John Cardy facts for kids

John Lawrence Cardy (born March 19, 1947) is a very smart British-American scientist. He is a theoretical physicist. This means he uses math and ideas to understand how the universe works. He doesn't do experiments in a lab.

John Cardy is best known for his work in condensed matter physics. This part of physics studies how materials behave. He also worked in statistical mechanics, which looks at how many tiny particles act together. He made big discoveries about critical phenomena and two-dimensional conformal field theory. These are ways to understand how things change, like water turning into ice.

John L. Cardy: A Physics Explorer

John Cardy started his studies at Downing College, Cambridge in England. After finishing his advanced degrees, he moved to the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1977. There, he became a professor.

In 1993, he moved back to England. He joined the University of Oxford and became a professor of physics. He worked at All Souls College until 2014. Later, he was a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley.

What Does a Theoretical Physicist Do?

Before 1978, John Cardy studied particle physics. This field looks at the smallest parts that make up everything. He studied how these tiny particles bounce off each other at high speeds.

After that, he started using ideas from quantum field theory to study materials. He used something called the renormalization group. This helps scientists understand how materials behave when they are near a "critical point." A critical point is where a material changes its state, like when a liquid becomes a gas.

In the 1980s, he helped create the idea of conformal invariance. This is a special kind of symmetry that helps explain how things look the same even when you zoom in or out. These ideas were also important for understanding string theory and even black holes.

His Amazing Discoveries

In the 1990s, John Cardy used his ideas about conformal invariance to solve problems in percolation theory. This is a math problem about how things connect, like water flowing through a coffee filter. His work helped inspire other mathematicians. Two of them, Wendelin Werner and Stanislav Smirnov, won the Fields Medal. This is a very important award in math.

More recently, he has studied quantum entanglement. This is a strange idea where tiny particles are linked, no matter how far apart they are. He also looked at how systems change over time when they are not in balance.

John Cardy is most famous for his work on conformal field theory. Some important ideas are named after him:

• The Cardy formula for black hole entropy. This helps measure the "disorder" of a black hole.
• The Cardy formula in percolation theory.
• The Cardy conditions in boundary conformal field theory.

Awards and Recognition

John Cardy has received many important awards for his work:

• He became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1991. This is a very high honor for scientists in the UK.
• He received the Dirac Medal in 2000 from the Institute of Physics.
• He won the Lars Onsager Prize in 2004 from the American Physical Society.
• He was awarded the Boltzmann Medal in 2010.
• He received another Dirac Medal in 2011 from the International Centre for Theoretical Physics.
• In 2024, he won the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. This is a very big award for major discoveries in physics.

Selected Works

John Cardy has written many important scientific books and papers. Here are a few examples:

• Scaling and renormalization in statistical physics (1996)
• Non equilibrium statistical mechanics and turbulence (2008)
• Conformal Invariance and Statistical Mechanics (1988)