The Legacy of Ken Wilson

Ken Wilson — The Early Years ∗

Ken Wilson’s life-time achievements in fundamental theoretical physics are well known and are well documented in this memorial volume. Therefore, there is no purpose in my adding yet another appreciation of his seminal work. Rather, I shall describe Ken and some of his activities at the beginning of his career, when he was junior faculty at Cornell and I was his student — one of two in the firs...

Ken Wilson: a scientific appreciation.

Ken Cheng

Ken Cheng was born in Hong Kong. His family emigrated to Toronto, Canada while he was still young, and he attended high school in Toronto, and then the University of Toronto. He has a M.Ed. from Harvard University and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, USA in 1984. He did postdoctoral work at the University of Sussex and at the University of Western Ontario before beco...

Ken Fearon

Ken attended St Aloysius’ College, an independent Jesuit school in Glasgow, and he was proud of both his faith and his West of Scotland origins. From the day he entered Glasgow Medical School, it was evident that Ken had a fierce intellect and that he was an academic clinician to watch in the future. He achieved numerous distinctions in medical school, and in his final examinations, he was awar...

The Wilson-Wilson Experiment

An example of unipolar induction is a slab of material with (relative) permittivity and (relative) permeability μ that is immersed in a uniform external magnetic field H0 parallel to the plane of the slab, such that if the slab has velocity v perpendicular to H0 but also in the plane of the slab, a nonzero voltage difference V is detected between sliding contacts (fixed in the laboratory) on op...