Felix Pirani

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Felix Arnold Edward Pirani (born February 2, 1928 in London ; † December 31, 2015 ) was a British theoretical physicist who studied gravitational physics and general relativity (AR).

Pirani's family went to Canada before the outbreak of World War II. He studied at the University of Western Ontario (Bachelor 1948), the University of Toronto (Master’s 1949) and received his doctorate in 1951 under Alfred Schild at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (D. Sc. On canonical quantization of gravitation) and a second time (Ph .D. Cantab) 1956 with Hermann Bondi at the University of Cambridge ( The relativistic basis of mechanics ). As a post-doctoral student he was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Dublin with Erwin Schrödinger (and John Synge ) and at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill (1959) with Bryce DeWitt . From 1958 he was at King's College London (as a colleague of Bondi), from 1961 to 1967 as a reader in mathematics and since 1968 professor of rational mechanics.

In 1959 a fundamental work on gravitational wave solutions in AR appeared with Bondi and Ivor Robinson. They mathematically showed the existence of plane gravitational wave solutions. In 1957 he independently came to the results of A. Petrow on the classification of the Weyl tensor in the AR (like other authors).

In 1972, together with Jürgen Ehlers and Alfred Schild, he showed that the space-time geometry of general relativity can be constructed from simple measuring processes with light rays and freely falling particles.

He also wrote popular science books for children and obtained new editions of Bertrand Russell 's ABC of relativity . In addition, he was politically active in the left spectrum as a scientist from the 1960s, including founding the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science in the early 1970s, was active in the group around PMS Blackett and advised the Institute of Strategic Studies on scientific issues for disarmament.

Fonts

  • Gravitational Radiation , in Louis Witten (editor) Gravitation - an introduction to current research , 1962
  • Introduction to gravitational radiation theory in Trautman, Pirani, Bondi Lectures on General Relativity , Brandeis Summer Institute 1964, Volume 1, p. 249, Prentice-Hall
  • with M. Crampin Applicable differential geometry , London Mathematical Society Lecture Notes, Volume 59, Cambridge University Press 1986
  • with Christine Roche: The universe for beginners , Allen and Unwin 1993
  • with Christine Roche Introducing the universe , Totem Books 2002
  • Introduction to the theory of gravitational radiation, Physikalische Blätter, March 1961

swell

  • Who's who in British Science
  • Felix Pirani, mathematician-obituary. In: The Telegraph. February 10, 2016(English).;
  • Dean Rickles: Interview with Pirani. In: Oral History. AIP, June 23, 2011 .;
  • The Authors: Felix Pirani . In: Dean Rickles, Cécile M. DeWitt (Ed.): The Role of Gravitation in Physics . Report from the 1957 Chapel Hill Conference. S. 28 (English, edition-open-sources.org [PDF; 12.0 MB ]).
  • Gerald Wick: Activism with Feeling . In: New Scientist . February 11, 1971, p. 311-312 ( google.es ).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ theguardian.com: Felix Pirani obituary
  2. ↑ Bondi, Pirani, Robinson Gravitational waves in General Relativity III: Exact plane waves , Proc. Roy. Soc., A, Vol. 251, 1959, pp. 519-533
  3. ↑ Pirani Invariant formulation of gravitational radiation theory , Physical Review, Volume 105, 1957, p. 1089. See also Hans Stephani et al. a. Exact solutions of Einstein's field equations , 2nd edition, Cambridge University Press 2003, chapter 4
  4. ↑ Ehlers, Pirani, Schild The geometry of free fall and light propagation , in O'Raifeartaigh (editor) General Relativity. Papers in Honor of JL Synge , Oxford University Press 1972, pp. 63-84
personal data
SURNAME Pirani, Felix
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Pirani, Felix Arnold Edward (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British physicist
DATE OF BIRTH February 2, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH December 31, 2015