Source: TW
Perhaps a life like that of the Swiss nobleman mathematician and sometime Princeton Professor Ernst Carl Stueckelberg von Breidenbach might not have been a bad one. Independently wealthy, he could devote himself to doing science for science’s sake rather than going through the trouble of publishing in high-profile places.
But his work in physics was of the highest standing – one of his great discoveries, which a relatively moderate student can understand, is that an antiparticle, e.g., positron, is the particle moving backward in time!(5) He also developed Lorentz-covariant perturbation theory, proposing the vector boson exchange model for the strong nuclear force, the baryon number conservation principle, and co-discovering the renormalization group.
Some say the Feynman diagrams should actually be named after him.