Gian Carlo Wick, first name "Gian Carlo",[2] was born in Turin, Italy in 1909. Wick's father was a Latinist and Greekist,[3] and his mother, Barbara Allason (1877–1968), was a well-known Italian writer and anti-fascist. His paternal grandfather had emigrated from Switzerland to Italy and his grandmother from Austria.
In 1930 Wick received his doctoral degree in Turin under G. Wataghin with a thesis on the electronic theory of metals. He then went to Göttingen and Leipzig to further his study of physics. One of the professors he got to know there was Werner Heisenberg. Heisenberg liked the young Italian theoretician—they shared a common interest in classical music—and treated him with an affection that Wick never forgot. Once a week, Heisenberg had invited Wick and other students to his home for spirited evenings of talk and Ping-Pong.[4]
As a member of Fermi's group in Rome, Wick calculated the magnetic moment of the hydrogen molecule with group-theoretical methods. He extended Fermi's theory of beta decay to positron emission and K-capture, and explained the relationship between the range of a force and the mass of its force carrier particle. He also worked on slowing down of neutrons in matter, and joined a group of Italian physicists led by Gilberto Bernardini which made the first measurement of the lifetime of the muon.[1]
While in the United States, Wick made fundamental contributions to quantum field theory, such as the Wick theorem in 1950, which showed how to express calculations in quantum field theory in terms of normally-ordered products and thus derive Feynman rules.[1] He also introduced the Wick rotation, in which computations are analytically continued from Minkowski space to four-dimensional Euclidean space using a coordinate change to imaginary time[6] He developed the helicity formulation for collisions between particles with arbitrary spin, worked with Geoffrey Chew on the impulse approximation, and worked on meson theory, symmetry principles in physics, and the vacuum structure of quantum field theory.[1]
Wick, G. C. (1933). "Über die Wechselwirkung zwischen Neutronen und Protonen". Zeitschrift für Physik (in German). 84 (11–12). Springer Science and Business Media LLC: 799–800. doi:10.1007/bf01330504. ISSN1434-6001.
Wick, G. C. (1950-10-15). "The Evaluation of the Collision Matrix". Physical Review. 80 (2). American Physical Society (APS): 268–272. doi:10.1103/physrev.80.268. ISSN0031-899X.
Wick, G. C. (1954-11-15). "Properties of Bethe-Salpeter Wave Functions". Physical Review. 96 (4). American Physical Society (APS): 1124–1134. doi:10.1103/physrev.96.1124. ISSN0031-899X. (introduced the Wick rotation.)[6]
Wick, G. C. (1955-10-01). "Introduction to Some Recent Work in Meson Theory". Reviews of Modern Physics. 27 (4). American Physical Society (APS): 339–362. doi:10.1103/revmodphys.27.339. ISSN0034-6861.
Jacob, M.; Wick, G.C. (1959). "On the general theory of collisions for particles with spin". Annals of Physics. 7 (4). Elsevier BV: 404–428. doi:10.1016/0003-4916(59)90051-x. ISSN0003-4916.
Wick, G. -C.; Wightman, A. S.; Wigner, Eugene P. (1970-06-15). "Superselection Rule for Charge". Physical Review D. 1 (12). American Physical Society (APS): 3267–3269. doi:10.1103/physrevd.1.3267. ISSN0556-2821.
Lee, T. D.; Wick, G. C. (1974-04-15). "Vacuum stability and vacuum excitation in a spin-0 field theory". Physical Review D. 9 (8). American Physical Society (APS): 2291–2316. doi:10.1103/physrevd.9.2291. ISSN0556-2821.
^Amaldi, E. (1998). "Gian Carlo Wick during the 1930s". In Battimelli, G.; Paoloni, G. (eds.). 20th Century Physics: Essays and Recollections: a Selection of Historical Writings by Edoardo Amaldi. Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Company. pp. 128–139. ISBN9810223692.
^"Wick Gian Carlo". SIUSA Archivi di Personalità (in Italian). Retrieved January 8, 2022.
^Gian Carlo Wick, The Catcher was a Spy, Nicholas Dawidoff, New York 1994 p.178