Bryce DeWitt

Discussion at the École de Physique des Houches , 1972. From left: Juval Ne'eman , Bryce DeWitt, Kip Thorne .

Bryce Seligman DeWitt (born January 8, 1923 in Dinuba , California , † September 23, 2004 in Austin ) was an American theoretical physicist .

Life

DeWitt studied at Harvard University , where he made his bachelor's degree in 1943, obtained his master's degree in 1947 (after a break in studying as a naval aviator during World War II ) and received his doctorate in 1950 under Julian Schwinger . In 1949/1950 (and 1954, 1964, 1966) he worked at the Institute for Advanced Study , was with Wolfgang Pauli at the ETH Zurich in 1950 and then as a Fulbright scholar at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research . In 1952 he was back in the USA and went to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory , where he carried out hydrodynamic calculations in nuclear weapons research. Later he was able to apply the expertise he gained there in astrophysics. From 1956 he was professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (at the Institute for Field Physics) and from 1972 professor at the University of Texas in Austin (Texas) , where he was director of the Center of Relativity from 1972 to 1986. In 2000 he was retired. In 2004 he died of pancreatic cancer .

DeWitt worked on quantum gravity , where he was a pioneer of the methods of quantizing gravity and of the Yang Mills theories related to gravity as early as the 1950s (it was the subject of his PhD) and 1960s . In the late 1950s he developed the formalism of Green's functions for curved spacetime. In the early 1960s he extended the quantization rules for gravitation and Yang-Mills theories found by Richard Feynman (Warsaw Conference 1961) to higher orders of perturbation theory (Feynman had formulated them for the lowest order, 1-loop approximation). He later also worked on supersymmetry (and super-manifolds) and supergravity . DeWitt is known for the Wheeler-DeWitt equation , a kind of Schrödinger equation for the wave function of the universe. In the general theory of relativity , he dealt with the problem of freely falling electrical charges. He gave the relative state formulation of Hugh Everett 's name many-worlds interpretation and was an avid proponent of this interpretation of quantum mechanics.

In 1975/76 he was a Guggenheim Fellow . In 1953 he received the Gravity Research Foundation Prize. In 2002 he received the Pomeranchuk Prize . In 2005 he received the Einstein Prize of the American Physical Society . He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters . In 1987 he received the Dirac Medal (ICTP) .

DeWitt had been married to physicist Cécile DeWitt-Morette since 1951 , who also did research on gravitational theory and mathematical physics and was a professor in Austin. With her he had four daughters. In 1973 he and his wife led an expedition to repeat the classic test of general relativity about the deflection of light from fixed stars at the edge of the sun during a total solar eclipse in Mauritania. His wife was also the founder of the Les Houches summer schools in France, in which DeWitt also participated from the start. He and his wife received the Marcel Grossmann Award .

DeWitt (center) with Vilkovisky (left), Barkovsky at a seminar on quantum gravity in Moscow in 1990

Fonts

• with Robert W. Brehme: Radiation Damping in the Gravitational Field. In: Annals of Physics . Volume 9, No. 1960, pp. 220-259, doi : 10.1016 / 0003-4916 (60) 90030-0 .
• Quantization of Geometry. In: Louis Witten (Ed.): Gravitation. an introduction to current research. Wiley, New York NY et al. 1962, pp. 266-381.
• with Cécile Morette DeWitt : Falling Charges. In: Physics. Volume 1, No. 1, 1964, pp. 3-20, doi : 10.1103 / PhysicsPhysiqueFizika.1.3 , (Erratum in: Physics. Volume 1, No. 2, 1964, doi : 10.1103 / PhysicsPhysiqueFizika.1.145 ).
• as editor with Cécile DeWitt: Relativité, groupes et topologie. = Relativity, Groups and Topology. Lectures delivered at Les Houches during the 1963 Session of the Summer School of Theoretical Physics. Université de Grenoble, Ecole d'Été de Physique Théorique, Les Houches 1963. Gordon and Breach, New York NY et al. 1964.
• Dynamical Theory of Groups and Fields. Gordon and Breach, New York NY et al. 1965.
• Quantum Theory of Gravity. Part 1–3. In: Physical Review . Volume 160, No. 5, 1967, pp. 1113-1148, doi : 10.1103 / PhysRev.160.1113 ; Vol. 162, No. 5, 1967, pp. 1195-1239, doi : 10.1103 / PhysRev.162.1195 ; Pp. 1239-1256, doi : 10.1103 / PhysRev.162.1239 .
• as editor with Cecile DeWitt-Morette: Black Holes. = Les astres occlus. Les Houches, Août 1972, cours de l'Ecole d'Eté de Physique Theorique. Gordon and Breach, New York NY et al. 1973, ISBN 0-677-15610-3 .
• Quantum Field Theory in Curved Spacetime. In: Physics Reports . Volume 19, No. 6, 1975, pp. 295-357, doi : 10.1016 / 0370-1573 (75) 90051-4 .
• Quantum Gravity - The New Synthesis. In: Stephen W. Hawking , Werner Israel (Ed.): General Relativity. An Einstein Centenary Survey. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge et al. 1979, ISBN 0-521-22285-0 , pp. 680-745.
• Supermanifolds. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge et al. 1984, ISBN 0-521-25850-2 .
• The Global Approach to Quantum Field Theory (= International Series of Monographs on Physics. 114). 2 volumes. Clarendon Press, Oxford et al. 2003, ISBN 0-19-851093-4 .
• Steven M. Christensen (Ed.): Bryce DeWitt's Lectures on Gravitation (= Lecture Notes in Physics. 826). Springer, Berlin et al. 2011, ISBN 978-3-540-36909-7 .

literature

• Steven Weinberg Bryce Seligman DeWitt (1923-2004) (= National Academy of Sciences. Biographical Memoirs. ). National Academy of Sciences, Washington DC 2008, ( digitized ).
• Cécile DeWitt-Morette: The Pursuit of Quantum Gravity. Memoirs of Bryce DeWitt from 1946 to 2004. Springer, Berlin et al. 2011, ISBN 978-3-642-14269-7 .
• Steven M. Christensen (Ed.): Quantum theory of Gravity. Essays in Honor of the 60th birthday of Bryce S. DeWitt. Adam Hilger, Bristol 1984, ISBN 0-85274-755-1 (with essays by Larry Smarr on DeWitt's contributions to classical general relativity and by C. Isham on DeWitt's contributions to quantum gravity and the list of publications).

Web links

Wikiquote: Bryce DeWitt  - Quotes

• Brief biography on the pages of the Austin University Library
• Biography at the Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy, PDF (138 kB)
• Biography on the occasion of the Einstein Prize 2005
• University of Texas obituary
• Publications by B. DeWitt in the INSPIRE-HEP database
• Bryce S. DeWitt. Biography. In: aip.org. Retrieved January 21, 2018 .