Science is in Gerardus ‘t Hooft’s blood. In 1953, his grand-uncle Frits Zernike, received the Nobel Prize in Physics, his grandfather PN van Kampen was a biology professor, and his uncle, Nicolaas van Kampen was professor of theoretical physics at Utrecht.
Gerardus, born in Dan Helder in 1946, was late in learning to read, write, or even speak, but he was advanced in engineering. He experimented with Meccano sets and radio kits. When his father, a naval engineer, bought him books about ships and cars, he rejected them, saying: “Those things have already been invented. I want to discover new things.” At the Dalton Lyceum in The Hague he excelled at mathematics (at 16, he came second in a National Math Olympiad), chemistry and physics (where his arguments caused a textbook to be rewritten), and was encouraged in biology due to the staff’s regard for his grandfather. He progressed to the State University of Utrecht where his uncle was teaching but, keen to get to grips with subatomic particles, he studied instead under Martinus Veltman. Veltman had been working on a paper by CN Yang and RL Mills regarding massless particles, which was considered brilliant but useless for, as he explained to his student: “It describes particles which do not exist”.
Scientists had formulated several different theories in attempts to describe the electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force as the products of one single force. These theories were without a mathematical foundation, but Veltman suspected that the Yang-Mills theory had to be the key to the problem, and had started designing a computer program to prove it. The duo joined forces in 1969. The next year ‘t Hooft attended a summer course in Corsica under Maurice Lévy. He formulated Feynman rules and derived identities for the Yang-Mills particles and in 1971 published his fi ndings. The two men then used Veltman’s computer to calculate the properties of the W and Z particles predicted by the theory. The ‘t Hooft- Veltman model allowed scientists to calculate the physical properties of other subatomic particles.
In 1999 the two men shared the Nobel Prize in Physics “for elucidating the quantum structure of electroweak interactions in physics”. Needless to say, ‘t Hooft passed his PhD in 1972. The same year he married Albertha Schik, a medical student at Utrecht (they have two daughters).
The duo then joined CERN in Geneva, where ‘t Hooft applied the Yang-Mills theory to the quark confi nement problem. This led him to other important discoveries. In 1976, he was guest lecturer at Harvard and Stanford in the US, and returned to Utrecht as a full professor. In the 1980s, he studied superstring theories but found himself more in sympathy with Stephen Hawking’s notions about black holes. In 1986, ‘t Hooft was awarded the Lorentz Medal. An asteroid (9491 Thooft) is named in his honour; and he has written a constitution for its future inhabitants.
This text and the picture of the Nobel Laureate were taken from the book:
"NOBELS. Nobel Laureates photographed by Peter Badge"
(WILEY-VCH, 2008).
Picture: © Peter Badge/ Foundation Lindau Nobelprizewinners
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