Stephen Louis Adler (born November 30, 1939) is an American physicist specializing in elementary particles and field theory.
Adler completed his doctoral dissertation, titled High energy neutrino reactions and conservations hypotheses, under the supervision of Sam Treiman.
In 2012, Adler contributed to a family venture when he wrote the foreword for his then 99-year-old father's 87th book, Solving the Riddle of Phyllotaxis: Why the Fibonacci Numbers and the Golden Ratio Occur on Plants.
Using the action principle, a Lagrangian can be constructed from the trace of a polynomial function of these matrices, leading to Hamiltonian equations of motion.
The construction of a statistical mechanics of these matrix models leads, so Adler says, to an "emergent effective complex quantum field theory".