Politzer was born in
New York City. His parents escaped to England from
Czechoslovakia in 1939 and immigrated to the U.S. after
World War II. He graduated from the
Bronx High School of Science in 1966, received his
bachelor's degree in physics from the
University of Michigan in 1969, and his
PhD in 1974 from
Harvard University, where his graduate advisor was
Sidney Coleman. In his first published article, which appeared in 1973, Politzer described the phenomenon of asymptotic freedom: the closer
quarks are to each other, the weaker the
strong interaction will be between them. When quarks are in extreme proximity, the nuclear force between them is so weak that they behave almost like free particles. This result—independently discovered at around the same time by Gross and Wilczek at
Princeton University—was extremely important in the development of
quantum chromodynamics. With
Thomas Appelquist, Politzer also played a central role in predicting the existence of "
charmonium", a subatomic particle formed of a
charm quark and a
charm antiquark. Politzer was a junior fellow at the
Harvard Society of Fellows from 1974 to 1977 before moving to the
California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he is currently professor of theoretical physics. In 1986, he was awarded the
J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics by the
American Physical Society. In 1989, he appeared in a minor role in the movie
Fat Man and Little Boy, as
Manhattan Project physicist
Robert Serber. In 2003 he was awarded the
High Energy Particle Physics Prize of the
European Physical Society, jointly with
David J. Gross and
Frank Wilczek. The Nobel Prize in Physics 2004 was awarded jointly to
David J. Gross, H. David Politzer and
Frank Wilczek "for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction." Politzer is one of the 20 American recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physics to sign a letter addressed to President
George W. Bush in May 2008, urging him to "reverse the damage done to basic science research in the Fiscal Year 2008 Omnibus Appropriations Bill" by requesting additional emergency funding for the
Department of Energy’s
Office of Science, the
National Science Foundation, and the
National Institute of Standards and Technology. Politzer was elected as a member of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011. Politzer plays the
banjo and has done research on the physics of the instrument. ==Trivia==