NO WISDOM WITHOUT FOLLY

This book is a biography of François Englert, the first Belgian Nobel Laureate in Physics. Jointly awarded to him and British physicist Peter Higgs, the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics was celebrated for the understanding of the origin of massive particles in the emerging Universe, one of the most important breakthroughs in Physics in the second half of the 20th century.

From his childhood as the son of Jewish emigrants, a 'hidden child' during the Second World War, a rebellious youth — still a rebel fond of poetry and music, aware of the 'sound and fury' of the world — to his achievements as a physicist and his contributions that won the Nobel Prize, readers will find the life story of François Englert imbued with the epitome of resilience. The epilogue further expresses Englert's philosophical and scientific standpoints about the future of Physics.

Although written with a great concern for scientific accuracy, the book's primary goal is to offer the lay reader an accessible account of the life and scientific work of François Englert. This is to address the fact that the development of fundamental physics, one of the greatest intellectual revolution in the history of mankind, remains largely unknown to the general public.

The author, Danielle Losman, is a former student of François Englert and a literary translator. When the suggestion came about to write his biography, it seemed natural to the professor and his former student to embark together in this adventure.

Contents:

• Foreword
• Notice
• Notations
• Abbreviations and Symbols
• Acronyms
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue: A Physics Lesson
• A Child in Wartime:
  • The Birth of a Project
  • Emigrants
  • The War
  • The Hidden Child
  • The Righteous
  • A Sense of Apparent Normalcy ...
  • A Not So Studious Adolescence
• François and the Others:
  • Abhorrence of the Polytechnique ... et la maison du bon dieu
  • A Busy Year (1955)
  • Pierre Aigrain: Genuine Physics, at Last!
  • A Doctorate While in Uniform
• A Stroll through the Land of Physics:
  • Physics ... A Late Blooming
  • The Atom and the Emergence of Quantum Physics
  • The Photon, a Little Fellow Well Deserving of a Couplet
• Robert Brout, A Lifelong Friendship:
  • François at the Dawn of the Sixties
  • The United States
  • The Return to Belgium
• The Genesis of the Brout–Englert–Higgs Mechanism:
  • 1964 — A Visionary Paper
  • Relativistic Quantum Field Theory (QFT)
  • The Brout–Englert–Higgs (BEH) Mechanism
  • The Standard Model of Elementary Particles
  • No Doubt, It is Renormalizable!
• On the Threshold of Cosmology:
  • When 'the Infinitely Small' Merges with 'the Infinitely Large'
  • The Boson Goes Its Way ... And François Goes His
  • Cosmology and Big Bang
  • Genesis According to Brout, Englert, Gunzig, and Spindel (BEGS)
  • A Fertile Haven within the ULB
• Coming Together and Breaking Apart:
  • Ghosts of the Past ...
  • An International Network
  • Aharon Casher and Tel Aviv University
  • The Florida Crowd
  • Prolegomena to the Quantization of General Relativity
• Israel and the Jerusalem Impromptu:
  • At Joseph Katz's
  • Mira
• International Recognition:
  • A Cascade of Prizes
  • In the Aftermath of the Nobel Prize
  • A Laureate's Journeys
• The Birthday Party
• The Sixth of November 2012 was François's Eightieth Birthday
• Epilogue: Glimpses of the Future
• Original Texts of the Citations
• Bibliography
• Index

Readership: General public, academicians, scientists and physicists.

'This book is a Bruegel painting where unbridled characters overflowing with life dance to the music of a klezmer band. It is an ode to the magic universe of physics, to intelligence and laughter, to friendship and resilience, to humanism.' - Foreword by Physicist Nathalie Deruelle

Key Features:

• Draws the portrait of an extraordinary man, both as a scientist and as a human being, and presents a role model for young scientists, as well as a lesson in humanism for all and sundry
• Sketches a short history of fundamental science, and describes the main research topics tackled by François Englert while highlighting his contributions to major breakthroughs
• Intended for the general public to familiarize the lay reader with essential developments in fundamental physics, one of the greatest intellectual revolution of mankind