Lawrence Schulman

In 2013 he spent part of a sabbatical at Georgia Institute of Technology and has since been adjunct professor at that institution.

Visiting positions, honors, etc.: See the [1]. Of particular mention is his relation to the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems (Dresden), where he has been a frequent visitor since being awarded the Gutzwiller fellowship in 2005.

These ideas have not been accepted in the mainstream of physics and Schulman himself has expressed doubts about them - his claim though is that other ideas on the quantum measurement process are even less believable. As of 1997, the work was summarized in a book, Time's arrows and quantum measurement. Despite the apparent finality of book publication, more than a decade later practical experimental tests of these ideas were conceived and published.

At the Technion he accepted a position as Associate Professor, but only resigned from Indiana several years later as Professor. In 1985 he returned to the United States as Chair of the Physics Department of Clarkson University and eventually (1988) also resigned from the Technion (as full Professor). In 1991 he left the chair-ship and since then has stayed on at Clarkson as professor of physics.

In 1981 Schulman published Techniques and Applications of Path Integration, from which many physicists learned about Feynman's path integral and its many applications. The book went on to become a Wiley classic and in 2005 came out in a Dover edition (with a supplement).

Quantum measurement had always seemed an oxymoron and in the 1980s Schulman conceived of a way to retain unitary time evolution while at the same time having a single "world" (in the sense of the many worlds interpretation). So measurements in quantum mechanics could yield definite results. The mechanism for achieving definite outcomes was the use of "special states" in which pure unitary evolution led to only a single outcome, when in the absence of special initial conditions many outcomes were conceivable. The need for those states at all times led to an examination of the arrow of time and of determinism (achieved here, but in a way that might have surprised Einstein, at least according to his collaborator - and Schulman's Technion colleague - Nathan Rosen).

After completing his thesis he took a position as Assistant Professor at Indiana University (Bloomington), but in 1970 went to the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa on a NATO postdoctoral fellowship.

He was born to Anna and Louis Schulman in Newark, New Jersey, USA. He first went to the local public school, but switched to more Jewish oriented institutions, graduating from Yeshiva University in 1963. While still in college he married Claire Frangles Sherman. From Yeshiva he went to Princeton where he received the Ph.D. in physics for his thesis (under Arthur Wightman) A path integral for spin.

Lawrence S. Schulman (born 1941) is an American-Israeli physicist known for his work on path integrals, quantum measurement theory and statistical mechanics. He introduced topology into path integrals on multiply connected spaces and has contributed to diverse areas from galactic morphology to the arrow of time.