Work
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.
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. 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 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.
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—Bob Dylan [Robert Allen Zimmerman] (b. 1941)
“Work is an essential part of being alive. Your work is your identity. It tells you who you are. It’s gotten so abstract. People don’t work for the sake of working. They’re working for a car, a new house, or a vacation. It’s not the work itself that’s important to them. There’s such a joy in doing work well.”
—Kay Stepkin, U.S. baker. As quoted in Working, book 8, by Studs Terkel (1973)
“The English public, as a mass, takes no interest in a work of art until it is told that the work in question is immoral.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)