neu-
trino physics today, came as a postdoctoral fellow and became
a highly valued lifelong professional colleague. Thanks to the
links with the Napoli group, several students and visiting faculty
from there also came to work at Syracuse. In 1967, Joseph M.

RESONANCE | February 2019 137

 GENERAL ARTICLE

Schechter (1965 Rochester Ph D with Okubo) joined the group.

Probably the best known result from ECG’s group in these years
at Syracuse is the O’Raifeartaigh Theorem showing the impossi-
bility of combining internal symmetry and relativistic invariance
in a nontrivial manner.
In 1969, ECG made his last move within the US from Syracuse to
the University of Texas at Austin, as Professor and Co-Director
(with Yuval Ne’eman) of the Centre for Particle Theory. (His
successor at Syracuse was Kameshwar C. Wali (born 1927), a
theoretical elementary particle physicist, who moved from the Ar-
gonne National Laboratory.) He remained in Austin for the rest of
his professional life in the US, teaching and directing and doing
research in theoretical physics. Among the areas he explored in
almost five decades, there were relativistic wave equations, indef-
inite metric quantum field theories using the concept of shadow
states, the Zeno paradox and effect in quantum mechanics, quan-
tum mechanics of open systems, the measurement problem in
quantum mechanics, and supersymmetry in particle physics. In
addition, there were long-term collaborations with colleagues in
Italy and Spain, and in India. Two of his students from the Austin
years live and work in India: Urjit A. Yajnik (1982–1986) at the
Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, and Anil Shaji (1999–
2005) at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research,
Trivandrum.
It is appropriate to recall that during his long working life in the
US, ECG had particularly cordial relationships with two outstand-
ing Japanese theoretical physicists: Hiroomi Umezawa (1924–
1995) and Yoichiro Nambu (1921–2015). Umezawa was a very
ECG had particularly original quantum field theorist, who moved from Napoli to the
cordial relationships University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, then onto the University
with two outstanding
of Alberta at Edmonton, with some assistance from ECG. Nambu
Japanese theoretical
physicists: Hiroomi worked at the University of Chicago and won the Nobel Prize in
Umezawa (1924–1995) 2008. ECG’s student Han collaborated with Nambu in the con-
and Yoichiro Nambu struction of the Han–Nambu quark model in 1965. And in 1982,
(1921–2015).
Nambu attended a conference in Bangalore to celebrate 25 years
of the Sudarshan–Marshak V – A theory of 1957.

138 RESONANCE | February 2019

 GENERAL ARTICLE

Events and Publications From 2006

In 2006, ECG turned 75. In celebration, an international confer-

ence and a symposium were held, and a book published. The
book and the two proceedings are: (i) E. C. G. Sudarshan –
Selected Scientific Papers (ed. Nair, R.), Centre for Philosophy
and Foundations of Science, New Delhi, 2006. (ii) Particles and
fields: classical and quantum. Journal of Physics: Conference
Series, 2007, 87. (iii) Sudarshan: seven science quests, Journal
of Physics: Conference Series, 2009, 196.
The book (i) contains 57 papers selected by ECG, preceded by:
Autobiographical Notes; a 1985 preprint from IMSc, Chennai, by
him titled ‘Mid-century adventures in particle physics’; ‘Origins
of the universal V – A theory’ by ECG and R. E. Marshak, based
on a 1984 international conference talk by Marshak at Racine,
Wisconsin; and ‘The pain and the joy of a major scientific dis-
covery’, the text of Marshak’s banquet talk at a 1991 celebration
of ECG’s 60th birthday.
Publication (ii) contains some of the contributions to the confer-
ence ‘Particles and Fields: Classical and Quantum’ held at Jaca,
Spain, during 18–21 September 2006, organized by ECG’s Italian
and Spanish collaborators. A ‘Laudatio for E. C. G. Sudarshan’
by Luis J. Boya, and ECG’s ‘A glance back at five decades of
scientific research’ are followed by articles from the speakers.
Publication (iii) contains the Proceedings of the Symposium ‘Su-
darshan: Seven Science Quests’ held at the University of Texas at
Austin, during 6 and 7 November 2006, with an interesting struc-
ture. Apart from opening and closing messages, ECG’s work was
surveyed by several speakers in seven technical sessions, each de-
voted to one of his quests: V – A; symmetry; spin and statistics;
quantum coherence; quantum Zeno effect; Tachyons, and open
systems. While the work in each of these streams is important,
it would be out of place to dwell in detail on all of them here.
We have earlier mentioned ECG’s work with Currie and Jordan
in the area of symmetry – the no interaction theorem in classical
relativistic Hamiltonian particle mechanics. Even before this, fol-

RESONANCE | February 2019 139

 GENERAL ARTICLE

His work on Tachyons lowing a discussion among Salam, ECG and Marshak, the first
was an attempt to show ever use of broken symmetry in particle physics to obtain con-
that the usually stated sequences for masses and magnetic moments of the Σ-hyperons
postulates of Special
Relativity permit the was made by Marshak, Okubo and ECG in 1957 [11]. In later
existence of particles years, ECG and collaborators applied symmetry-based arguments
with space like to tackle several problems in classical wave optics and the kine-
energy–momenta and
matics of quantum mechanics.
speeds always greater
than that of light. In the area of the spin–statistics connection, the original 1940
work by Wolfgang Pauli (1900–1958) was based on Special Rel-
ativity and essentially limited to the free field case. ECG main-
tained always that an alternative approach based on nonrelativis-
tic quantum mechanical notions and the Action Principle, and al-
lowing for interactions, was what was really needed. His work
on Tachyons was an attempt to show that the usually stated pos-
tulates of Special Relativity permit the existence of particles with
space like energy–momenta and speeds always greater than that
of light; but for them under homogeneous Lorentz transforma-
tions the processes of emission and absorption can get interchanged.
Up to now there is no experimental evidence for the existence of
such particles.

The Quantum Zeno Effect

This subject apparently has a long history going as far back as von
Neumann’s treatment of the mathematical foundations of quan-
tum mechanics in 1932. In the traditional probabilistic interpreta-
tion of quantum mechanics, and von Neumann’s treatment of the
measurement process, there are several important features:

(i) All probabilities (for transitions from one state to others, as well
as for survival of an initial state) are squared moduli of corre-
sponding complex probability amplitudes.

(ii) The equation of motion of quantum mechanics, the linear Schrödinger

wave equation, is obeyed in between measurements.

(iii) When a measurement is carried out, that equation is temporar-

ily suspended, and in its place we have a collapse of the wave
function.

140 RESONANCE | February 2019

 GENERAL ARTICLE

Thus every measurement acts as an interruption of unitary Schrödinger

evolution.
It is well known that for short times Δt, the probability that a
given initial state |ψ(t0 ) remains unchanged, i.e. undecayed, at
time t0 + Δt is unity minus a quantity quadratic in Δt; equally
well, the probability of survival of the initial state is close to a
Gaussian rather than to an exponential:

|ψ(t0 )|ψ(t0 + Δt)|2  e−(Δt)

2 /τ2
, some τ. (1)

In this sense, probabilities of transitions from |ψ(t0 ) to other

states cannot be proportional to Δt, and thus cannot be described
by transition rates. Following Dirac, in the usual presentations of
quantum mechanics, if we assume we have a continuum of final
states into which transitions could take place, one can by a judi-
cious set of approximations obtain an exponential form for sur-
vival probabilities, as in radioactive decay. (It is in this way that
we arrive at the Fermi Golden Rule for transition rates caused by
a perturbation.) In the absence of these conditions, we do not
obtain the exponential law at all.
In 1977, Baidyanath Misra (born 1937) and ECG showed that
indeed all this can have observable consequences [12]. In partic-
ular, if one checks sufficiently frequently whether the initial state
|ψ(t0 ) has not decayed, then as this frequency is increased indefi-
nitely, |ψ(t0 ) will not decay at all. And in the case of an unstable
particle or state, sufficiently frequent measurement inhibits the
decay and converts instability to stability.
The original analysis by Misra and ECG is mathematically quite
sophisticated. Over the years it has been generalized, in particular
by ECG and his Italian collaborators G. Marmo, S. Pascazio and
P. Facchi. Experiments by W. M. Itano, and by M. Raizen, and
their collaborators, have confirmed the existence of the Quantum
Zeno Effect.

RESONANCE | February 2019 141

 GENERAL ARTICLE

Quantum Theory of Open Systems

As mentioned earlier, the basic equation of motion in quantum

mechanics is the Schrödinger wave equation. This involves the
energy of the system in the form of the Hamiltonian operator
Ĥ(t); it is an equation obeyed by the complex wave function ψ(t)
corresponding to the time-dependent state of the system:

d
i ψ(t) = Ĥ(t)ψ(t). (2)
dt
Properly speaking, a wave function describes a so called ‘pure
state’, a state with maximum possible information, and the wave
equation is valid for a closed or isolated quantum system.
As early as in 1961, along with P. M. Mathews and Jayaseetha
Rau, ECG envisaged a two-fold generalization of this situation
[13]. General mixed or ‘impure’ states of the system are de-
scribed by so called ‘density matrices’ ρ(t), which may be pic-
tured as being ‘quadratic’ in wave functions, equally well as a
classical statistical ensemble of pure states:

ρ(t) ∼ ψ(t)ψ(t)∗ ,

ρ(t) = pr ψr (t)ψr (t)∗ . (3)
r

And the most general conceivable time evolution of such states,

preserving the defining properties of density matrices, was termed
as ‘stochastic quantum dynamics’. The law of such evolution was
taken to be linear in the density matrix. The motivation of this
work lay in the general classical theory of stochastic processes,
and a desire to generalize it to the quantum domain to serve as
The density matrix in the starting point or foundation for the more phenomenological
quantum mechanics Pauli master equation in quantum statistical mechanics.
generalizes in a
profound way the The density matrix in quantum mechanics generalizes in a pro-
classical idea of a found way the classical idea of a probability distribution; there-
probability distribution.
fore it retains as one of its basic properties, the idea of being non-
negative. Any dynamical map must preserve this and other prop-

142 RESONANCE | February 2019

 GENERAL ARTICLE

erties of density matrices; we call this the positivity of the map

itself.
It turned out that the situation is much more subtle and profound
than ECG and co-authors initially appreciated. Since we are deal-
ing in general with open quantum systems, there is always the
possibility that the system being studied is part of a larger quan-
tum system. The possible presence of quantum correlations be-
tween parts of a larger quantum system leads to a genuinely new
requirement on dynamical maps – they have to be completely pos-
itive, or possess the CP property. This goes beyond the previously
mentioned positivity property, because of the subtlety of quantum
correlations.
In his Autobiographical Notes of 2006, ECG has said that the ex-
istence and importance of the CP condition was not initially ap-
preciated by him. It took many years to unravel all the properties
of dynamical maps, and to set up a robust formalism for han-
dling open quantum systems. Along the way the Italian physi-
cist Vittorio Gorini joined ECG in this work in the 1970s; then
they made contact and collaborated with the Polish mathematical
physicist Andrej Kossakowski. As a result of this sustained attack
on a genuinely difficult problem with many algebraic features, a
framework for describing the most general physically acceptable
dynamical map, and a form for the corresponding evolution equa-
tion, was finally obtained. At some point Gorini discussed this
work and ideas with G. Lindblad in Sweden, who had been work-
ing on Kossakowski’s results. As these efforts progressed, it was
realized that the mathematician W. F. Stinespring had dealt with
complete positivity as far back as in 1955; and M. D. Choi had
obtained important related results in 1975.
Today the final form of the evolution equation for open quantum
systems, incorporating the CP property, is named after all of them
– ECG, Gorini, Kossakowski, Lindblad – and one more, Kraus!
Here is what it looks like:

RESONANCE | February 2019 143

 GENERAL ARTICLE

d i
i ρ(t) = [Ĥ(t), ρ(t)] + (2A j ρA+j − A+j A j ρ − ρA+j A j ), (4)
dt 2 j

where Ĥ(t) is the Hamiltonian and the A j are additional operators.

An excellent and detailed account of these developments is con-
tained in [14].

The V – A and Diagonal Representation Stories

Of all his work in varied fields, two of ECG’s achievements are

extremely highly regarded, with many considering that they are
of the Nobel class. We have referred to them previously, here
we give a more detailed discussion. Borrowing from a phrase of
Albert Einstein, we shall be ‘as brief as possible, but not more
so.’

The case of V – A

The phenomenon of radioactivity, discovered in 1896 by Henri

Becquerel, comes in three forms which were recognized by Ernest
Rutherford. The β form is the second of them. The basic or prim-
itive β processes (until the 1940s and 1950s) are the decay of the
neutron into a proton, an electron and an (anti) neutrino, and the
reverse ‘proton decay’ (possible only within a nucleus) into neu-
tron, positron and neutrino:

n → p + e− + ν¯e ,
p → n + e+ + νe (inside a nucleus). (5)

(Here νe is the electron-type neutrino; later two others have been

found.) The existence of the neutrino had been proposed by Wolf-
gang Pauli (1900–1958) in 1930, in order to restore conserva-
tion of energy, momentum and angular momentum in β-decays

144 RESONANCE | February 2019

 GENERAL ARTICLE

in which it was known that the electron is emitted with a con- Fermi’s theory gave
tinuous energy spectrum [15]. The monumental Fermi theory of quantitative expression
β-decay was proposed in 1933, just a year after the discovery of to a new fundamental
force or interaction in
the neutron by James Chadwick in 1932. The most important ex- Nature, namely the Weak
perimental results available to Fermi were from the work of B. W. Interaction, entirely
Sargent in 1932–33. within the framework of
quantum mechanics.
Fermi’s theory gave quantitative expression to a new fundamen-
tal force or interaction in Nature, namely the Weak Interaction,
entirely within the framework of quantum mechanics. He used
the neutrino hypothesis and the formalism of quantum field the-
ory (QFT), which as quantum electrodynamics (QED) had been
proposed by Dirac in 1927 to treat electromagnetic interactions.
Fermi had reviewed QED in exquisite fashion in the Reviews of
Modern Physics in 1932 [16]. Thus his 1933 work was the sec-
ond major use of QFT methods in physics, and in turn it inspired
Hideki Yukawa’s (1907–1981) work on the meson theory of nu-
clear forces in 1935 [17].
In the Fermi theory the basic ‘variables’ are the four quantum
fields corresponding to the proton, the neutron, the electron and
the neutrino, each a four-component Dirac field. Fermi assumed
they interact multiplicatively and locally at each point in space–time.
He also assumed both Lorentz invariance and space inversion
symmetry, i.e. conservation of parity. By a great leap of intu-
ition based on the case of QED, he chose the vector – V-form
for the interaction – a Lorentz four-vector formed out of the pro-
ton and neutron fields was contracted with a similar four-vector
formed from the electron and neutrino fields. Thus the interaction
term in the Lagrangian density in Fermi’s theory was (in modern
notation) the four-fermi expression

GF
LFermi (x) = − √ ψ̄ p (x)γμ ψn (x)ψ̄e (x)γμ ψν (x)
2
+ hermitian conjugate. (6)

Here G F is the Fermi coupling constant, known to have the value

(c)3 × 1.166 × 10−5 (GeV)−2 ; and γμ are the Dirac 4 × 4 gamma
matrices.

RESONANCE | February 2019 145

 GENERAL ARTICLE

With this interaction structure, and working to lowest nontrivial

order of perturbation theory, Fermi was able to explain the prin-
cipal experimental results on β-decay put together by Sargent.
Fairly soon, two things became evident: (i) the theory did not
permit meaningful calculations to higher orders in perturbation
theory; (ii) the V-form chosen by Fermi was one of five forms
permitted by relativity and parity conservation, the four others
being S (scalar, γμ → 1), T (tensor, γμ → 12 [γμ , γν ]), A (ax-
ial vector, γμ → γ5 γμ ) and P (pseudoscalar, γμ → γ5 ). Here,
γ5 = γ0 γ1 γ2 γ3 ; and in each case the replacement for γμ in eq.
(6) is indicated. Thus, in principle, there could be five terms in
LFermi (x), labelled S, V, T, A, P all added together and each with
its own coupling constant.
In the Fermi theory, in the nonrelativistic limit, β-decay conserves
the nuclear spin, i.e. ΔJ = 0. In order to handle decays with
ΔJ = 1, in 1936 Gamow and Teller proposed inclusion of the T
and A terms in the Fermi interaction, so we had the original Fermi
V-form plus the later Gamow–Teller A–T forms.
The late 1930s, and after World War II the period from about
1947 to 1958 (and onto 1967) saw many revolutionary devel-
opments in the physics of weak interactions, indeed in the ex-
panding field of elementary particle physics as a whole. The μ
meson was discovered in 1936; and the π meson predicted by
Yukawa, in 1947 [18]. These decayed via new weak processes:
π− → μν̄μ , eν̄e ; μ− → eνμ ν̄e (That νe and νμ are different was es-
tablished in 1962.) In addition, there was the μ-capture process,
basically μ− + p → n + νμ . With the discoveries in the 1950s of
the unstable ‘strange’ particles, mesons K ± , K0 , K̄0 and baryons
∧, Σ± , Σ0 , all their decays too were seen to be weak processes.
Overall it became clear that there were three kinds of weak pro-
cesses (mainly decays): purely leptonic (μ decay); semileptonic
(the original nuclear β processes (5), π decay, certain K, ∧, Σ de-
cays); and nonleptonic (K, ∧, Σ decays to p, n, π only).
Gradually it emerged that these decay processes had ‘strengths’
similar to the original β-decays. The case of μ decay was noted in
1948 by Oskar Klein (1894–1977); that of μ capture in 1949 by

146 RESONANCE | February 2019

 GENERAL ARTICLE

J. Tiomno (1920–2011) and J. A. Wheeler (1911–2008); and of In June 1956, Lee and
all three by T. D. Lee, M. N. Rosenbluth and C. N. Yang, also in Yang proposed that
1949 [19]. After the discoveries of the strange particles, in 1955, parity was violated in
weak interactions. They
N. Dallaporta (1910–2003) noticed this similarity in their decays pointed out that this had
as well [20]. From all of these partial hints arose the idea of a never been checked
Universal Fermi Interaction (UFI) underlying all these phenom- directly.
ena.
Then in 1954 in an incisive analysis of strange particle (nonlep-
tonic) decays R. H. Dalitz (1925–2006) uncovered the ‘τ − θ puz-
zle’, the apparent existence of two different particles with the
same mass but decaying into final states with opposite parities
[21]. Two years later in June 1956, Lee and Yang proposed as
a solution that parity was violated in weak interactions, and that
τ and θ were one and the same. They pointed out that this had
never been checked directly and persuaded Lee’s experimental
colleague Mme Wu at Columbia University to take up this chal-
lenge. In 1957, Wu and her colleagues demonstrated in an exper-
iment carried out at the National Bureau of Standards in Wash-
ington DC over 2–8 January that in the β-decay of polarized Co60
nuclei, the emitted electrons came out preferentially in the back-
ward direction – a clear sign of parity violation. As mentioned
earlier, Lee and Yang received the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics.
The consequences of this dramatic discovery for the Fermi theory
were immediate: instead of only five possible types – S, V, T, A,
P – of parity conserving four-fermion couplings, there were now
twice as many. New parity violating forms SP, PS, VA, AV, ...
could be present, each with its own strength.
It was to this extremely active and rapidly developing field that
Marshak introduced ECG in late 1956, and suggested that he
examine the prospects of a UFI in the new scenario. The latter
plunged into the problem immediately and made amazingly rapid
progress. Since the background has been adequately presented,
the events of the subsequent months will be described essentially
in chronological order.

(a) ECG studied all the available experimental weak interaction data

RESONANCE | February 2019 147

 GENERAL ARTICLE

in great detail, and by December 1956–January 1957 reported

to Marshak that there were internal inconsistencies or contradic-
tions among some reported results.

(b) By early 1957, ECG and Marshak were convinced that the only
possible form for a UFI was the V – A form: for each set of
four-fermion fields ψ1 , ψ2 , ψ3 , ψ4 the interaction had to have the
form

L ∼ gψ¯1 γμ (1 + γ5 )ψ2 ψ¯3 γμ (1 + γ5 )ψ4 . (7)

This implied maximal parity violation.

(c) However, they saw that there were four experiments, one pub-
lished (in preprint form) and three yet to be published, disagree-
ing with the predictions of V – A. They were:

(i) The Rustad–Ruby experiment on electron–neutrino angu-

lar correlation in 6 He decay.
(ii) The experiment by Lederman et al. on the sign of electron
polarization in μ decay; results privately communicated to
P. T. Mathews.
(ii) The Anderson–Lattes experiment on the frequency of the
electron mode in π decay; private communication from M.
Gell-Mann.
(iv) The Novey–Telegdi experiment on asymmetry in polarized
neutron decay, private communication from B. Stech.

(d) The seventh Rochester Conference on High Energy Physics was

to be held during 15–19 April 1957 at Rochester. Marshak was
the originator of this series of conferences. However, even though
he and ECG had in hand results (b) and (c) above, keeping in
mind his own position, the fact that ECG was still a Ph D student,
and that he himself was to present another talk on the nucleon–
nucleon potential, Marshak did not provide an opportunity for
ECG to present their results even briefly.

(e) Instead, Marshak requested P. T. Mathews from England, then

visiting Rochester, to present the V – A results as remarks dur-
ing one of the discussion periods, and Mathews agreed. This

148 RESONANCE | February 2019

 GENERAL ARTICLE

however he did not do, as in the review talks by Lee and Mme
Wu, the message was that β-decay was probably V and T, and all
in all, the UFI idea would have to be abandoned.

(f) Marshak was to spend summer 1957 as a consultant at Rand Cor-

poration in Santa Monica, California, as was Murray Gell-Mann
(born 1929). Marshak requested Gell-Mann to arrange a lunch
meeting with himself, ECG and a few others. ECG described
their V – A analysis and results, and found Gell-Mann most cor-
dial and appreciative.

(g) Soon after, as preparation for a talk Marshak was to give at the
Padua–Venice ‘Conference on Mesons and Recently Discovered
Particles’ in September 1957, ECG and Marshak sent in an ab-
stract on V – A, and on 16 September 1957 (ECG’s 26th birth-
day) submitted their paper titled ‘The nature of the four-fermion
interaction’ [22]. As a matter of publication ethics, Marshak de-
cided the same results should not be submitted to two different
places. As it happened, the publication of the Padua–Venice Pro-
ceedings was delayed until May 1958.

(h) In the meantime, on 16 September 1957 (just a coincidence?),

Feynman and Gell-Mann submitted their paper titled ‘Theory of
the Fermi Interaction’ to the Physical Review [23]. It was pub-
lished on 1 January 1958, but their route to the V – A structure
was based on rather weak theoretical grounds.

(i) Probably to make up for lost time, Marshak took the initiative
to submit a very short paper with ECG to the Physical Review
on 10 January 1958, titled ‘Chirality invariance and the universal
Fermi interaction’ [24]. It appeared in print on 1 March 1958,
but in most physicists’ minds the Feynman–Gell-Mann paper had
priority.

This reconstruction of events is based on later recollections of

both ECG and Marshak (see below). It was in this complex ECG and Marshak lost
manner, by what may be called a ‘comedy of errors’ ending with the credit due to them as
tragic consequences for some, that ECG and Marshak lost the being the first to
conceive of the V – A
credit due to them as being the first to conceive of the V – A idea. idea.
Over the next two years all four experiments listed by them were

RESONANCE | February 2019 149

 GENERAL ARTICLE

repeated, the results changed, and fell in line with the ‘V – A’

predictions.
It seems that at least Salam and Nambu (see earlier Section on
the ‘US years’) were aware of and sensitive to the ways these
events unfolded. In 1985, ECG received the first Physics Prize of
the Third World Academy of Sciences (TWAS) set up by Salam
at Trieste, Italy in 1983. ECG has described the V – A story in
several places: the TWAS Prize acceptance speech ‘Origins of the
universal theory of weak interactions’ (See Reflections Section in
this issue, pp.245–252); an essay titled ‘Mid-century adventures
in particle physics’ also from 1985; and in his Autobiographical
Notes in the 2006 volume edited by Ranjit Nair.
At ECG’s 60th birthday celebrations in 1991, Marshak gave an
after-dinner talk titled ‘The pain and the joy of a major scientific
discovery’ [25]. This is an amazing combination of eloquence,
candour and humility. After recounting in full detail the events
sketched above, he asks for ECG’s forgiveness for his three ‘Car-
dinal Blunders’: points (d), (g) and (i) in our account above.
He also comments on Gell-Mann, exchanges with Feynman, and
with J. R. Oppenheimer (1904–1967), in very revealing ways:
(i) ‘Gell-Mann claims in his 1983 Catalunya (Spain) talk on “Par-
ticle theory from S matrix to quarks” that, at the “summit” lun-
cheon meeting, he mentioned the V – A theory as a possible “last
stand”; however, that claim does not jibe with the recollections
of the other four participants in the “summit” meeting ... Gell-
Mann’s Catalunya remarks also do not jibe with Feynman’s ac-
count of the genesis of the Feynman–Gell-Mann version of V –
A theory ...’
(ii) From a letter Feynman wrote to Marshak in 1985: ‘... I hope
some day we can get this straightened out and give Sudarshan
the credit for priority that he justly deserves ... these matters all
vex me – and I wish I had not caused you and Sudarshan such
discomfort. At any opportunity I shall try to set the record straight
– as I have always done – but nobody believes me when I am
serious.’

150 RESONANCE | February 2019

 GENERAL ARTICLE

‘Indeed, even gracious Dick Feynman, who faithfully stuck to the

facts on the priority question, apparently never read our original ‘We have a conventional
Padua–Venice paper but only our short note. How else to explain theory of weak
interactions invented by
his statement as “Summarizer” at the Neutrino 1974 Conference,
Marshak and Sudarshan,
in which he said: “We have a conventional theory of weak interac- published by Feynman
tions invented by Marshak and Sudarshan, published by Feynman and Gell-Mann, and
and Gell-Mann, and completed by Cabibbo – I call it the conven- completed by Cabibbo –
tional theory of weak interactions – the one which is described as the one which is
described as the V – A
the V – A theory”.’ theory.’ – R. P. Feynman
(iii) At a December 1957 meeting in Princeton, ‘... Oppenheimer
enthused about the new V – A theory of Feynman and Gell-Mann
as I listened in stunned surprise ... Nine years later – shortly be-
fore his death — Oppie rediscovered our Padua–Venice paper and
wrote me: “It is a beautiful paper and, for whatever good it is,
even at this late date I read it with excitement and great plea-
sure”.’
Sadly, Marshak passed away soon after, in a drowning incident in
Mexico, in December 1992.
The V – A theory was never recognized for a Nobel award, ei-
ther for ECG and Marshak or for Feynman and Gell-Mann. (Nei-
ther, it should be remembered, did Fermi get a Nobel for his 1934
work.) It went on to become the basic first step, the crucial in-
gredient, for the unification of electromagnetism and weak inter-
actions, achieved by Sheldon Lee Glashow (born 1932), Salam
and Steven Weinberg (born 1933) by 1967–68. For this they
shared the 1979 Nobel Prize. At the 2006 Conference in Austin
for ECG’s 75th birthday, Glashow said in a message:
‘... my thesis advisor, Julian Schwinger, ... published a deeply
flawed version of the universal theory of weak interactions... They
(Marshak and Sudarshan) presented a comprehensive analysis of
the weak interaction data, which along with the imposition of
an elegant symmetry principle, allowed them to deduce a unique
form for the weak interactions, the so-called V – A theory. ... The
Sudarshan–Marshak paper was submitted practically at the same
time as the Feynman–Gell-Mann paper, “Theory of the Fermi In-

RESONANCE | February 2019 151

 GENERAL ARTICLE

teraction.” ... However, several reasons underlie my belief that

Sudarshan and Marshak deserve priority in this matter... . In my
view, Sudarshan’s seminal contribution to weak-interaction the-
ory, representing only a small portion of his oeuvre, would itself
justify the award of a major prize in Physics.’
It is appropriate to conclude this part of this Section with a few
sentences from Weinberg’s talk ‘V – A was The Key’ at Austin in
2006:
‘ ... it took tremendous courage for Marshak and Sudarshan to
propose ... that in fact the weak interaction was vector and axial
vector, and not, as had been thought, scalar and tensor. ... there
really is a profound analogy between weak and electromagnetic
interactions. It is not that the weak interactions are produced only
by a vector current, as Fermi had thought; it certainly is not that
weak interactions are produced by scalar and tensor interactions
which had dominated the thinking of nuclear physicists for so
many years; rather, weak interactions are produced by both vec-
tor and axial vector currents, as with great courage and physical
insight and elan, Marshak and Sudarshan were the first to propose
in 1957.’

The case of the ‘diagonal representation’ in quantum optics

The University of Rochester has a long and rich history in the

field of optics – its Institute of Optics was set up in 1929. The
iconic names of Kodak, Xerox and of Bausch and Lomb are of
companies founded in Rochester. For many decades the emphasis
was on classical optics, and then in the 1960s the quantum optics
period began.
In 1959, when ECG came back from Harvard to a faculty posi-
tion at Rochester, the first edition of the monumental book Prin-
ciples of Optics by Max Born (1882–1970) and Emil Wolf was
published [26]; and Wolf moved from Manchester in England to
Rochester as a faculty member. From the very beginning, ECG
and Wolf had a very cordial relationship. At that time Leonard
Mandel (1927–2001) was visiting Rochester from Imperial Col-

152 RESONANCE | February 2019

 GENERAL ARTICLE

lege in London. Then in 1964, he too moved to a position at

Rochester, just as ECG moved to Syracuse.
In the mid-1950s, Wolf had created the definitive formulation of
classical optical coherence theory, treating the classical electro-
magnetic field as a stochastic process. The concept of partial co-
herence and its propagation laws were clarified – partial coher-
ence was described by the so called ‘two-point function’, which
was physically like the intensity but was propagated like an am-
plitude. This theory was included in Principles of Optics.
When the Hanbury–Brown–Twiss (H–B–T) effect was discovered
in 1956 [27], initially there was considerable confusion about its
conceptual basis, with some insisting that quantum ideas were es-
sential to its understanding. Then in 1958, Mandel worked out a
semiclassical treatment of photo–electron counting statistics[28].
Here the optical field incident on a photodetector is treated as
a classical statistical system, belonging to an ensemble and ex-
periencing fluctuations. The quantum mechanical photo-detector
acts as the apparatus or measuring device. From the statistics
of the photocounter in time, one tries to reconstruct (at least par-
tially) the statistical properties of the incident classical beam, thus
passing from a quantum apparatus to a classical observed system!
This work of Mandel helped in understanding the H–B–T effect
as well – conceptually it is the result of intensity–intensity corre-
lations in a fluctuating classical light beam.
Soon after this, the invention of the laser in 1960 led to the need
for a well-formulated framework for quantum optics. Of course,
the quantization of the Maxwell field had been done by Dirac in
1927, and reviewed by Fermi in 1932 (ref. 16). A manifestly
covariant (and renormalizable) form of QED had been developed
in the 1940s. For the most part, though, these methods had been
used for few-photon processes – Compton, Møller, Bhabha, ...
scattering. While in principle the quantization of the Maxwell
field was completely known, what were needed were practical
ways to describe quantum states ‘close’ to classical beams of
light; and in particular the quantum counterpart of the new Born–
Wolf classical theory of partial coherence needed to be developed.

RESONANCE | February 2019 153

 GENERAL ARTICLE

It was this that was achieved starting in 1963. The two key per-
Basic to the treatment of sons involved were R. J. Glauber and ECG.
Young-type interference
and diffraction In his theory of partial coherence in classical optics, Wolf had
phenomena was the used the complex analytic signal, the positive frequency part E (+) (x)
two-point coherence or of, say, the electric field vector, introduced by Denis Gabor (1900–
correlation function.
1979) in 1946 [29]. Basic to the treatment of Young-type inter-
ference and diffraction phenomena was the two-point coherence
or correlation function

Γ(1,1) (x; x
) = E (−) (x)E (+) (x
), E (−) (x) = E (+) (x)∗ , (8)

with the angular brackets denoting averaging over a classical sta-

tistical ensemble of solutions of the Maxwell equations. (For sim-
plicity we omit here suffixes on the Es denoting the Cartesian
vector components). To begin with, it is this that was generalized
to the quantum case by Glauber.
At this point, as with the V – A story, here too there have been
conflicting claims of priority, and who did what and when; so it
is useful to list in chronological sequence the four basic papers
involved:

(a) Glauber – ‘Photon Correlations’ – Phys. Rev. Lett., submitted 27

December 1962, published 1 February 1963, 10, 84

(b) Glauber – ‘The Quantum Theory of Optical Coherence’ – Phys.

Rev., submitted 11 February 1963, published 15 June 1963, 130,
2529.

(c) ECG – ‘Equivalence of Semi-classical and Quantum Mechani-

cal Descriptions of Statistical Light Beams’ – Phys. Rev. Lett.,
submitted 1 March 1963, published 1 April 1963, 10, 277.

(d) Glauber – ‘Coherent and Incoherent States of the Radiation Field’

– Phys. Rev., submitted 29 April 1963, published 15 September
1963, 131, 2766.

Paper (c) was ECG’s first one in the field of optics.

154 RESONANCE | February 2019

 GENERAL ARTICLE

In paper (a), Glauber generalized the classical definition (eq. (8))

to quantum theory using the annihilation and creation parts Ê (+) (x),
Ê (−) (x) of the quantized electric field operator:

G(1,1) (x; x
) = T r(ρ̂ Ê (−) (x)Ê (+) (x
)), Ê (−) (x) = Ê (+) (x)+ ,
ρ̂ = density matrix of state of quantised field. (9)

Just as the classical treatment of the H–B–T effect involves the

higher order correlation function

Γ(2,2) (x, y; x
, y
) = E (−) (x)E (−) (y)E (+) (x
)E (+) (y
), (10)

Glauber also introduced the higher order quantum object

G(2,2) (x, y; x
, y
) = T r(ρ̂ Ê (−) (x)Ê (−) (y)Ê (+) (x
)Ê (+) (y
)). (11)

(Note that in both eqs (9) and (11), the operators on the right are
in normal-ordered form: creation operators to the left of anni-
hilation operators.) He pointed out the importance of using the
so-called coherent states of the photon field in these problems,
and also noted that for a thermal state, ρ̂ can be written as a con-
vex (integral) combination of projections onto them. Since the
properties of these states are crucial for what follows, we recall
their definition and properties at this stage.
For simplicity we consider a single mode of the quantized radi-
ation field, so all the photons are similar and are in that mode.
The photon annihilation and creation operators, â and â+ , obey
the canonical commutation relation

[â, â+ ] = 1. (12)

The states of the single mode field make up a Hilbert space H.

The Fock states are those with definite numbers of photons, and
they form an orthonormal basis (ONB) in H. Starting from the

RESONANCE | February 2019 155

 GENERAL ARTICLE

no-photon state |0 we have

√
n = 0, 1, 2, . . . : |n = (â+ )n |0/ n! ;
↠â|n = n|n;
n
|n = δn
,n ;
∞
|nn| = 1 on H. (13)
n=0

The last equation expresses completeness of these states. Thus

the Fock states are the eigenstates of the Hermitian photon num-
ber operator ↠â.
On the other hand, the coherent states |z, where z is any complex
number, are right eigenstates of the nonhermitian annihilation op-
erator â. Their expansions in the Fock basis and key properties
are

∞
zn
− 12 |z|2
z∈C: |z = e √ |n;
n=0 n!
â|z = z|z;

Im z
∗ z
z
|z = e− 2 |z −z|
1 2 +i
. (14)

Thus, they are always nonorthogonal. However, as shown by

Klauder in 1960, they furnish a resolution of the identity [30]


1
d2 z |zz| = 1 on H, d2 z = d Re z d Im z. (15)
π

In fact, they form an overcomplete set: any |ψ ∈ H can be ex-

panded in terms of {|z} in infinitely many ways, one of which is
obtained by applying both sides of eq. (15) to |ψ.
Now we return to recounting the events in 1963. As ECG rec-
ollected later, sometime in February 1963, Wolf returned from a
Conference in Paris – The Third International Congress on Quan-
tum Electronics – where he had listened to Glauber’s presentation
of the ideas contained in paper (a). He felt discouraged that the

156 RESONANCE | February 2019

 GENERAL ARTICLE

quantum mechanical treatment would be beyond him, and con-

veyed this to ECG. The latter then reassured him that he would
re-express and explain all that was involved in such a way that
Wolf would understand everything with no difficulty. In this way,
in double quick time, ECG did the calculations leading to this
surprising result: on account of the over-completeness of the co-
herent states {|z}, any density matrix ρ̂ can be expressed in the
‘diagonal representation’ form

1
ρ̂ = d2 z φ(z) |zz| (16)
π

in terms of a suitable unique c-number diagonal weight φ(z). ECG

even produced a formal (very singular) expression for φ(z) in
terms of the Fock states matrix elements of ρ̂:


∞ √

r +i(n −n)θ −∂
2
n!n
!
e

φ(z) =

n|ρ̂|n  ( )n+n δ(r),

n,n
=0
(n + n )! 2πr ∂r
z = reiθ . (17)

Thanks to the normal ordering in eqs (9), (11) and (14), we then
see that the quantum mechanical correlation functions take up the
forms (in the single mode case).


† 1
G (1,1)
→ Tr(ρ̂â â) = d2 z φ(z) z∗ z,
π

† 2 1
G(2,2) → Tr(ρ̂(â ) (â) ) =
2
d2 z φ(z) z∗2 z2 , (18)
π

formally exactly as in a classical statistical ensemble but with φ(z)

in place of a classical probability distribution.
ECG recalled that upon seeing all this, Wolf insisted that ECG
draft a paper based on his calculations immediately, and send it
off by priority mail for publication, and only then go for lunch. It
is in this way that paper (c) in the Physical Review Letters came
to be written. The result that, thanks to ECG’s diagonal repre-
sentation eq. (16), the quantum mechanical correlation functions

RESONANCE | February 2019 157

 GENERAL ARTICLE

defined by Glauber take up the classical looking forms of eq. (18)

is called the ‘optical equivalence theorem’.
At the November 2006 symposium in Austin, Texas for ECG’s
75th birthday, the session on ‘Quest 4: Quantum Coherence’ had
presentations by three speakers: Chandra Lal Mehta (born 1938),
Harry Jeffrey Kimble (born 1949) and Rajiah Simon (born 1948)
(written version co-authored with M. D. Srinivas). Kimble em-
phasized the key role played by ECG’s ‘diagonal representation’
in these words:

‘The Optical ‘... the Optical Equivalence Theorem has provided the central
Equivalence Theorem tool in Quantum Optics for distinguishing between classical and
provides a definitive,
manifestly quantum (or non-classical) regimes for the electro-
model independent line
of demarcation between magnetic field. ... the function φ(z) is, in modern terms, called
the classical and the Glauber–Sudarshan phase-space function. The aspect of this
manifestly quantum function that George emphasized (and formally established) is its
domains.’
universal character for all states of the electromagnetic field, rang-
– H.J. Kimble
ing from black body radiation... to more pathological examples,
such as a number (Fock) state ... the Optical Equivalence Theo-
rem provides a definitive, model independent line of demarcation
between the classical and manifestly quantum domains.’
He then went on to the exploration in the laboratory of the conse-
quences of the Optical Equivalence Theorem, and to the creation
and study of ‘nonclassical light’ corresponding to φ(z) not being
a classical probability distribution.
The presentations by Mehta and Simon contain careful and de-
tailed comparisons of the contents of Glauber’s papers (a), (b)
and (d) contrasted with ECG’s paper (c). We summarize the main
conclusions as follows:

(i) In paper (a), while the usefulness of the coherent states |z is
mentioned, there seems to be no appreciation of their overcom-
pleteness, and no references to the fundamental mathematical re-
sults of Bargmann, Segal and Schweber used and quoted by ECG
[31].

(ii) Paper (a) contains the easily obtainable double integral represen-

158 RESONANCE | February 2019

 GENERAL ARTICLE

tation (in the ECG notation!)


ρ̂ = d 2 z d2 z
F(z, z
)|zz
|, (19)

but for given ρ̂ the function F(z, z

) is ‘doubly non-unique’, whereas
the quantity φ(z) in eq. (16) is unique. Therefore, no clear dis-
tinction between classical and nonclassical states is possible on
the basis of Glauber’s eq. (19).

(iii) In paper (d), starting from his non-unique representation eq. (19),
Glauber says: ‘... for a broad class of radiation fields which in-
cludes ... virtually all of those studied in optics, it becomes possi-
ble to reduce the density operator to a considerably simpler form
...’
This ‘simpler form’ is given by Glauber as

ρ̂ = P(α)|αα|d2 α (20)

which is just ECG’s eq. (16) with the variable changes z →

α, φ → P. Then a footnote is added: ‘the existence of this form
for the density operator has also been observed by E. C. G. Su-
darshan’. As Simon says, the word ‘observed’ should have been
replaced by ‘discovered’, and this ‘way of citing an earlier pub-
lished paper ... is extraordinary, to say the least.’

(iv) In paper (d), there is no derivation of eq. (20) from eq. (19), no
inversion formula for P(α) in terms of ρ̂, and no clear statement
of the states ρ̂ for which the repesentation eq. (20) is claimed.
From later remarks, one infers that Glauber accepts the validity
of the representation eq. (20) only for states ρ̂ which are classical
by the diagonal representation criterion.

In view of all this, it is indeed strange that all too often the ECG
Diagonal Representation (eq. (16)) is called, after a change of
variables, the Glauber Representation or the Glauber–Sudarshan
Representation.
In later joint work, Mehta and ECG exploited again the overcom-
pleteness of coherent states to find other more convenient ways
than eq. (17) to ‘compute’ φ(z) from ρ̂, expressing its distribution

RESONANCE | February 2019 159

 GENERAL ARTICLE

theoretic nature in other ways [32]. The book [10] by Klauder

and ECG gives a complete and thorough discussion of the nature
of the diagonal weight φ(z), the extent of its singular nature for
nonclassical states, and ways to approximate it by a sequence of
tempered distributions.
Glauber shared the 2005 Nobel Prize with the experimentalists
John L. Hall and Theodor W. Hansch. Simon’s presentation shows
how the Nobel citation and Glauber’s Nobel lecture were both
inaccurate and deeply flawed in the ways recounted above. No
wonder that ECG expressed his pain in the Biblical quote: ‘Give
unto Glauber only what is his’.
For the work described in this Section, ECG was nominated sev-
eral times for the Nobel Prize in Physics. The fact that he was
not so honoured was undoubtedly a source of deep unhappiness
to him. In his 1985 essay ‘Mid-century adventures in particle
physics’ he wrote:
‘It has been a sad but wise experience to recognize that the uni-
versality of science does not imply unbiased acclaim for scientific
truth and a true history of science; and that if you have neither
powerful alliances nor influential sponsors you should learn to do
science for its own sake and not be depressed by lack of appreci-
ation. Over the years I have developed this skill...’
But the disappointment when the 2005 Nobel Prizes were an-
nounced was not alleviated by such an attitude. The only con-
solation may be that others too have had such experiences [33].
We conclude this Section with some remarks. It was mentioned
that ECG’s paper (c) was written (and then despatched) in an
enormous hurry. It may have been wiser to have not rushed so
much, as then sentences like these may have been avoided:
‘... statistical states of a quantized (electromagnetic) field have
been considered recently, and a quantum mechanical definition
of coherence functions of arbitrary order presented. It is the aim
of this note to elaborate on this definition and to demonstrate its
complete equivalence to the classical description as long as no

160 RESONANCE | February 2019

 GENERAL ARTICLE

non-linear effects are considered.’

‘The demonstration above shows that any statistical state of the
quantum mechanical system may be described by a classical prob-
ability distribution over a complex plane, provided all operators
are written in the normal ordered form.’
These may convey the content of the optical equivalence theo-
rem inaccurately, since φ(z) is not always a classical probability
distribution.

The Indian Connection – 1970s and after

All through the years of his academic life in USA from 1959 on-
wards – at Rochester, Syracuse and then Austin – ECG main-
tained strong links with the Indian physics community, and more
generally with Indian science. Among his many professional
friends and close collaborators, the following may be particu-
larly mentioned: P. M. Mathews, S. P. Pandya, S. N. Biswas
(1926–2005), T. Pradhan (born 1929), V. Singh (born 1938) and
J. V. Narlikar (born 1938). He also interacted with many others
from different scientific backgrounds and other walks of life.
During the 1960s he made extended visits to IMSc, the Delhi
University Summer Schools in elementary particle physics at Dal-
housie and Udaipur, and to Delhi University itself. In 1970–71,
he was Sir C. V. Raman Distinguished Professor at the University
of Madras, hosted by P. M. Mathews.
Probably ECG’s most substantive involvement with Indian sci-
ence began in 1971–72. Satish Dhawan (1920–2001), Director
of IISc from 1962 to 1981, had just returned from a sabbatical
year at the California Institute of Technology, USA. He was In-
dia’s most distinguished fluid dynamicist and aeronautical engi-
neer, who placed India’s space programme on secure and strong
foundations. Daulat Singh Kothari (1905–1993) was at that time
Chairman of the University Grants Commission of India, a posi-
tion he occupied from 1961 to 1973. Earlier he had been Profes-
sor of Physics at Delhi University (1934–1961), and the first De-

RESONANCE | February 2019 161

 GENERAL ARTICLE

fence Science Advisor to the Government of India (1948–1961).

As a result of initiatives taken by Dhawan and Kothari, and dis-
cussions among all three, ECG was invited to set up and direct a
new Centre for Theoretical Studies (CTS) at IISc. This was to be
concurrent with his responsibilities at the University of Texas at
Austin, with him making two visits each year to IISc. The major
aims and activities of CTS were to establish a place where any
scientific problem with significant mathematical structure could
be discussed and pursued; to organize seminars and conferences
covering a wide range of disciplines, and to run a vibrant Visit-
ing Scientists Programme especially for faculty and students from
Indian universities and institutions.
The initial faculty put together in 1972–73 by ECG with guid-
ance from Dhawan consisted of Roddam Narasimha (born 1933),
aeronautical engineering and fluid dynamics; Krityunjai Prasad
Sinha (born 1929), theoretical physics; both already in IISc; N.
Mukunda (born 1939), theoretical and mathematical physics; Mad-
hav Gadgil (born 1942), evolutionary biology and ecology; Su-
lochana Gadgil (born 1944), atmospheric science and monsoon
meteorology; and Hombegowda Sharat Chandra (born 1938), hu-
man genetics. A. K. Rajagopal (born 1938), theoretical physics,
joined CTS for the year 1974–75. In 1976, Ramamurti Rajaraman
(born 1939), Jagadisan Pasupathy (born 1940), both in theoreti-
cal physics; and Vidyanand Nanjundiah (born 1947), in evolution
and developmental biology; came to CTS.
CTS functioned well in the early years, guided and inspired by
ECG’s vision. The Visiting Scientists Programme was probably
the first of its kind in the country. Some of the particularly stimu-
lating seminars were on ‘The Mind: Pathways to its Understand-
ing’; ‘Science and Society’; ‘Mathematical Models in Ecology’;
and ‘Human Genetics and Evolution’. In 1974, to celebrate the
Golden Jubilee of Bose Statistics, a National Seminar on Statisti-
cal Physics was organized; and in 1982 a celebration of 25 years
of the V – A theory was held, to which Nambu was a distin-
guished invitee.
However, as the work of its diverse faculty grew, IISc created

162 RESONANCE | February 2019

 GENERAL ARTICLE

new specialized centres from out of CTS: the Centre for Atmo-
spheric Sciences in 1982 (expanded in 1996 to include Oceanic
Sciences); the Centre for Ecological Sciences in 1983, and the
Developmental Biology and Genetics Laboratory in 2004. Newer
faculty in CTS were largely in physics. Finally, in 2004, CTS was
formally separated into a Centre for High Energy Physics, and a
Centre for Contemporary Studies.
Sometime before these later changes at IISc, in 1985, ECG was
invited to the Directorship of IMSc. He held this position till
1990, rejuvenating and expanding the scope of the Institute’s ac-
tivities. One of his important collaborators in this period, contin-
uing from the early 1980s, was R. Simon. However, towards the
end of this phase as Director of IMSc, the atmosphere was sadly
vitiated on account of conflicts with some senior faculty mem-
bers.
Upto about 1990, ECG pursued somewhat separate streams of ac-
tivity at Austin, and in India. At Austin, the focus was largely on
the Zeno problem in quantum mechanics, theory of open systems
and their quantum dynamics, wave equations, and problems in
quantum field theory. In India, the work was on refinements of the
Diagonal Representation; group theoretical methods in problems
of classical optics especially in dealing with partial coherence
and polarization; the significance of the real symplectic groups
S p(2n, R) for both optics and quantum mechanics, and geometric
phase theory. In particular, ECG and some of his Indian collab-
orators exploited methods learnt from experience with quantum
mechanics to pose and solve classical wave optical problems from
a fresh perspective. In the period 1979–1984 he inspired and led
a group of physicists from USA, Sweden, Italy and India col-
laborating on problems in mechanics, mathematical physics and
topological ideas in elementary particle theory.
After about 1990, ECG’s collaborations with physicists from Italy
and Spain picked up in strength, the focus being mainly on quan-
tum tomography, the Zeno effect and open system dynamics. The
one to whom ECG was closest in outlook and interests was Giuseppe
Marmo (born 1946) from Napoli.

RESONANCE | February 2019 163

 GENERAL ARTICLE

ECG was honoured by the Government of India with the Padma

Bhushan in 1976 and the Padma Vibhushan in 2007. He was
elected to the Indian Academy of Sciences and the Indian Na-
tional Science Academy in 1963 and 1972 respectively. In 1977,
he delivered the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Lecture on ‘Physics
as a spiritual discipline’, and also received the INSA S. N. Bose
Medal. The prestigious Desikotthama Award of Visva Bharati
came in 1998.
Among his recognitions and awards at the international level, the
first TWAS Physics Prize in 1985 has been mentioned. In 1987,
he was elected to the Academie Internationale de Philosophie des
Sciences. In 2006, the birth centenary of Ettore Majorana (1906–
1939), ECG received the first Majorana Prize. In 2010, the Inter-
national Centre for Theoretical Physics, Trieste, Italy gave ECG
and Nicola Cabibbo the Dirac Medal.

Views on Religion and Philosophy – Concluding Remarks

Apart from a few biographical details, this account has concen-

trated on ECG’s life and work in physics and as a scientist. The
complete list of his scientific publications and co-authored books
are easily available to the interested reader. It is appropriate to
conclude with a few words on other facets of his personality.
ECG was born into an orthodox Syrian Christian family, and was
serious in his explorations of religion from quite a young age. In
2002, he made these statements about his attitudes [34]:
‘I was born in an Orthodox Christian family. I was very deeply
immersed in it ... I was not quite satisfied with Christianity, and
‘Gradually I got more gradually I got more and more involved with traditional Indian
and more involved with ideas.’
traditional Indian ideas.’
‘I would now say I am a ‘I would now say I am a Vedantin, with these two religious and
Vedantin, with these two cultural streams mixed together.’
religious and cultural
streams mixed together.’ As a speaker, ECG had an entertaining style, a ready wit and
– E C G Sudarshan plenty of humour. On the other hand, he was also a very intense
person. In the early 1970s, he was attracted by the teachings of a

164 RESONANCE | February 2019

 GENERAL ARTICLE

Vedantin in Kerala. By about the mid to the late 1970s, he became

close to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and his institution in Switzer-
land. Each of these ‘involvements’ seems to have ‘run out’ after
a few years. Again from the early 1970s or earlier, certainly right
up to 1984, he had several serious discussions with the philoso-
pher Jiddu Krishnamurti, especially in Chennai and Bangalore.
In many of his talks, ECG freely used Sanskrit verses and apho-
risms – the 1977 Nehru Memorial Lecture and the 1985 TWAS
Prize acceptance speech, for example, are full of them.
From about 2010, his health began to fail; much earlier a diabetic
condition had been detected in 1984. The end came on 13 May
2018 in Austin, Texas. Bhamathi, a theoretical physicist, survives
him.

Acknowledgements

I thank Arvind, H. Sharat Chandra, Subhash Chaturvedi, G. Mad-

havan, Usha Mukunda, Sandip Pakvasa and Xerxes Tata for their
comments and suggestions on a preliminary version of this arti-
cle.

Selected References and Footnotes

[1] T D Lee and C N Yang, Question of Parity Conservation in Weak Interactions,
Phys. Rev., Vol.104, 254, 1956.
[2] C S Wu, E Ambler, R W Hayward, D D Hoppes and R P Hudson, Phys. Rev.,
Vol.105, 1413, 1957.
[3] At just about the same time as the Wu et al. experiment, the conceptually sim-
pler experiment using the decay Λ → p + π− was done by Garwin, Leder-
man and Weinrich at Columbia University, and independently by Telegdi and
Friedman at the University of Chicago. The result of the former appeared in
the same issue of the Physical Review as [2], while publication of the latter in
the same journal seems to have been delayed because of a ‘Columbia effect’.
[4] E Fermi, La Ricerca Scientifica, 4, No.2, 491, 1933; Attempt at a theory of β-
rays, Il Nuovo Cimento, 11, 1 1934; Zeitschrift für Physik 88, 161, 1934.
[5] G Gamow and E Teller, Selection Rules for the β-disintegration, Phys. Rev.,
49, 895, 1936.
[6] K Johnson and E C G Sudarshan, Inconsistency of the Local Field Theory of
Charged Spin 3/2 Particles, Ann. Phys., 13, 126, 1961.

RESONANCE | February 2019 165

 GENERAL ARTICLE

[7] A detailed account of what happened may be found in Indira Chowdhury,

Growing the Tree of Science – Homi Bhabha and the Tata Institute of Funda-
mental Research, Oxford University Press, 2016.
[8] E C G Sudarshan and N Mukunda, Classical Dynamics – A Modern Perspective,
Wiley (NY), 1974; reprinted by Hindustan Book Agency (Delhi), 2015.
[9] D G Currie, T F Jordan and E C G Sudarshan, Relativistic Invariance and
Hamiltonian Theories of Interacting Particles, Rev. Mod. Phys., 35, 350, 1963.
[10] J R Klauder and E C G Sudarshan, Fundamentals of Quantum Optics, W. A.
Benjamin, New York, 1968.
[11] R E Marshak, S Okubo and E C G Sudarshan, Consequences of Charge In-
dependence for the Magnetic Moments and Masses of Σ Hyperons, Phys. Rev.,
106, 599, 1957.
[12] B Misra and E C G Sudarshan, The Zeno’s Paradox in Quantum Theory, Jour.
Math. Phys, 18, 756, 1977.
[13] E C G Sudarshan, P M Mathews and Jayaseetha Rau, Stochastic Dynamics of
Quantum–Mechanical Systems, Phys. Rev. 121, 920, 1961.
[14] D Chruscinski and S Pascazio, A Brief History of the GKLS Equation, Open
Systems and Information Dynamics, Vol.24, No.3, p.1740001, 2017.
[15] It took ten years, from 1919 to 1929, to establish that the electron energy spec-
trum was continuous. In the early 1920’s it seemed apparent that it was con-
tinuous except for some gamma ray lines. Soon the continuity was clearly es-
tablished by the work of C. D. Ellis and collaborators in England. But the out-
standing experimentalist Lise Meitner (1878–1968) believed firmly in the spec-
trum being discrete, and did experiments to prove her claim. Ellis et al. did
further experiments to support the continuous spectrum claim, but Meitner
kept coming back with more data and arguments. Finally Ellis and Wooster
did a calorimetric measurement which conclusively established the continuity
of the spectrum; but Meitner would not agree until she had repeated the ex-
periment herself. By now it was 1929.
[16] E Fermi, Quantum Theory of Radiation, Rev. Mod. Phys, 4, 87, 1932.
[17] H Yukawa, On the Interaction of Elementary Particles, Proc. Phys. – Math.
Soc. Japan, Vol.17, 48, 1935.
[18] The μ meson was initially mistaken for the meson predicted by the Yukawa
theory. It was only in a 1943 paper by S. Sakata and T. Inoue, published in
1946, that it was suggested that π mesons are made by cosmic rays, followed
by the sequence of decay processes π− → μ− + ν̄μ and μ− → e− + ν̄e + νμ . All
these varieties of neutrinos were not known then, but they did suggest that νμ
is a spin 12 neutral particle like νe but possibly different!
[19] O Klein, Nature, 161, 897, 1948; J Tiomno and J A Wheeler, Rev. Mod. Phys.,
21, 153, 1949; T D Lee, M N Rosenbluth and C N Yang, Phys. Rev., 75, 905,
1949.
[20] N Dallaporta, On the Mean Lives of Heavy Unstable Particles, Il Nuovo Ci-
mento, 1, 962, 1955.
[21] R H Dalitz, Decay of τ-Mesons of Known Charge, Phys. Rev., 94, 1046, 1954.
[22] E C G Sudarshan and R E Marshak, The Nature of the Four-Fermion Interac-
tion, Proceedings of the Conference on Mesons and Newly Discovered Particles,

166 RESONANCE | February 2019

 GENERAL ARTICLE

Padua-Venice, September 1957; ed. N. Zanichelli, Bologna (1958). Reprinted

in The Development of Weak Interaction Theory, P. K. Kabir (ed), Gordon and
Breach (1963).
[23] R P Feynman and M Gell-Mann, Theory of the Fermi Interaction, Phys. Rev.,
109, 193, 1958.
[24] E C G Sudarshan and R E Marshak, Chirality Invariance and the Universal
Fermi Interaction, Phys. Rev., 109, 1860, 1958.
[25] This is reprinted in the 2006 volume edited by Ranjit Nair mentioned in Section
4.
[26] M Born and E Wolf, Principles of Optics, Pergamon Press, Oxford, England,
1st ed., 1959.
[27] R Hanbury Brown and R Q Twiss, Nature, 177, 27, 1956.
[28] L Mandel, Proc. Phys. Soc., 72, 1037, 1958.
[29] D Gabor, J Inst. Elec. Engrs., (London) 93, 429, 1946.
[30] J R Klauder, Ann. Phys., (N.Y.) 11, 123, 1960.
[31] V Bargmann, Commun. Pure Appl. Math., 14, 187, 1961; I E Segal, Illinois J.
Math., 6, 500, 1962; S S Schweber, Jour. Math. Phys., 3, 831, 1962.
[32] C L Mehta and E C G Sudarshan, Phys. Rev., 138, B274 1965.
[33] Probably the most extreme case of this kind in physics is that of Arnold Som-
merfeld (1868–1951). Between 1917 and 1951, he was nominated 84 times,
practically every year, but was never chosen. Among those who nominated
him were Max Planck, Max von Laue, Wilhelm Wien, Robert Millikan, James
Franck, and Enrico Fermi, all Nobelists. However, neither Albert Einstein nor
Niels Bohr did so. Interestingly, none of his own ‘Nobel’ students – Werner
Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, Hans Bethe and Pieter Debye – ever nominated Address for Correspondence
him. [email protected]
[34] W Mark Richardson, ed (2002), “George Sudarshan” in Science and the Spiri-
tual Quest: New Essays by Leading Scientists, Routledge.

RESONANCE | February 2019 167