Sir

In his obituary of US physicist Julian Schwinger (Nature 370, 600; 1994), David S. Saxon wrote: “He once remarked that he had been reading straight through the Encyclopaedia Britannica and when he came to the letter P and to physics, that was it.”

In another memorial article, Paul C. Martin and Sheldon L. Glashow wrote “Armed with the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the books and journals in nearby libraries, Schwinger set himself apart from the establishment of teachers, textbooks and assignments.” (Physics Today 48 (10), 40–46; 1995).

These descriptions raised my interest in the contents of the famous 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1910), which also influenced the physicist Freeman Dyson profoundly (see S. S. Schweber QED and the Men Who Made It: Dyson, Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga 479; Princeton Univ. Press, 1994).

After examining this edition, I found to my surprise that 'physics' is not an entry word. This is particularly strange as this edition was published a decade and a half after the great discoveries that marked the beginning of modern physics. In contrast, both 'chemistry' and 'physiology' are entry words, with many depictions of these two sciences. Was Schwinger's account of his early commitment to physics perhaps either a joke or a fable?

Of course, many entry words regarding the science of physics were included and embedded in different volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, so one could well believe that young Schwinger learnt physics from the entire set.