Mlodinow was born in
Chicago, Illinois, to Jewish parents who were both
Holocaust survivors. His father, who spent more than a year in the
Buchenwald concentration camp, had been a leader in the
Jewish resistance in his hometown of
Częstochowa, in
Nazi German-occupied Poland. As a child, Mlodinow was interested in both
mathematics and
chemistry; while in high school, he was tutored in
organic chemistry by a professor from the
University of Illinois. He said in his book ''Feynman's Rainbow
that his interest turned to physics during a semester he took off from college to spend on a kibbutz in Israel, during which he had little to do at night besides reading The Feynman Lectures on Physics'', which was one of the few English books he found in the kibbutz library. Mlodinow completed his doctorate at the
University of California, Berkeley. In his PhD dissertation he developed a new type of
perturbation theory for
nonrelativistic quantum mechanics, based upon solving the problem in infinite dimensions, and then correcting for the fact that we live in three. The method has become the basis of the 1/d expansion used by theoretical chemists. He has also done pioneering and innovative work in the quantum theory of
nonlinear optics. The central problem of quantum nonlinear optics is how to quantize a
dielectric that, as well as the usual homogeneities and
anisotropy, can also have nonlinearities and
dispersion, and earlier attempts in this direction, while incorporating the known linear theory, had not fully reproduced the nonlinear equations. and wrote the screenplay for the 2009 film
Beyond the Horizon. He continued to conduct research in theoretical physics, and again joined the faculty of Caltech in 2005, leaving in 2013. His latest work in physics concerns the
arrow of time,
quantum decoherence, and the relation between discrete
quantum random walks and the
relativistic equations of quantum theory. host
Josh Zepps interviews Mlodinow –
CFI Summit – 2013. ==Bibliography==