Dennis W. Sciama

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Dennis William Sciama (born November 18, 1926 in Manchester , † December 19, 1999 in Oxford ) was a British physicist and was particularly concerned with cosmology .

Live and act

He attended Malvern College and then studied at Cambridge University , where he became a student of Paul Dirac . Like Dirac, he was fascinated by Mach's principle , according to which local physical phenomena depend on the effect of the masses in the entire universe. There he also met Hermann Bondi , Thomas Gold and Fred Hoyle and became a supporter of the steady state theory developed in England at the time , an unorthodox alternative to the Big Bang theory canonized since Edwin Hubble's discoveries . In his doctoral thesis in 1952 he developed a theory of gravity based on Mach's principle.

In 1959 he married. From this marriage two daughters were born. In the same year he went to Princeton and Harvard . In 1961 he returned to Cambridge. At that time, cosmology was a bit fallow. Dennis Sciama succeeded in turning astrophysics and cosmology into a creative branch of physics, making him one of the leading scientists in this field at the time, along with Yakov Zeldovich in Russia and John Archibald Wheeler in America. Through conversations, he also convinced Roger Penrose to turn to the theory of gravity, to which he soon made important contributions.

In Cambridge he taught the well-known astrophysicists George FR Ellis , Brandon Carter , Stephen Hawking and Martin Rees . Dennis Sciama was one of the leading theorists of black hole theory and encouraged his students to investigate it. He encouraged them to take up Roger Penrose's topological ideas, which Stephen Hawking did with great success.

In 1965, when Arno Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson discovered the cosmic background radiation and thus the steady-state theory became untenable, he gave it up and became a supporter of the big bang theory. One of his employees at the time was Martin Rees.

In 1971 he went to Oxford University . There, too, he had well-known students such as John D. Barrow , James Binney , Philip Candelas and David Deutsch . From 1978 to 1982 he also taught intermittently at the University of Texas . In 1983 he went to the "International School of Advanced Studies" in Trieste. There, too, he published some theories. Since 1980 he was a member of the American Philosophical Society . In 1982 he was elected to the Royal Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . From 1980 to 1984 was chairman of the "International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation". In 1991 he received the Faraday Medal (IOP) .

Dennis Sciama remained scientifically active until his death in 1999. In the film adaptation of the Hawking biography The Discovery of Infinity , Sciama is played by David Thewlis .

In 1961 he developed a calibration theory of gravitation with TWB Kibble with the Poincaré group as the calibration group, which includes the Einstein-Cartan theory .

Publications (selection)

  • The Unity of the Universe . Doubleday, Garden City, NY 1959
  • The Physical Foundations of General Relativity . Doubleday, Garden City, NY 1969
  • Modern Cosmology . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1971
  • Modern Cosmology and the Dark Matter Problem . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1993

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Dennis W. Sciama in the Find a Grave database . Retrieved January 19, 2019.
personal data
SURNAME Sciama, Dennis W.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Sciama, Dennis William Siahou (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British physicist
DATE OF BIRTH November 18, 1926
PLACE OF BIRTH Manchester
DATE OF DEATH December 19, 1999
Place of death Oxford