Climbing the Mountain : The Scientific Biography of Julian Schwinger - Schwinger died on 16 July 1994, and enough time has elapsed to begin to appreciate the full impact of his gentle genius. We believe that we are uniquely privileged and qualified to bring a scientific and human perspective to his life and work. This project began with an extensive series of interviews by one of us (J.M.) with Julian and his wife Clarice in 1988, just after his 70th birthday celebration in Los Angeles, with the goal of writing his biography, which Schwinger had fully authorized. J.M. had known Schwinger personally since spring 1959 when, as a young man, he attended Schwinger's invited lectures at UCLA; they found much in common in their respective acquaintances with Paul Dirac and Wolfgang Pauli (who had recently died), and their contacts and encounters grew over the years. At the time of his interviews with Julian and Clarice, J.M. was writing The beat of a different drum: the life and science of Richard Feynman (Oxford, 1994), a full-length biography of Feynman, who had died the previous moth, which would also provide the background for a complementary point of view of Schwinger's lifework. The second author (K.A.M.) was one of Schwinger's last students at Harvard, and accompanied him on his move to UCLA in 1971, staying on there as his 'assistant' and collaborator until 1979, and as his trustedfriend throughout. Due to this close association, he gained an intimate perspective on the life and work of Schwinger, and, some time after Julian's death, J.M. invited K.A.M. to collaborate with him, which he was happy to do, and Clarice gave him her gracious authorization to join in the task of writing her husband's biography. Thus we bring to the project direct knowledge of Schwinger and his career over a long period. Because the last third of Schwinger's life seems more puzzling compared with the easy triumphs of the early period until 1950, beginning in nuclear physics and culminating in the construction of renormalized quantum electrodynamics, we believe this perspective offers the possibility ofunderstanding this extremely complex and extraordinarily private man.
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