Photos for Young Suh Kim Professor Emeritus Department of Physics University of Maryland College Park, Maryland 20742, U.S.A.

You may click on each photo to enlarge it.

Photo 1, 1935-1946.

• I was born in 1935 at a Korean village called Sorae, where Koreans set up their first Presbyterian church in 1984. Horace Underwood was the first American Presbyterian missionary who came to Korea in 1885. Upon hearing about this church, he went to Sorae and noted that this village is near a beautiful scenic beach called Kumipo. He built his house there. Then, many other Americans came to Kumipo to build their summer houses.

  My grandfather was one of Underwood's trusted Korean friends. He was a well-to-do landlord, and took care of Underwood's properties at Sorae and Kumipo while he was busy in the capital city of Seoul. Underwood set up a Christian college in Seoul which became one the leading universities in Korea.

  I attended this Sorae church when I was a child, and grew up in the thoroughly Christian environment.

• Unfortunately, Korea became divided in 1945 after World War II, and the village of Sorae is now under the control of the North Korean regime which was installed in 1948 by Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union. My family moved to Seoul in 1946 before 1948.

• Click here for my Korean background.

Photo02, 1946-1954.

• In Seoul, I finished my elementary school and went to six years of high school education from 1948 to 1954. Alas, the Korean War broke out in 1950 and lasted until 1953. The school campus was destroyed and the students had to study at temporary places until the cease fire was signed in July of 1953. During my high school period, I was an excellent student and was the leader of the student body.

• In this photo of 1954, I am shaking hands with General Maxwell Taylor who was the commander of the U.S. Forces in Korea. Under him were more than 300,000 combat-ready American troops. General Taylor was a scholarly man and was interested in Korea's educational system. In this photo, I am in my high-school uniform.

• Click here for a war story.

Photo03, 1954-1958.

• In September of 1954, I came to the United States to become a freshman at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now called Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The life was not easy for me, but I worked hard enough to get excellent grades. On March 12, 1958, I received a letter from Princeton University telling I was one of twelve students admitted to the graduate program in physics.

  This was the happiest day in my life. Going to Princeton meant working with Albert Einstein, even though he died in 1955, three years before 1958.

• Click here for my photos form Pittsburgh.

Photo04, 1956-1962.

• In July of 1958, I went to Princeton for my graduate study. Thanks to my solid high-school and undergraduate backgrounds, I completed my PhD degree in three years, but I was asked to stay there for one additional year as a post-doctoral fellow. In t his photo, I am making preparations for my third paper to be published in the Physical Review, the standard journal of the American physical Society.

• While in Princeton, I used to go to New York City often. Click here for my New York page.

• I also have many interesting photos from Princeton. Click here.
  Princeton campus and Princeton carnivals.

Photo05, 1962-1966

• In July of 1962, I became an assistant professor of physics at the University of Maryland, near Washington, DC. This is a photo of the physics faculty taken in the spring of 1963, and I am the youngest person in this photo. The life was not easy for me in the highly competitive academic world, where everybody is afraid of his/her colleague becoming more famous than himself/herself. However, I always got help from appropriate persons whenever I was in a difficult position. The point is that I pursued my own research line strange to others.

• During the period from 1962 to 1966, in my research, I followed the current trend. I had to publish papers on the subjects which made headlines in the journals, but I finally realized that I had to pursue my own line of research.

• The most rewarding aspect of my life at the University of Maryland is that the campus is near the city of Washington, DC. Here are the photos from this unique city.

• Even though I am away from Princeton, I used to think the ultimate wisdom in physics comes from Princeton. However, in 1965, Princeton is not necessarily the holy place in physics. Click here for my explanation.

  This does not mean that I lack respect for Princeton's historical figures such as Albert Einstein and Eugene Wigner. Those people I dislike do not exist in the history of physics.

Photo06, 1966-1977.

• I then started studying the paper written in 1939 by Eugene Wigner (Nobel 1963) on the Lorentz group which deals with Einstein's space-time symmetries. I then realized that Wigner's mathematics is applicable to internal space-time symmetries of particles, such as the spins, helicities, and gauge degree of freedom.

• I then noted that Niels Bohr's observation on the hydrogen atom became quantum mechanics, and that Einstein was worrying about how things look to moving observers. Bohr and Einstein met occasionally to discuss physics. Then did they talk about how the hydrogen atom looks to moving observers? If they did, there are no written records of their conversation on this aspect. If they did not, it is understandable. There were and still are no hydrogen atoms moving with speed comparable to that of light.

• During the latter half of the 20th Century, high-energy accelerators started producing protons moving with speeds close to that of light. However, the proton is not a hydrogen atom. In 1964, Murray Gell-Mann formulated the quark model of hadron where the proton is a quantum bound state of more fundamental particles called "quarks." In this way, Gell-Mann was able to explain the mass spectra of other particles appearing in high-energy physics.

  While the proton is a quantum bound state, just like the hydrogen atom, it can move with speed close to that of light. For this ultra-fast proton, Feynman observed a number of peculiarities. This observation is called "Feynman's parton picture." Thus the Bohr-Einstein issue of the hydrogen atom is translated into the question of Gell-Mann's quark model and Feynman's parton picture can be explained in terms of Einstein's relativity.

• Click here for the wide-open physics world.

Photo07, 1977-1986.

I then found out I was not the first person to worry about moving hydrogen atom. I then studied the papers written by early pioneers. Paul A. M. Dirac (Nobel 1933) devoted much of his professional life to constructing quantum mechanics in Einstein's relativistic world.

He wrote beautiful sentences, and his papers are like poems, but there are no figures in his papers. I then translated Dirac's poems into cartoons and illustrations. With those figures, it is easy to integrate Dirac's papers into one. The net effect is then the Bohr-Einstein issue of how the hydrogen atom appears to moving observers, or how the hydrogen atom appears when it moves fast.

In this picture, the hyperbola is for Einstein's relativity and the circle is quantum mechanics of the proton or the hydrogen atom (localized probability distribution according to quantum mechanics). It has a probability distribution along the spacial axis (according to Bohr, Schroedinger, and Heisenberg). It also has a distribution along the time axis according to Dirac.

When the system moves, the hyperbola remains the same according to Einstein. On the other hand, the circle becomes squeezed to ellipse, while maintaining the contact point with the hyperbola.

• I met Dirac in 1962,

Photo08, 1986--.

• The mathematics of the circle becoming squeezed into an ellipse is simple enough. The question is whether this effect can be observed in the real world. Indeed, Gell-Mann's quark model and Feynman's parton picture are routinely observed in high-energy laboratories. They can be described in terms of this simple mathematics.

• Click here for my the parton file.

Photo09, 1986--.

• Then where does this result stand in history? Historically our unified understanding of scattering and bound states has been very brief. Comets (scattering) and planets (bound states) were quite different until Isaac Newton produced his equation of motion. In atomic and nuclear physics, they were separate issues until Schroedinger and Heisenberg produced their formulas.

  In Einstein's world, they are again separate issues. For scattering problems, quantum field theory is a satisfactory scheme for dealing with scattering problems. For the bound-state, we have to deal with the problem using the mathematical procedure given here.

  The question then is whether the scattering and bound states in Einstein's relativistic world can be derived from the same set of equations. The answer is YES. This set is called the inhomogeneous Lorentz group or the Poincare group. With my younger colleagues, I published many articles and books on this subject. His latest book is entitled "Physics of the Lorentz group: Beyond High-energy Physics and Optics," published in 2021 by the British Institute of Physics.

• Click here for my recent publications on this suject.

Photo10, 1986--.

• Throughout my research life, I was guided by the paper on the inhomogenous Lorentz group published in 1939 by Eugene Wigner (Nobel 1963). He was a professor at Princeton University when I was a student there. I used to go to him whenever I had questions other professors could not explain.

• His 1939 paper deals with the internal space-time symmetries of particles in Einstein's world. A massive particle can be brought to the frame where it is at rest. In this frame, the particle exhibits its internal angular momentum called "spin," and its spin axis can have three different directions. For massless particles, like photons, the spin can have one direction parallel to its momentum. This massless particle has an un-observable gauge degrees of freedom. Wigner's 1939 did not produce a unified picture of these two different physical phenomena.

  Again with my younger colleagues, I produced a unified picture of these two different internal space-time symmetries in 1983. In 1986, I approached Professor Wigner to tell this story. He became very happy and asked me to publish new papers with him. We produced seven papers.

• This photo tells Einstein's E = mc^2 unifies the energy-momentum relations for massive and massless particles. Then it tells Wigner's 1939 paper gives a unified picture of internal space-time symmetries, In additions it tells Gell-Mann's quark model and Feynman's parton picture comes from one formula.

• Click here for further contents of Einstein's E = mc^2 .

Photo11, 1986--.

• Throughout my academic career, the most important asset has been my graduate and post-graduate education in Princeton (1958-62). I met there Professor Eugene Wigner while I was a student. After coming to Maryland, I continued the research line set up by Wigner. In 1986, I approached Wigner again after doing enough work to tell him the stories he really wanted to hear. In this way, I published seven papers with Wigner. Thus, it is possible to construct Princeton's Einstein genealogy as shown in this photo.

• Click here for my Wigner file.
• Click here for his little groups spelled out in his 1939 paper.

Photo12, 2012--.

• It is said that Einstein was more than a physicist. Then, was he a politician? No. Was he a philosopher? YES. Then, where is his coordinate among philosophers. While he was a high-school student, Einstein studied the books written by Immanuel Kant. According to Kant, one thing could appear differently depending on the observer's environment. This is why Einstein worried about how things look to moving observers.

• On the other hand, most of his scientific achievement are Hegelian. He synthesized the energy-momentum relation for massive and massless particles. He also synthesized the wave and particle natures of the matter in his photo-electric effects. Unlike Kant who wanted to reduce things to one, Einstein reduced many to two, and then synthesized them into one. Indeed, this is how the physical laws have been developed.

• Click here for Einstein as philosopher.

I am a life-time student. I love students, and they love me!

More about Myself

• Personal Background. Korea, Pittsburgh, Princeton, Maryland, then World.

• Where do I live? The Univ. of Maryland is in the Greater Washington area and is about 25 km from the White House. How was my life in this area?
  Click here.

• Work Habit. Connect the existing lakes to build a big canal. Paul A. M. Dirac wrote many papers in order to make quantum mechanics consistent with relativity. But he never attempted to combine them to make one big paper.

• Where do I stand in Physics? Why is it so difficult to understand my articles in physics? It is fun to "integrate" the papers written by others.
  See this file.

• Albert Einstein as a philosopher. His coordinate among the well-known philosophers.

• Physics as an art of Harmony and Integration.
  1. Harmony in Architecture and Harmony in Physics.

  2. Harmony in Music and Harmony in Physics.

  3. One Physics. Like Feynman, I believe in one physics.

• Cities I visited. I enjoy travelling around the world.

• Herod Complex. As an academic person, your job is to become famous. How do you feel when some one else becomes more famous?

• Why am so I crazy about webpages?
  1. Passion for communication.

  2. How do I take photos?

  3. One crazy webpage.

  4. Another crazy webpage.