Remembering James Bjorken: A great scientist, and wonderful man.

Over the past 60 years, our understanding of the physics of elementary particles has changed radically. James Bjorken played a key role. 1934-2024

James Bjorken—or Bj, as his friends and fellow physicists knew him—was probably not known to many people outside the particle physics community. But his impact on that field may have been as great as that of the recently deceased Peter Higgs. Like Higgs, only more successfully, Bjorken shied away from the limelight, didn’t care about honours, and preferred to simply do the work, rather than talk about it.

Over the past 60 years, our understanding of the physics of elementary particles has changed radically. In 1960, we understood just one of the four forces of nature, electromagnetism, in terms of a complete relativistic quantum field theory. By 1979, we had theories that successfully described three of the four forces, including the weak and strong forces, leaving only gravity without a complete quantum theory. Bj played a key role in all these developments….

From a memorial I wrote that appeared today in Quillette in honor of my late friend and colleague James Bjorken, who died last week. Follow the link above to read the rest.