Originally published 2021-11-18.
In 2021 Manfred Steiner completed a PhD in physics at Brown University at the age of 89, a few weeks short of his 90th birthday. It was his third doctorate. Decades earlier he had qualified as a physician in Vienna and earned a PhD in biochemistry at MIT, then spent a long career in hematology, the study of blood and its diseases. Physics had been his first love all along, and once he retired he went back to it, one class at a time.
From wartime Vienna to medicine
Steiner grew up in Vienna, Austria, and was a teenager during the Second World War. The war and the hard years that followed shaped his choices. With his family displaced and the economy of the early 1950s offering little security, relatives steered him toward medicine as a safer path than physics.
He followed that advice. Steiner graduated as a doctor of medicine from the University of Vienna in 1955 and later moved to the United States, where he trained in hematology at Tufts and continued his studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earning a PhD in biochemistry there in 1967.
The timing must have been bittersweet. The middle of the twentieth century was a remarkable era for physics, from quantum field theory to the first lasers, and Steiner followed it from the sidelines while building a career elsewhere.
A career in hematology
In 1968 Steiner joined the medical school at Brown University, now the Warren Alpert Medical School, as an assistant professor. He remained at Brown for more than a quarter of a century, teaching and researching blood disorders, before leaving in 1994 for a research post in North Carolina. He retired in 2000 and moved back to Rhode Island.
Looking back, he has said he had no real regrets about medicine: it gave him a good life and many friends. But, as he put it to reporters, "physics always lurked in the background."
Starting physics again at about 70
Retirement gave Steiner the time he had never had. Around 2000, when he was close to 70, he began taking undergraduate physics courses. He started at MIT but switched to Brown to avoid the commute to Boston, and he took only as many classes each semester as his health allowed.
Over the following years he worked through the undergraduate material, was admitted to Brown's graduate physics programme and began doctoral research under Professor Brad Marston. Steiner's explanation of why he did it was simple: "Physics was always a part of me."
We are proud to see Manfred Steiner earn national recognition for earning his Ph.D. at age 89. The love of knowledge knows no boundaries.https://t.co/rM5VZ4mrLf
— Brown Physics (@brown_physics) November 8, 2021
Brown's physics department marked the achievement on Twitter in November 2021, as his story was picked up by news outlets across the United States and beyond.
What is bosonization?
Steiner's dissertation was titled "Corrections to the Geometrical Interpretation of Bosonization". The subject sounds forbidding, but the core idea can be described in plain terms.
Physicists divide particles into two families. Fermions, such as electrons, refuse to share the same quantum state, which is why matter takes up space. Bosons, such as photons, can pile into the same state happily. Normally these behave very differently. Bosonization is a mathematical technique showing that, in systems confined to one dimension of space (think of electrons moving along an extremely thin wire), a collection of interacting fermions can be described exactly as a collection of simpler, non-interacting bosons.
The idea goes back to Sin-Itiro Tomonaga in 1950 and was developed further in the 1970s by Sidney Coleman and Stanley Mandelstam in particle physics and by Alan Luther and Daniel Mattis in condensed-matter physics. It remains a valuable tool for studying one-dimensional materials and is still an active area of theoretical work. Steiner said he hoped to revise his dissertation for publication and keep researching.
What his story says about learning later in life
Steiner's path is exceptional. A doctorate in theoretical physics is demanding at any age, and he spent roughly two decades getting there. But the broader lesson is not that everyone should enrol in a PhD programme in their seventies. It is that curiosity does not have an expiry date.
His own advice was aimed at people his age: "It is important not to waste your older days." He has argued that older people hold a great deal of knowledge and experience that can benefit younger generations, whether they share it in a lecture hall, a laboratory or a family kitchen.
For anyone thinking about returning to an old interest, his route offers a few practical ideas:
- Start small. Steiner began with individual undergraduate courses, not a degree programme. A single class, a library reading list or a free online course is a low-risk first step.
- Pace yourself. He fitted study around his health. Progress measured in semesters or years is still progress.
- Find a guide. A good mentor, like his adviser at Brown, can turn interest into real work.
- Check what is available locally. Many universities offer reduced fees, auditing or continuing-education places for older students.
Three doctorates, one lifelong interest
Steiner's qualifications span seven decades: a medical degree in 1955, a biochemistry PhD in 1967 and a physics PhD in 2021. The first two built a career. The third fulfilled a wish he had carried since his school days in Vienna. His story is a reminder that the paths people do not take in youth are sometimes still open later, for those patient enough to walk them.
Sources: My Modern Met: Manfred Steiner earns physics PhD at 89; Brown Physics on Twitter; Wikipedia: Bosonization.
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