Tony Skyrme and the Origins of Skyrmions

Abstract

I first discuss the main motivations for Tony Skyrme's highly original program (1958-62) of making fermionic nucleons out of bosonic pion fields, as described in his Cosener's House talk in 1984. These include a dislike of point-like elementary particles, which he blamed for infinite renormalization, and a preference for extended objects distinguished by what we would now call topological quantum numbers. In this he was strongly influenced by William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), who was so impressed by Helmholtz's proof of the conservation of circulation ("Wirbelbewegung") in fluid vortices that he developed an entire theory of atoms as knotted vortices in the ether fluid. Skyrme liked mechanical models, as did Kelvin, and he grew up fascinated by the ingenuity of Kelvin's machine for predicting tides, an example of which stood in his grandfather's house. This seems to have been connected to his strong preference for bosonic fields, which have a classical limit, over fermionic fields which do not. I then sketch the progress of Skyrme's ideas in the series of six papers in the years 1958-62, which passed largely unnoticed at the time. I emphasize his remarkable intuition that the kink solution of the classical Sine-Gordon equation would be a fermion when quantized, and the novelty of his identification of the Skyrmion winding number with baryon number in the three-dimensional case. I end by briefly describing how Skyrme's work was dramatically related to QCD in 1983-4.