Personal Background

I came to the United States from Korea in 1954 after high-school graduation, and became a freshman at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now called Carnegie-Mellon University). In 1958, I became a graduate student at Princeton University. After receiving my PhD degree from Princeton in 1961, I stayed there for one more year as a post-doctoral fellow. Since 1962, I have been on the faculty of the University of Maryland at College Park. The United States has been very nice to me.

With General Maxwell Taylor (1953), the commander of U.S. Forces in Korea. I was in my high-school uniform. There were 330,000 US combat troops under Taylor's command. Later, Gen. Taylor served as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs for the Kennedy administration and designed Kennedy's Cuban invasion plan.

I spent my high-school years in Korea from 1948 to 1954, covering the Korean War period (1950-53). There were 360 boys in my entering class, but only 250 were able to graduate. This tells how destructive the war was on Korea's educational system. Yet, my class produced three Harvard PhDs, two Princeton PhDs, and one MIT PhD. I contend that my high-school class was the No. 1 class in the world.
You may click here for my Korean background.
In Korea, I had a Hallicrafters short-wave radio and was able to listen to the world. From Japanese broadcasts, I picked up many music programs. I used to listen to the "Voice of America" English programs directly from California, and heard clearly what was happening in the United States after the Supreme Court ordered the school integration in May of 1954, three months before coming to the United States. If you see my Carnegie Tech photo given on this page, you will see a black box on my left. It was another Hallicrafter radio which I had while I was at Carnegie.
In addition, I was born in a Christian family. My mother used to say I was able to recite verses of the Gospel of Matthew before I learned how to speak. This was of course an exaggeration, but I discovered easily that the super-constitution of the United States is the Gospel of Matthew. I have many Jewish friends who do not believe in Jesus, but they all agree with on this Matthew issue.
With this Christian background, I invented the word Herod Complex. As you know, King Herod ordered all new-born babies be killed after hearing that a new king was born. Most of my physics colleagues were No. 1 boys or girls in their respective high schools. If you are the No. 1, you cannot afford another No. 1 in your class. I know I have this complex, and I am able to understand atrocious behavior of my colleagues in terms of the Herod complex. In this way, I live in this world more comfortably.

Koreans are also hard workers. The United States rewards those who work hard. This was particularly true at Carnegie Tech which is still known as a brute-force school.

Studying in my dormitory room at Carnegie Tech (1958).
While I was a student at Carnegie Tech, I had excellent professors. I can mention three names. They were Lincoln Wolfenstein, Michel Baranger, and Hugh Young. Wolfenstein's ideology was that you have to produce the numbers which can be compared with experiments. At that time, I had to use slide rules to calculate the numbers, and I am still good at it. I took the first-year quantum mechanics course from Michel Baranger. Because of his influence, I was able to pinpoint the mistake Dashen made in his calculation of the n-p mass difference. This aspect of my professional life is on my webpage. Hugh Young is widely known for his textbooks, and was a dedicated teacher when I was a student. I have images of Baranger and Wolfenstein on my website. I would like to visit Hugh Young at CMU to have a photo with him.
Indeed, Carnegie Tech gave me a very solid education during my first four years in the United States. Pittsburgh is a very interesting city, and I have my Pittsburgh page.

When I was a student (1958-61) and a postdoc (1961-62), I enjoyed being associated with many physics and non-physics friends. There was a student from the Soviet Union (unthinkable at that time) named Alexander Merkolov. He brought with him a Soviet-made shaving machine which operated on winding spring. He complained Americans do not sing at parties. Indeed, Russians sing passionately at their parties.

Princeton commencement ceremony (1961). I was sitting on the third row, and was able to have a close-up view of Dean Rusk, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Mary Bunting who were among the recipients of the honorary degrees.

I frequently had arguments with those students who were planning to be in foreign service. One of them told me and others that the best way to handle China (hostile to the U.S. at that time) is to let Japanese invade China by giving weapons to them. I then asked him whether Japanese were going to fight for Americans. American foreign policies are not always consistent with true Americanism. You can see why.

In addition to those non-physics people, I think I was popular among my physics friends and professors. I was not John A. Wheeler's student, but he still remembers me and likes to talk with me. Indeed, Princeton was very nice to me. Recently, I started developing my own Princeton page. It is not secret, and you are welcome to visit my Princeton page.
While I was writing my PhD thesis on the subject called "Dispersion Relations," I knew that this subject could not survive in the history of physics. Thus, I started studying Wigner's paper on the representations of the inhomogeneous Lorentz group in the Annals of Mathematics (1939). However, I was not able to understand what his formulas have to do with physics.
Click here to expand this faculty photo of 1963. I was an assistant professor at the Univ. of Maryland. I am the youngest man in this photo.

After spending one post-doctoral year after my PhD, I came to the University of Maryland in 1962 as an assistant professor. At that time, the physics world was dominated by the ideology that every thing comes from singularities in the complex plane, but I was not happy with the physics environment.
In 1965, I became convinced that the prevailing ideology was only a superstition and I went through the controversy called the Dashen-Frautchi Fiasco. To make a long story short, I almost got thrown out from the United States.
The scientific issue is that the superstition does not guarantee the localization of bound-state wave functions. On the other hand, physicists did not and still do not know how to construct wave functions which can be Lorentz-transformed.
If there exists such a wave function, it has to be a harmonic oscillator wave function. I then realized that Dirac, Yukawa, and Feynman independently attempted to construct Lorentz-covariant oscillator wave functions.
However, they never attempted to construct their wave functions within the framework of Wigner's 1939 paper, where he constructs his little groups which are subgroups of the Lorentz group whose transformations leave the momentum of a particle invariant. I then realized that the harmonic oscillator wave functions are applicable to internal space-time wave functions of hadrons.

Lunch with the Wigners in 1991, at a seafood restaurant in Princeton.

With this clue, I restarted studying Wigner's paper again. Wigner in his paper concludes that the internal space-time symmetries of massive and massless particles are isomorphic to O(3) and E(2) respectively. The question then is whether the E(2)-like little group can be obtained as a limiting case of the O(3) group. After obtaining a satisfactory result, I approached Wigner in 1985, and Wigner liked my stories about his paper.
From 1987 to 1990, I was able to publish seven papers with Wigner. This is the reason why I am known as Wigner's youngest student. You are invited to my Wigner page. for further details.